Camp-fire Memories.

All the little troubles of the day were forgotten when we had had our tea and stretched out before the comforting fire that made the bush camp-ground a little “palace in the wild.” We would have been more comfortable had there been fewer mosquitoes, but we made shift to lighten the plague with much tobacco smoke, and there were the yarns of such old-timers as Hursthouse and Frank Lawry and Jackson Palmer's songs; tales and ditties that go best to the accompaniment of a crackling log fire, the “koukou” of a wondering morepork; the dancing of the firelight on the lichen-crusted tree-trunks and the twisted kiekie-hung branches

And “Wirihana!” I see him now, with the eye of memory—big, straight-backed, bearded “Wirihana,” squatting by the fire blanketed like a Maori, pipe in the corner of his mouth, a shrewdly humorous twinkle in the tail of his eye, though his face retains the gravity of a Maori tohunga. What a store of bush lore and war adventure he had crammed into his fifty-odd years of life! Like the immortal Jim Bludso, “a keerless man in his talk” was “Wirihana” when he relaxed, but there was always sound wisdom in his most whimsical mood. He was a captain in the line of stout fellows who blazed the way and made this land fit for peaceful settlement.

How good, too, were those mornings when all the world was young! When the forest felt and smelled the fresher for its night's rest, when the damp fragrance of moss and bank and leaf and leaf-mould came to one like wild nature's incense. All the tree-world held a dim and fairy mystery, when the tui and the bellbird gurgled and fluted and chimed their morning song. Puhi has the billy on good and early; we have our biscuit and hard tack, pack our swags, and are off on the new trail before the sun penetrates the foggy day.