Early Days, and the First Fighting Trail.

The boy Preece was bi-lingual almost from his birth; he had that perfect knowledge of Maori that belongs only to those who acquired it in childhood.

As a young man, he was given an official position by reason of that knowledge. He was clerk and interpreter to the Magistrate, Mr. Deighton, at Wairoa, Hawke's Bay, which was in those days of the mid-'sixties an important trading place with a large Maori population.

Then in 1865, came the first of the Hauhau fanatic propaganda on the East Coast, and war ruined this peaceful tenor of life along the beautiful Wairoa. Preece was speedily on the war-path, with his rifle, raising contingents of friendly Maoris, riding in desperate haste to rouse the settlements, and presently potting away at the Hauhau raiders. He served in one skirmish and pa-storming after another, from Wairoa to the East Cape, back to Wairoa and the shores page 18 of that then all but unknown Lake Waikaremoana.

An interval of rest and the Court Clerk's duties again; then in 1868, Tc Kooti came on the scene. Preece was one of those who followed him up with a fighting party, and shared in the hard warfare of the winter of 1868. Then after the Poverty Bay massacre he was with a contingent of the Ngati-Kahungunu tribe in the force that drove the warriors out of their trenches at Makaretu, with heavy loss to the rebels.