Page:Reminiscences of Earliest Canterbury 1915.pdf/22

 extent in dairy work, making very good butter. The irksomeness, however, of milking morning and evening soon wearied them, and they abandoned it, allowing the cattle to suckle and grow up; until in the “sixties” they sold off all their cattle.

The Maoris made a kind of wine from the fruit of the tu-tu. The juice was strained from the berries, the seeds carefully rejected, and the liquor fermented and bottled in the shell of the kuma-kuma. This was a gourd resembling a vegetable marrow, which they first boiled and then through a small aperture scooped out the pulp, thus converting the gourd into a rude kind of bottle, which they rendered capable of suspension by plaiting flax round it. With the advent of “waipiro” it no longer became necessary to make tu-tu wine.

The modem Maori, physically and intellectually, is not comparable to his ancestor of seventy or eighty years ago, who was a good whaler both at sea and on land, a good shearer, a capital hand in the bush with an axe, and industrious as a cultivator,