slowly approached his hand down to it,—and
touched it with one finger. No sound came
from it, and it had no vibration. He glanced
all round him with a rapid stare—then a
deliberate scrutiny—and then his eyes were again
rivetted upon the flute.

Presently, his savage pride, and all the
recollections of his warrior-deeds, came to
make him boil with rage at the dismay he
had been made to feel,—and, seizing the flute
with fury, he began to blow into it, and
play with all his might.

In spite of himself, and of all his intentions
and efforts, the tune of scorn and triumph,
he began with, by long wailing notes, echoes,
and moaning transitions, modulated into the
grand death-march of a hero!

He dropped the flute; but the strain was
instantly repeated all round his head, in tones
of thunder! It swelled—it rolled—it was in
the air all round him—its great gongs and
shell-cymbals were now thundering and bashing
and booming round his feet—it came
in ear-crashing bursts from the funnel
mouths of the volcano-craters—it again
became measured and sustained, and swept
away over the blocks of lava and pumice, and
over all the rank vegetation, and settled above
the roof of the ruined mausoleum. Ta?nui
staggered hither and thither with each
change of place in this tremendous orchestra,
and, glaring at the roof of the mausoleum, he
gasped for breath, and whirled his arms aloft,
with a sort of madly-defying dismay. Whereat,
the tall wooden-carved figures with pearl-shell
eyes, all dropped their lower jaws, and
extended their arms—seeing which, Ta?nui, with
a yell of horror, fled fast away, followed by
a long succession of similar yells from the
fallen jaws of the figures of the tomb!

Without intending to imply that any of
these extraordinary scenes were the work of
the renowned witches of New Zealand, we
shall content ourselves with stating the fact
that makutu, or witchcraft, was most
implicitly believed in by the Mokaurie tribe,
as by nearly all the other tribes, and is, to
this day, most fully believed in by all who
remain unconverted, and even by some of
these,—who say "the dibble (devil) is too
strong to let go." Even so recently as 1844,
a celebrated witch of Waikato, named Eko,
possessed such power over the imaginations
of the people, that having been insulted by a
gay young Maori fellow, she calmly told him
a few days afterwards that she had taken out
his heart—it was gone! Fully impressed
with this belief the poor young fellow actually
died.

From whatever cause he conjectured the
recent events to have proceeded, not one word
to anybody, of any part of them, spake the
king. In deep and sullen silence he brooded
over the business, and the more he thought of
it, the less he understood it, and the less
could his haughty and overbearing nature
endure the sense of defeat which he felt he
had suffered from the flute. Of course he
identified this leg-bone instrument with his
ancient foe, Te Pomar. But, what was to be
done? Here was he, the King of the
Mokauries—and here was the leg-bone of his
slain enemy, who had several times triumphed
over him:—which was to be the master, and
make the other tremble and do his bidding?
The answer was simple. The King of Mokau
must be the master. Is he to be alarmed by
his own music—the loud sounds he chooses
to produce? And if witches have meddled
with the wooden images of the tapu house of
a dead chief, so as to make them gape and yell
—let the witches go and live in the tomb, if
they like, and dare to do so. All this is
nothing to Ta?nui, who is a great warrior,
and lord of all Mokau.

Thus did the king silently reflect, while
seated alone on the roof of his royal house;
solacing himself, however, with a pipe, or by
chewing cowdie gum and roasted bull-rush
root. Sometimes he condescended to relieve
his spleen by abusing his queen—the lady
who enjoyed the honour of being regarded as
his chief wife;—but never did he deign to
breathe a word of the mixed wonder and
awe of his recent affair with the flute.

While seated in this way, one evening, he
saw a chief hastening towards his house with
manifest signs of alarm—and presently another
—and soon a third. The king came down
from his seat on the roof, and went out to
meet them. They all came with the same
story. The unburied remains of the late
King of the Waikatotos (they avoided mentioning
his name aloud) which had been cast to
perish among rubbish within sight of the hut
where his daughter the slave Te?ra dwelt,
were coming to life again—not in the form of
a warrior, but in the form of a spirit.

Ta?nui was about to cry out angrily that
he did not believe it—but he checked himself,
and accompanied the chiefs in silence; for he
did believe it.

When they arrived within view of the
mound of rubbish on which the body of the
once great Te Pomar had been flung, they all
stopped abruptly. Luminous mists and violet-
coloured flakes of light were gleaming all
over the mound, and beautiful meteors were
dancing above it. The chiefs who had
accompanied the king decamped with sudden
ejaculations—for it is considered no disgrace in a
warrior to be afraid of spirits. But Ta?nui,
though he heartily wished himself a hundred
miles away, firmly held his ground, and
watched the spectral appearances.

Perplexed to the utmost, he mechanically
bent his steps towards the hut with a vague
notion in his mind, or rather in his impulses,
of killing Te?ra as the probable cause of all
this. Arriving at the door, who should he
see but his old discarded wife Kaitemata, who
had taken up her abode with Te?ra! This
seemed to explain everything to the king.
All the recent magical events were revealed