Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/379

 yards; it then makes a mad leap of about forty feet, and dashes tumbling over rapids with frantic fury for some distance, and then suddenly resumes the quiet dignity of a great river. It is said that a party of sixty stranger natives were once taunted by the residents into trying to shoot the falls in a canoe, and were, as might have been expected, all drowned. The hot springs were much like those we had before seen; the only remarkable one is called the Crow's Nest. The water has formed a perfect hollow cone of silica about ten feet high. On looking into the cone from above it appears to be built of regular layers of large sticks bound together by incrustations of silica. These sticks give the cone its name of the Crow's Nest, but how the nest came to be so made is a mystery.

In the afternoon I took advantage of a doubt as to whether the game laws apply to game on Maori land to shoot some cock-pheasants, although the shooting season does not begin till May. It is very hard on the natives if they are affected by the game laws, for they would have no means of killing the pheasants, which are increasing so rapidly as to threaten to become a perfect plague to them and their small corn cultivation.

In Taupo Lake, besides carp, there is a most excellent little fish resembling whitebait. They, like everything else in this country, have their legend. Some five hundred years ago a chief with a long name came to Taupo, and grieved to find none of his favorite fish in the lake. After failing to introduce them by natural means, he was driven to have recourse to that most enviable power of obtaining whatever he wished that chiefs seemed to have had then, and have so completely lost now. He accordingly took his cloak, tore it up into small pieces, and cast them into the lake, commanding them to become little fishes, and little fishes they became, and there they are in myriads to this day. Fastidious people think they still have a slightly woolly taste, and I know of no better evidence to support the legend.

Our visit to the hot-lake district came to an end at Taupo. We drove thence some seventy or eighty miles to Napier. We were sorry to leave our friends the Maories with the conviction full in our minds that their days will not be long in their land. I devoutly hope that it may never again be necessary to change our present "sugar and flour" policy for one of "blood and iron."—Fraser's Magazine.