The Good Highland Stock.

Another special settlement with a history, and a greater history than that of Puhoi, is Waipu, in North Auckland, where a brave and hardy band of Macs of a dozen clans built their first bush huts over seventy years ago, a pioneer camp that soon gave place to a township and scores of well-tilled farms. The present-day Waipu people, Scottish Highlanders twice removed during the last century—first to Nova Scotia and then to this country—are having their history put together in book form. It certainly is an inspiring story of determination, endurance and fearlessness in the struggle to make comfortable homes and at the same time to preserve something of the old clan traditions of their forefathers.

Waipu has not forgotten the Gaelic, at any rate many of the elders have not, though they never saw the Highlands, or “the lone shieling on the misty island.” Waipu has produced, besides many a good farmer, many master mariners, schoolmasters, and pipers—especially pipers. The sound of the pibroch, the music of Paradise, is beloved in Waipu. The bagpipes may be heard too on board ships commanded or manned by Waipuvians. There was a captain of an Auckland brigantine bearing a grand old Highland name, a Waipu man, who got out his pipes whenever it fell calm and strode to and fro on his quarterdeck giving page 44 the ocean and the crew “a blaw, a blaw,” until he had played the vessel into a breeze. It was far more efficacious than the ordinary sailor way of whistling for wind, or the Finnish seaman's wizardly trick of sticking his knife in the mast for a fair breeze.