armour was finally dragged by ropes through
the boundary river, and so lost to the
Mokauries.

Ta?nui, on his return, assembled all his
chief warriors that same night, and led them
to the dark wood in which was the cave of
their great Idol. After sacrificing some of the
prisoners taken in battle, according to their
custom, while the priests sung one of their
barbarous hymns, the king made all his chiefs
swear with him a solemn vow of vengeance
against Te Pomar, and that they never would
cease to make war upon the Waikatotos, till
he was slain, and his male relations also,
while the women were made the slaves of
Ta?nui. This was accordingly sworn by the
assembled chiefs; and the priests informing
them that the whispers of the Idol assured
them of success, they went home very much
exalted.

From this night, scarcely a week passed
without some skirmishes of wandering parties,
and never a month without either a battle in
one or other of the pahs (villages), or an
attempt of the Mokauries to surprise Te Pomar
amidst his chiefs. Te Pomar acted grandly in
the affair of the armour. He said he preferred
peace to war, and did not like his warriors to
be killed on account of a battle-dress which
nobody could wear; he therefore offered
magnanimously to return it to Ta?nui with
presents of honour, and proposed that they
should then bury the war-club and hatchet,
and be friends. Te Pomar merely stipulated
that the King of the Mokauries should
consent, in a friendly way, to his retaining
the armour for the legs, simply to show that
he had not been compelled to surrender the
battle-dress, but had done so of his own free
will and good feeling, and with a desire that
all old animosities should be forgiven and
forgotten.

To this proposal of the renowned Te Pomar,
so great, and, though coming from a heathen,
so Christian-like in its spirit, Ta?nui sent the
most haughty and provoking reply he could
invent, viz. this: "Ta?nui will rub the heads
of Te Pomar's warriors with cold potatoes and
fish; and as for the leg-armour, he will take
Te Pomar's legs away from him at the same
time."

From this day, war to the death became
inevitable between these two great chiefs.
Ferocious descents upon each other's villages
were made continually, during which time
Ta?nui was secretly planning a general attack
by all the warriors and fighting-men he could
muster. As soon as he was ready, he
assembled his entire force one night,—crossed
the boundary lines with speed, then over a
broad river, and then through a wood,—by
which means he came with all his force upon
Te Pomar, who thought it was only a small
skirmishing party, until surrounded by his
enemies. A great slaughter was the
consequence, Te Pomar falling among the number,
by the hand of Ta?nui, who also carried off
his daughter, Te?ra, with other women of
his household, to become slaves. Furthermore,
in fulfilment of his vow, and to gratify
his vengeance, for what he chose to call his
wrongs, and the indignities put upon him,
Ta?nui cast the remains of Te Pomar among
a heap of broken and worn-out war weapons,
and domestic utensils and refuse, preserving
only the large bone of one leg. This he
carefully dried and prepared, and then manufactured
into a native flute. He made some
rude carvings over it, describing his last great
battle and victory.

Upon this flute the king sometimes amused
his savage fancies in playing; and on great
occasions he even wore it round his neck
attached by a leathern thong. The sound of
the instrument was truly strange and doleful.
If a leg-bone could have memory, and lament
its fallen state, a lamentation to that effect
was the only impression that the ear of a
properly-constituted human being could derive
from the sound. But the savage feeling of
Ta?nui was far from appeased by the death of
the great Te Pomar, whose noble character and
actions were well remembered by the chiefs
of both the tribes; and however silent the
Mokauries might be on the subject (because
after a chief is dead his name must never be
mentioned), what was in their minds now and
then glanced forth accidentally, which
renewed the rage of the king. He, therefore,
took a wicked pleasure in playing this doleful
flute, with which he often celebrated the
memory of his final victory over the departed
chief. In a very short time, he took to
wearing it constantly dangling from his neck;
and whenever he sat still, and was not
smoking, or after he had remained thoughtful
for half an hour, he always solaced himself
with a tune upon this unfortunate flute. He
even taught his son, Waipata, a fine youth of
seventeen, to play the same hideous tune, and
exhorted him to treasure up the same vindictive
feelings.

Meanwhile Te?ra, the daughter of Te
Pomar, now a beautiful young girl of fifteen,
was a slave to Kaitemata, one of the wives of
the king—the oldest of them, the ugliest, the
most ill-tempered, and the one he most hated.
He could not venture to get rid of this wife,
because, according to a superstition of his
nation, very ugly old women who were wives
of chiefs, often became witches, and he did
not know what mischief Kaitemata might be
able to do him, or his goats and poultry, to
say nothing of his great droves of wild pigs.
So, to keep her mind occupied, and also to
gratify his hatred of the race of Te Pomar,
he gave Te?ra into her charge.

To the surprise, however, of the king, he
found that this cross old wife neither beat,
nor even scolded Te?ra. The old woman was
in truth, brought into an amiable state
towards this young girl by her sweet and
forgiving disposition. But Ta?nui attributed
this to a different cause—that of want of