I believe with the Maori that when we drift into dreamland the spirit leaves the body for a space and meets in its floating the spirits of other dreamers, and beholds those vanished faces “lost in death's dateless night.” Very seldom is there perfectly dreamless slumber. The day's work and the day's news often carry on in their own way in one's sub-conscious mind. But more often still the mind is in the past, in the old scenes, and with the men and women who are a memory of the past in one's waking hours.

The old places come before one more; one does not dream of future surroundings—at any rate to me it is always the past that is “apparelled in celestial light”; the future is a dim mystery impenetrable. The past is best.

I would not see the future, if I could. Old friends—old enemies, too—old sweethearts, the old dream faces appear in their several environments. But most of all I think the faces of my father and mother. If ever I prayed to any God it would be to them.

The old farm scenes, the good land on which I was reared, the horses I rode in my boyhood, the old roads and tracks, the creeks and pools, the big-trees, the farmhouse, the old-fashioned buildings that are really much better than those of to-day. The blockhouse that stood near our farm—I can remember being taken into it when I was three years old (date fixed by a frontier murder and Maori raid scare that are historical); the tall windmills that were the Waikato settlers' flour-mills; the old-fashioned flail and the tarpaulin threshing floor, the first bush journeys, and the first pigeon shooting climb up Pirongia Mountain, all bush and gully and cascading streams. Such scenes are revived with all “the glory and the freshness” of early years' impressions. There are other hallowed places. There are scenes that I saw when they lay perfectly unspoiled, sanctuaries of peace, slumbering in their gauzy mists—Waikare-iti, Okataina, lakes of the woods. I shall not row across their shining waters with my companions again.

The glamour of the days when exploration of many such quiet places was a kind of adventure will not return.