Old Carbineers.

We still have a few human links, a few surviving frontiersmen, to keep the adventurous past of New Zealand close to our modernity, to remind us that the most eventful, even savage era of this country is not yet more than one lifetime behind us. The last of our New Zealand Cross holders, sturdy old Ben Biddle, still lives up Whakatane way, the last of twenty-three Cross-men, who won the rarest military decoration in the British Empire. Out at Petone still lives one of the last of Von Tempsky's Forest Rangers, veteran David Taylor, who was in the disastrous bush battle of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu, in which Von Tempsky was killed, in 1868. Another old Ranger, one of Major Westrupp's men, lives in the Lower Hutt.

Old soldiers never die, they say. At any rate they are often tough lads, hard to kill. At the time of writing, the veteran Michael Gill, survives in Napier, one of the last two survivors of the famous “Die-Hards,” the 57th Regiment, of Maori War service. He is over ninety; so, too, is his old comrade, Sergeant-Major Bezar, of Wellington. Gill is one of the heroes of the defence of Turuturu-mokai Redoubt, in Taranaki, in 1868. In that warm corner ten out of the little garrison of twenty-two men were killed, and six were wounded.

Poets have written of the English dead who salted down the outlands of the Empire. As a matter of fact, some of the Imperial regiments which fought in our Maori wars were nearly all Irish. In that valiant defence of Turuturu-mokai against a large body of Hauhaus, nearly all the garrison were Irishmen. The boys from Kilkenny and Tipperary, Skibbereen and Athlone did their share to uphold the mana of Mr. Kipling's “English Flag” in this country. Michael Gill, tough old Die-Hard, is, as he would say himself, “wan of thim.”