of his men were shot in the process.  For weeks the wind blew the wrong way for the besiegers and they could only watch their piles—­could not fire them.  All the while the soothsayers in the beleaguered fort perseveringly chanted incantations and prayed to the wind-god that the breeze might not change.  At length one morning the north-west wind blew so furiously away from the walls that the besieged boldly set alight to the brushwood from their side.  But the wilder the north-west wind of New Zealand, the more sudden and complete may be the change to the south-west.  Such a shifting came about, and in a moment the flames enveloped the walls.  Shouting in triumph, Rauparaha’s men mustered in array and danced their frenzied war-dance, leaping high in air, and tossing and catching their muskets with fierce yells.  “The earth,” says an eye-witness, “shook beneath their stamping.”  Then they charged through the burning breach, and the defenders fell in heaps or fled before them.  The lagoon was black with the heads of men swimming for life.  Through the dense drifting smoke many reached the swamps and escaped.  Hundreds were killed or taken, and piles of human bones were witnesses many years after to the massacre and feast which followed the fall of Kaiapoi.

Nearly seventy years have passed since these deeds were done.  The name Kaiapoi belongs to a pretty little country town, noted for its woollen-mill, about the most flourishing of the colony.  Kapiti, Rauparaha’s stronghold, is just being reserved by the Government as an asylum for certain native birds, which stoats and weasels threaten to extirpate in the North Island.  Over the English grasses which now cover the hills round Akaroa sheep and cattle roam in peace, and standing by the green bays of the harbour you will probably hear nothing louder than a cow-bell, the crack of a whip, or the creaking wheels of some passing dray.  Then it is pleasant to remember that Rauparaha’s son became a missionary amongst the tribes which his father had harried, and that it is now nearly a generation since Maori blood was shed in conflict on New Zealand soil.

Chapter VIII

“A MAN OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS”

  “Under his office treason was no crime;
  The sons of Belial had a glorious time.”
                              Dryden.

Between 1830 and 1840, then, New Zealand had drifted into a new phase of existence.  Instead of being an unknown land, peopled by ferocious cannibals, to whose shores ship-captains gave as wide a berth as possible, she was now a country with a white element and a constant trade.  Missionaries were labouring, not only along the coasts, but in many districts of the interior, and, as the decade neared its end, a large minority of the natives were being brought under the influence of Christianity.  The tribal wars were dying down.  Partly, this was a peace of exhaustion, in some districts of solitude; partly,