Passed to the Reinga.

Every old Maori whose life has been spent wholly or chiefly in a purely native environment is a mind-store of folk-lore and poetry, tradition and mythology, and every one on his departure from this world takes with him into the shadowy land much that the younger generation will never know. I heard with regret the news of the death lately of Tutanekai Haerehuka, who was the last of the old men of the tohunga class in the Arawa tribes. I knew well that with his passing hence, at the age of over eighty, a vast amount of priestly knowledge, the ancient wisdom, perished with him.

Many years ago it was my fortune to see a good deal of Tutanekai—excellent name, his forefather's of romantic fame twelve generations ago—and to be admitted by him to some of the secrets of the tohunga craft. We had many days together, out in the open where we could talk freely apart from the others. (Mokoia Island and Rotoiti were two of the places where I gathered these stories and chants of the past.) The old man was a philosophical soul. He used to say that he believed the Maori would have been wise to have adhered to the olden religion of the race and to the old and simple life that best suited him. “As for me,” he said once, “I do not know much about the new ways; I only know the old things, the karakia Maori, and my work is the tilling of the soil.”

Tutanekai was a farmer, he worked quietly and industriously with his family on his small farm on the Wai-o-whiro stream, which flows from the celebrated Fairy Spring into Lake Rotorua. Between his food-growing toil and the practice of his tohunga craft his activities were divided. His knowledge of the ritual of old in such ceremonies as those attendant on the opening of new carved houses brought him many requests to perform those rites, known as the whai-kawa, or taingakawa whare. Very, very few, indeed, of the Maori race living to-day possess anything like Tutanekai's knowledge of legendary and ritual. Much as I heard from him, and noted down at his dictation, it was only fragments from his mental treasury.