The Passing of the Old Order.

We saw some years after that march of peacemaking a dramatic migration, the canoe flotilla of the Waikato tribes sweeping down the Waipa and Waikato Rivers, returning to the remnants of their ancestral lands on the Lower Waikato. Then the final scene in the old primitive regime, the great tangihanga gathering in 1894, when four thousand Maoris met on the plain of a Hundred Wailings, below Taupiri Mountain, to farewell the spirit of King Tawhiao and speed it to the Reinga.

All have gone now, all the old chiefs, Tawhiao's compeers. The new path has opened before the Maori. He is at the parting of the ways; the old overgrown and dusky, the path of ghosts. The new path leads him into the modern farming life. He is a man of the land again, trying to regain the happiness and comfort that were his before the pakeha invasion and the merciless confiscation of his best lands, the old food-gardens of the Waikato.