Hill. — The Maoris To-day and To-morrow. 183 



different to opinion, to responsibility, to home. To gossip, to 

 smoke, and while away the time in frivolous conversation, are 

 common wherever native pas are to be found. When not on 

 the cultivation, which she tends from sheer necessity, she 

 is usually to be found smoking her pipe on the "village 

 green," indifferent to home, and apparently without the 

 ambition to have her surroundings improved. She has no 

 home such as the colonist deems a necessity. A place to 

 sleep, a place to cook, and a place to grow food or to 

 gather shellfish, and you have the social environment of 

 the Maori womanhood of the country, with a few rare excep- 

 tions. Contrast this with the training of the native girls at 

 such a school as the Hukarere boarding-school for natives in 

 the Town of Napier. There the girls are brought up under 

 the higher influences of home life. They are trained to be 

 clean and tidy and methodical. They have good beds to 

 sleep in, healthy rooms to live in, and are provided with 

 nourishing food at regular intervals. Neatness in dress, 

 cleanliness in body and surroundings, and healthy living con- 

 ditions are all brought to bear upon their training ; but what 

 do thev find at home ? How wide are the contrasts, and 

 what little wonder it is that so many girls fall back into the 

 old ways when they leave school to enter into life. Their 

 home, they find, is as it was when they left it at the first. 

 There are no sanitary arrangements, no water-supply, no 

 regular meals, no privacy, nothing for their improvement, 

 nothing to cheer, to attract, or to create hope and emulation. 

 Nor is it possible for girls who know better and would be 

 better to improve matters very much. A few days or weeks 

 from school suffice to bring about the reaction. Hope is 

 replaced by despair and indifference, for, after all, we are the 

 creatures of our environment. And yet the natives are fond 

 of tasty food ; many of the women can cook to perfection in 

 the kopa Maori, or native oven, but few of them know the 

 value of milk, and eggs, and poultry, in providing suitable and 

 nourishing food for the sick. 



A short time since, when visiting up the East Coast, I 

 went into a native village and found two young men suffering 

 from pneumonia. Both of them were very sick. Each was 

 lying on the ground with a small piece of takapau under him, 

 and in a whare that was far from being waterproof. Their 

 pale haggard faces betokened pain, and the hollow cough 

 showed how rapidly their ailment was moving deathward. In 

 reply to inquiries it appeared that the only food given to the 

 patients was kumara and strong tea without milk, while 

 hundreds of ducks, geese, and turkeys were running about 

 in the pa, and eggs and milk were available in plenty. The 

 common-sense and the experience of the nurse, however, were 



