there as Commissioner by the Government, as an agent of peace and conciliation.  In his charge was an industrial school.  It was in the heart of the King Country.  The King’s advisers must needs have an organ—­a broad-sheet called the Hokioi, a word which may be paraphrased by Phoenix.  With unquestionable courage, Gorst, acting on Grey’s orders, issued a sheet in opposition, entitled Te Pihoihoi Mokemoke, or The Lonely Lark.  Fierce was the encounter of the rival birds.  The Lark out-argued the Phoenix.  But the truculent Kingites had their own way of dealing with lese majeste.  They descended on the printing-house, and carried off the press and type of Te Pihoihoi Mokemoke.  The press they afterwards sent back to Auckland; of the type, it is said, they ultimately made bullets.  Gorst, ordered to quit the King Country, refused to budge without instructions.  The Maoris gave him three weeks to get them and depart, and very luckily for him Grey sent them.

The Governor pushed on a military road from Auckland to the Waikato frontier—­a doubtful piece of policy, as it irritated the natives, and the Waikato country, as experience afterwards showed, could be best invaded with the help of river steamers.  The steamers were, however, not procured at that stage.  About the same time as the Gorst incident in the Upper Waikato, the Government tried to build a police-station and barracks on a plot of land belonging to a friendly native lower down the river.  The King natives, however, forbade the erection, and, when the work went on, a party of them paddled down, seized the materials and threw them into the stream.

It was now clear that war was coming.  The utmost anxiety prevailed in Auckland, which was only forty miles from the frontier and exposed to attack both from sea and land.  Moreover, some hundreds of natives, living quite close to the town, had arms, and were ascertained to be in communication with the Waikatos.  The Governor attempted to disarm them, but the plan was not well carried out, and most of them escaped with their weapons to the King Country.  The choice of the Government then lay between attacking and being attacked.  They learned, beyond a doubt, that the Waikatos were planning a march on Auckland, and in a letter written by Thompson about this time he not only stated this, but said that in the event of an assault the unarmed people would not be spared.  By the middle of the year 1863, however, a strong force was concentrated on the border, just where the Waikato River, turning from its long northward course, abruptly bends westward towards the sea.  No less than twelve Imperial Regiments were now in New Zealand, and their commander, General Sir Duncan Cameron, a Crimean veteran, gained a success of some note in Taranaki.  He was a brave, methodical soldier, destitute of originality, nimbleness or knowledge of the country or of savage warfare.  In July, the invasion of the Waikato was ordered.  On the very