(Continued.)

Just beyond Mercer as we go southward the Teoteo Range, a high ridge of clay, drops abruptly to the slow Whangamarino Creek, which here joins the Waikato on its right (east) side. Above us there, commanding the Whangamarino and the main river, there was a British redoubt. Here a Royal Artillery officer was stationed with two field guns.

A story is told of an Irish soldier's adventure here one night towards the end of 1863. Jack Murphy was on sentry duty outside the redoubt, when he heard a Maori pig grunting, and presently observed a big porker rooting in the fern. The pig gradually came nearer, and to the soldier it seemed an unusually large one—a big bush boar, he thought. Getting uneasy, he challenged, and remembering stories of Maori tricks, he fired. He missed the pig, which next moment threw off its hide and leaped at him with a long-handled tomahawk. It was a naked warrior, who had adopted this old pigskin ruse of creeping up on an unsuspecting sentry. Murphy had no time to reload his muzzle-loading long Enfield. He tried to parry the blow, but the blade caught his left hand. The camp turned out, but the Maori had disappeared, and Murphy was yelling for some one to bring a lantern and find his thumb. The pig with the tomahawk had cut it clean off.

What scenes of life and colour, what warlike commotion on these Waikato banks when Cameron's army began the great invasion of Maori land! Regiments of the line—the great-bearded veterans of the 65th, the 40th, the 14th, the 18th Royal Irish—in their blue campaigning dress; the Waikato Militia regiments; the smart mounted Royal Artillery—a corps which was more than once used as cavalry, and again as a dismounted storming party; Colonel Nixon's Colonial Defence Force Cavalry, mostly members of South Auckland settler families; Jackson's and Von Tempsky's Forest Rangers, armed with Terry carbine, revolver, and bowie knife, with their coloured blanket rolls and their semi-piratical roving air; miles of commissariat and munitions carts, all crossing this Whangamar ino Stream by a bridge supported on barrels. On the broad river a picture of even greater action and thrill: the little steamer “Avon”—the first steam vessel that ever floated on the Waikato—and the gunboat “Pioneer,” with steady beat of their churning paddle-wheels; scores of Maori canoes, paddled by half - stripped warriors — “friendlies” these, allies of the Queen's troops—and laden with stores for the front; long boats of the Water Transport Corps, rowed by sailormen trying a landsman's life for a change; paddling-chants from the canoe captains, and now and again a snatch of sailor song from the boatmen, that mingled with the yells of the bullock-drivers on the right bank. Many a man of that army found a grave in the mystery land ahead of him; many a steamer-load of wounded came down the river as the slow campaign went on.

Our rail line bears inland to the left, keeping Meremere on our right. We have a glimpse across a swamp of the long ridge above the Waikato where the strong entrenchments of 1863 were constructed, and where there were at one time about two thousand Maori warriors in garrison. In the Meremere fortifications the Kingites had three pieces of artillery mounted to dispute with the Queen's troops the river right-of-way. These were old ship's guns, brought from the west coast with great labour. One was a 12-pounder swivel gun, another a 6 or 8-pounder carronade. These were emplaced in well-protected embrasures in the clay entrenchments near the river-bank. Higher up there was a 24-pounder in the upper line of pits.

The Maori gunners had been instructed by a white man, an exgunner in the East India Company's service, who was in the Waikato when the war began and was detained by the Kingites until he had shown them how to work the old muzzle-loading pieces. One Maori became particularly expert in gunnery, and he made some good practice with the 24 - pounder when the armoured gunboat “Pioneer,” a stern-wheel steamer 300ft. long, built at Sydney for the New Zealand Government, came steaming up the river. There were several artillery engagements between the Maori fortress and the ‘Pioneer,” and the gunners on Whangamarino Hill took a hand too. Once the Maoris plumped a 71b. steelyard-weight into a cask of beef on the gunboat's deck. They had no shot or shell, but made shift with weights taken from traders’ stores, old iron, anything that would cram into the guns. Musketry, too: the “Pioneer” anchored within easy rifle-shot of the trenches, and men in her turrets and on the lower deck made practice at the puffs of smoke on the pitted ridge; the Maori bullets rattled harmlessly on the iron sides of the gunboat.

The river fleet enabled Cameron to turn the Maoris flank and gave him command of the Waikato. The Maoris evacuated their defence lines at Meremere and retreated in canoes up the Whan-gamarino and across the flooded swamps where the rail-line now runs to the wide stretches of Lake Waikare and contiguous lagoons on our left as we go southward. Then they garrisoned Rangiriri, and there the heaviest fighting of the Lower Waikato campaign occurred.

Fifty-five miles south of Auckland we can see from our railway carriage windows the grassy and pine-wooded ridge of Rangiriri, with a raupo reed fringed shallow lagoon in the foreground on our right. This swampy lake, Kopuwera, is a sanctuary for native wild fowl. A little farther on is Rangiriri railway station, from which a road a mile in length leads to the willow-fringed river at a small township on the right bank of the Waikato. The battlefield of the 20th November, 1863, is half a mile or so north of the settlement. On the riverside is the military cemetery where the British sailors and soldiers who fell in the battle were buried. The Government tends the sacred ground carefully, and the memorials and the general well-kept appearance of the burying-place attest a fine reverence for the Empire's warriors of old time.

When General Cameron with nearly a thousand men attacked the Rangiriri fortifications on the 20th November, 1863, his infantry captured the outer lines of defence at the point of the bayonet. These entrenchments extended from water to water — from the lagoon on the east to the Waikato River on the west. They completely barred the way along this ridge until the soldiers turned them. But the strong central redoubt, the tihi, or citadel, of the earthworks, resisted all efforts to take it by assault or escalade. It was a rectangular work with steep escarpments 17ft. high, and it was defended by 200 Maoris, the most determined of the Kingite warriors. The others retreated across the lagoons when the outer trenches were carried.

With extraordinary recklessness for so experienced a general—a veteran of the Crimea War—Cameron launched three successive frontal attacks against this impregnable work, after shelling the place with his Armstrong guns. One attack after another was beaten back. The soldiers’ ladders were too short to reach the top of the parapet. A detachment of the Royal Artillery, armed with revolvers and swords, was ordered, late in the afternoon, to storm the fort. Captain Mercer led thirty-six of his men in the assault, but they were hurled back, and Mercer fell mortally wounded, shot through the mouth. Then the Royal Navy men—detachments from H.M. ships “Eclipse,” “Pioneer,” and “Miranda”—numbering ninety, charged the earthworks, but were repulsed with heavy loss. Darkness compelled the General to cease the waste of brave men's lives. Forty-two officers and men were killed or died of wounds and seventy-one were wounded.

Next day the Maori garrison surrendered. They had lost nearly fifty, including several women. To the number of 183 they were sent to Auckland and imprisoned on a harbour hulk. Later they were sent to Kawau Island, in the Hauraki Gulf, at the suggestion of the Governor, Sir George Grey, who owned the island. One calm night they all escaped to the mainland in boats and canoes sent by their sympathisers, the Ngapuhi tribe, and gradually they found their way back to the Waikato, but by that time the war was over.

The bang of the double-barrel gun is still a familiar sound around Rangiriri, but nowadays it is the wild duck and not the pakeha that makes the target.

The low clay hills of these parts of the Waikato are not inviting to the settler, but they grow fruit exceedingly well, and there are Government tree-plantations and vineyards. This clay country continues till we pass the coal-mining town of Huntly (65 miles) and approach the grand gorge of the Waikato at Taupiri.

It is at Huntly, a busy scene of industry with its pitheads, its great stores of coal, and its mingled mining and rural life, that the railway passenger has opportunity of viewing the splendid Waikato River free of obstructive hills.

The strong river flowing so smoothly between its low banks fringed with weeping willows is a living embodiment of quiet force and power. Far away on its upper course it is a stream of fierce tremendous turmoil and water-strife. Here it has steadied down into a wide placid current a quarter of a mile wide; lower down it broadens out to half a mile, and its surface is broken with some large islands, and it floats good-sized steamers that work up as far as Hamilton and Cambridge towns. Coal ior the old-time river fleet was broken out of outerops near where Huntly Town stands today, and Cameron's gunboats found here convenient fuel supplies.

Across the shining waterway, just before we reach the town, an assemblage of pakeha and Maori buildings on the west bank catches the eye; and there is the typical native design meeting-house, with its low-slanting eaves and its frontal carvings; in front of it is a tall flag-staff. This is the Maori “royal” town of Waahi, headquarters of the Kingite Waikatos and their hereditary head, Rata Mahuta, the great-grandson of the first Maori king, the venerable Potatau te Wherowhero friend of Sir George Grey. Up-stream ten miles we shall see the place, Ngaruawahia, where that ancient warrior chief was made king by the assembled tribes in 1858.

Taupiri (70 miles) is the most charmed spot of all Maori poetrs and legendry in all the Waikato, as it is also the most beautiful spot of mingled mountain and river and woodland land-scape. Here the hills on either side of the river become mountains and closely approach each other—the graceful conical mount of Taupiri, very nearly 1,000ft, high, on the east and the high spurs of the Hakarimata Range on the west. This is the grand gateway to mid-waikato Ages ago the Waikato River, which formerl lowed across the plains to the southern part of the Hauraki Gulf, found its was through here by an earthquake-rift in the hills, and wrought a wide and deep passage for itself at the back of the ranges. It comes down here in a glorious glimmer-glass reach from the rivers-meet at Ngaruawahia; then as it reaches Taupiri-foot it takes a magnificent sweep to the north-west. Our train runs close beside the blue shimmering waterway, brimming to it willowed banks.

We pass immediately below a steep foothill of Taupiri; a high green mound with sides trenched in the lines of an ancient fort, its summit covered with white-painted burying enclosures. This is the most venerated place in Waikato, the sacred resting place of the chiefs and many of their people. Here repose the remains of the Waikato kings. Before the Waikato War all travellers along the bank where our train now runs were forbidden to tread on this sacred soil, which was tapu to the water's edge. They were compelled to cross the river by canoe to the west side until they had passed the sacred spot, when they could recross. Horsemen in those days had to swim their horses behind the canoe.

Over yonder, on an alluvial flat between the river and the Hakarimata Range, there are time-stained relics of an old mission station, the Rev. B. Y. Ashwell's establishment in the “fifties” and early “sixties.” This station, an oasis of civili sation in the wilderness, gave hospitable wel come to many a canoe party of white travellers in the days when Waikato was wholly Maori land. Over there, too, near the soft green acacia grove that marks the mission site, was the large Native town called Kaitotehe, which was made the subject of a drawing by the artist G. F. Angas, who came exploring these parts in 1844.

But it is about Taupiri Mountain, its wooded head and gullies mistily blue, that the legends of this storyland chiefly gather. The beautiful name means a lover's embrance—“the closeclinging loved one.” taupiri, in an ancient nature-myth, is the wife of Pirongia Mountatin farther south yonder, and their daughter is Kawa Mountain, a shapely hill of volcanic orgin which we shall see as we enter the King Country. The sacred mana of Waikato is symbolised and centred in Taupiri.

(To be continued)