The Young Pioneer.

Elsdon Best was a product of the pioneering age of New Zealand. The bush filled valley of Porirua and the small rough town of Wellington were his earliest memories. There was no college education then for the colonial boy, unless his parents could afford to send him to England. The primary school gave him the beginnings of education; the wide world of adventure and contact with all kinds of men was his university. His youth on the edge of civilisation, swinging an axe in the Porirua forest, clearing bush and dealing with horses, bullocks, and the men of the frontier, up on the East Coast and elsewhere, developed him physically and strengthened his self-reliant character.

At the end of the 'Seventies he turned to the martial excitement of life in Taranaki, where for a long time the tension between the Government and the Ngati-Ruanui and allied tribes bordered on war. His friend, W. E. Gudgeon, then captain in the Armed Constabulary, was in command of the military post at Manaia—in fact, it was Gudgeon and his men who built that redoubt, a compact little fort wellpreserved to this day. Elsdon Best enlisted in a company of the Constabulary, part pakeha, part Maori, under Gudgeon, and served as a frontier soldier for many months. Drill and marching, trench - digging, redoubtbuilding and road-making in the disputed territory between the Waingongoro on the south and Stony River on the north; and a period as one of the A.C. garrison of Pukearuhe Redoubt, the North Taranaki outpost, under Captain (afterwards Colonel) Messenger.