In this month's sketch of notable New Zealanders two gallant and distinguished brothers are linked together as men who deserve to be held in remembrance for their splendid services to their country in the Maori wars, and for their work as frontiersmen and as intermediaries between the two races. Major William Mair and Captain Gilbert Mair were men of exceptional gifts and of truly heroic achievements; good and useful New Zealanders in every sense of the word.

The adventurous conditions of our earlier days produced two kinds of frontiersmen–the rough, unlettered bush-fighters and scouts and Pakeha-Maori settlers, and men of gifts and culture who made brave and capable leaders in wartime, who were perfect in their knowledge of forest warfare, and who in days of peace held high official positions in the service of their native land.

There were many of the former class who could be cited, hard, plucky fellows like the late Ben Biddle, of Whakatane, and big Tom Adamson, both New Zealand Cross men. The Mair Brothers were the born leaders of such men and of the Maoris, whom they held in as high esteem and affection as their own blood. They fought hostile Maori tribes strenuously in the course of duty, and when the gunpowder smoke drifted away from the outer lands they worked as strenuously in the cause of peace and the advance of settlement. No men did more to make this North Island fit for peaceful pursuits than these sons of New Zealand, the whole of whose lives were spent practically in subduing the borderlands and in bringing the two peoples closer together.

Major William Gilbert Mair and Captain Gilbert Mair, N.Z.C. (both sons were given the name of their father), were the two most distinguished members of a large pioneer family. One of the other brothers was the late Mr. Robert Mair, whose name is held in high regard at Whangarei, his life-long home town, to whose people he gave a beautiful park; and another was Henry Mair, a rover of many strange South Sea adventures, who was killed by the savages of Espiritu Santo, in the New Hebrides, in 1881. There were twelve children in the family; the parents were Gilbert and Elizabeth Mair, of Wahapu, Bay of Islands, and Whangarei. Mr. Gilbert Mair was a Peterhead man, who settled at the Bay of Islands over a century ago and who assisted the ex-Navy officer and famous missionary, Henry Williams, in the designing and building of the first Mission vessel built in New Zealand. Gilbert Mair was a shipwright as well as a sailor, and he was sailing-master of that pioneer schooner when Henry Williams made his first cruise down the East Coast. He was present at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and he and his family were acquainted with many of the noted men who visited the Bay of Islands in those days of our beginnings.

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