The Primitive Days.

Taumarunui's transformation from a Maori settlement to a place of pakeha progress and activity was, I suppose, as rapid as anything in the much-written-of Wild West. When I first rode down the Ongarue Valley—it was a two days' journey then from Te Kuiti—the place seemed as solitary and shut-in as a glen in the heart of the Urewera Country. Later on, over thirty years ago, we camped one night on the manuka flat at Taumarunui. Long afterwards I tried to locate that camping-place alongside the pioneer surveyor Rochfort's high-legged pataka or storehouse, but it was a bewildering search, so completely had the scene been changed. It was somewhere near where the Post Office stands to-day.

All was different. The railway station stood where there had been a group of Maori whares roofed with totara bark. Churches, stores, banks, large accommodation houses, pretty homes, had taken the place of maize and potato cultivations enclosed in pig-proof fences of manuka. Electric lights blazed in the streets at night; there were paved footpaths where once narrow tracks wound through the tall manuka. Old Taumarunui had completely vanished, except for a native kainga, considerably modernised, and the shingled cottage of the first white man in this retreat of the Maori the venerable Alexander Bell, old soldier and bush scout, old trader, one of the last of the real pakeha-Maori class.