kind of plateau, above a small river.  But though too strong for front attack, it was itself liable to be commanded from an outwork on a yet higher spur of the hills.  Bringing common sense to bear, Grey quietly despatched a party, which captured this, and with it a strong reinforcement about to join the garrison.  The latter fled, and the bloodless capture of Weraroa was justly regarded as among the most brilliant feats of the whole war.  The credit fairly belonged to Grey, who showed, not only skill, but signal personal daring.  The authorities at home must be assumed to have appreciated this really fine feat of his, for they made the officer commanding the two hundred moral supports a C.B.  But Grey, it is needless to say, by thus trumping the trick of his opponent the General, did not improve his own relations with the Home authorities.  He did, however, furnish another strong reason for a self-reliant policy.  Ultimately, though gradually, the Imperial troops were withdrawn, and the colonists carried on the war with their own men, as well as their own money.

[Illustration:  MAJOR KEMP MEIHA KEPA TE RANGI-HIWINUI]

In January, 1866, however, after General Cameron had by resignation escaped from a disagreeable position, but while the withdrawal of the troops was still incomplete, his successor, General Chute, showed that under officers of determination and energy British soldiers are by no means feeble folk even in the intricacies of the New Zealand bush.  Setting out from the Weraroa aforesaid on January 3rd with three companies of regulars, a force of militia, and 300 Maoris under the chief Kepa, or Kemp, he began to march northward through the forest to New Plymouth.  At first following the coast he captured various pas by the way, including a strong position at Otapawa, which was fairly stormed in the face of a stout defence, during which both sides suffered more than a little.  There, when one of the buttons on Chute’s coat was cut off by a bullet, he merely snapped out the remark, “The niggers seem to have found me out.”  Both the coolness and the words used were characteristic of the hard but capable soldier.  Further on the route Kemp in one day of running skirmishes took seven villages.  Arriving at the southern side of Mount Egmont, the General decided to march round its inland flank through a country then almost unknown except to a few missionaries.  Encumbered with pack-horses, who were checked by every flooded stream, the expedition took seven days to accomplish the sixty miles of the journey.  But they did it, and met no worse foes than continual rain, short commons, deep mud, and the gloomy silence of the saturated forest, which then spread without a break over a country now almost entirely taken up by thriving dairy-farmers.  Turning south again from New Plymouth by the coast-road, Chute had to fight but once in completing a march right round Mount Egmont, and thenceforward, except on its southern verge, long-distracted Taranaki saw no more campaigning.