“Langley's Look-out.”

Pass along to Kawhia's shores. History was made here in one way and another during six centuries of time. Down yonder on the sandy hillside toward the heads is the famous Tainui's resting place. The canoe, of course, crumbled to dust long ago, but the little manuka shrubbery which marks the spot is still tapu. Greatly tapu, too, are those grand old pohutukawa trees that shade the beach at the base of Motu-Ngaio, that massive hill pa that dominates Kawhia township. They have names of their own, those ancient chiefs of the Metrosideros tomentosa tribe—Papa-o-Karewa and Tangi-te-Korowhiti are two of them. They are thick with tapu in fact; I heard curious old legends about them from Hone Kaora and other elders of Tainui.

There was a pakeha elder, too, who knew almost as much as the Maoris. He was A. E. Langley, who, thirty odd years ago, had a pretty home set in an uncommon spot, on a broad terrace of Motu-Ngaio pa, just below the huge scarped wall of the tihi, or citadel of the ancient fortress. Fruit trees shaded “Langley's Look-out,” and old English flowers trailed around the house. Later a new settler built a smart house on the very summit of the hill—it was an inhabited pa in Rauparaha's era in old Kawhia—but the home I preferred to see was that comfortable bower of a cottage fitting itself like a Maori whare to the terrace of ancient Motu-Ngaio.