The Chief and the War Veteran.

Sir Douglas' deeds of quiet generosity were innumerable. He never sought publicity; he disliked making his gifts known to the world. The satisfaction of a kind deed was its own reward. This incident is a typical example of his openhandedness. One evening, when I was his guest at Napier, I happened to mention my old acquaintance Rowley Hill, of Auckland, the sailor and soldier of many medals. The talk turned to Mohaka, the scene of Te Kooti's raid in 1869, when Hill, a lone-handed Constabulary man who had gone to the assistance of the friendly Maoris there, was the leading figure in the defence of the stockade, a deed that won him the New Zealand Cross. I told Maclean of the hard little warrior's naval service at the Crimea, in the Baltic and in the Indian Mutiny, and as a volunteer under Garibaldi, in Italy, and of his Maori war work under Von Tempsky and others. I told him many stories of Rowley, who would not apply for the old-age pension but was living on his small New Zealand military pension and the shilling a day he received as a British naval pension (“Shillin' a day, bloomin' good pay—Lucky to touch it, a shillin' a day!”)

Sir Douglas listened but did not say anything about the veteran that night. In the morning he came to me with a cheque for £20, made out to Hill, and said: “Send that to ‘Rowley with the regards of the son of his old chief.” That was in allusion to the days of the Hauhau war, when Sir Donald Maclean was Defence Minister and directed the operations against Te Kooti.