the October, 1866, and June, 1868, when hostilities were once more to blaze up and only to die out finally in 1870.  This persistency was due to several causes, of which the first was the outbreak, early in 1864, of a curious superstition, the cult of the Hau-Haus.  Their doctrine would be hard to describe.  It was a wilder, more debased, and more barbaric parody of Christianity than the Mormonism of Joe Smith.  It was an angry reaction, a kind of savage expression of a desire to revolt alike from the Christianity and civilization of the Pakeha and to found a national religion.  For years it drove its votaries into purposeless outbreaks, and acts of pitiless and ferocious cruelty.  By the Hau-Haus two white missionaries were murdered—­outrages unknown before in New Zealand.  Their murderous deeds and the reprisals these brought about gave a darker tinge to the war henceforth.  Their frantic faith led to absurdities as well as horrors.  They would work themselves up into frenzy by dances and incantations, and in particular by barking like dogs—­hence their name.  At first, they seem to have believed that the cry Hau!  Hau! accompanied by raising one hand above the head with palm turned to the front, would turn aside the Pakeha’s bullets.

It was in April, 1864, that they first appeared in the field.  A Captain Lloyd, out with a reconnoitring party in Taranaki, fell, rather carelessly, into an ambuscade, where he and six of his people were killed and a dozen wounded.  When Captain Atkinson and his rangers came up at speed to the rescue, they found that the heads of the slain had been cut off and carried away.  Lloyd’s, it appears, was carried about the island by Hau-Hau preachers, who professed to find in it a kind of diabolical oracle, and used it with much effect in disseminating their teaching.  One of these prophets, or preachers, however, had a short career.  Three weeks after Lloyd’s death, this man, having persuaded himself and his dupes that they were invulnerable, led them against a strong and well-garrisoned redoubt at Sentry Hill, between New Plymouth and Waitara.  Early one fine morning, in solid column, they marched deliberately to within 150 yards of the fort, and before straight shooting undeceived them about the value of their charms and passes, thirty-four of the poor fanatics were lying beside their prophet in front of the redoubt.  A number more were carried off hurt or dying, and thenceforward the Taranaki natives were reduced to the defensive.

In the summer of the same year another prophet met his death in the most dramatic fight of the war, that by which the friendly natives of the Wanganui district saved it from a Hau-Hau raid by a conflict fought on an island in the Wanganui River, after a fashion which would have warmed the heart of Sir Walter Scott had he been alive to hear of a combat so worthy of the clansmen in “The Fair Maid of Perth.”  It came about a month after the repulse at the Gate