336 Notes on Spo7't and Travel m 



ball-rooms not so very long ago. Girls like Heine's 

 Northern Love, with eyes 



' Like to black suns,' 



and who used to scorn the cockney Pakeha, and in 

 their breezier moments long for the wild rush and 

 rave and ever-shifting incidents of their mother's 

 earlier life ; the mother often enough having gone 

 back to her fern root and Raupa from sheer 

 boredom. Would you wish to find out whether 

 the bright brunette with the yellow ribbon, who 

 sings so sweetly to you with a soft husky bubbling 

 voice, like nothing you ever heard before but an 

 English thrush after rain, be a lady of Lima or a 

 half-caste Maori girl, decoy her down to the oyster 

 rocks at low tide ; and if she does not pull off her 

 dainty kid gloves, and deftly knock off the lid of 

 the mollusc with a stone, leaving the delicate morsel 

 all ready for you, she has not a drop of Maori blood 

 in her veins. Should there be no oysters, tempt 

 her to the yellow sands still moist with the retreat- 

 ing tide ; and if she does not at once begin to scrape 

 for ' Pepis ' with her tiny fingers, she is Lima to the 

 backbone. The Maori girl could no more resist 

 these two temptations than the transformed cat 

 could the suddenly-liberated mice. 



The Maori, as Cook and Manning found him, 

 and as Lord Pembroke has reintroduced him to us, 

 was no autochthon, no native or original suckling. 

 He had been improved by at least one long sea- 



