chieftain seized his axe, made from the
sacred greenstone, which is highly prized by
the rangatiras,* and poising it, was about to
deliver that blow which is never known to fail
in dealing instant death— occasionally even cleaving
to the chin— when the commissioner motioned
to one of the oldest men present, who rushed
forward, and stepping in front of me, said, "Did
not my brother hear? The white man must
speak to the Maories. The white father says
so."

The would-be executioner lowered his axe.
I was released for the moment, but hope almost
forsook me when I heard an universal exclamation
of, "It is good. He speaks before he
dies."

Here was a very unpromising jury. Not
being so well read in Maori as in English law,
I was somewhat at a loss, but necessity being
the mother of invention, I gave vent to my
injured feelings in this manner:

"I speak to the great Maories. They have
a law. It is good and holy. I bend before it,
and I ask my great Maori brothers to put it
in force. If they do not, the sun will look
down to-morrow, and he will see that the Maories
are a people who have no holy law. They crawl.§
They do not walk. He will go away from them.
The moon, the stars, will no longer serve them.
The birds, the fishes, will all say, 'The Maories
crawl.' Do I speak well?"

A vehement cry of approbation answered me,
not, however, unmingled with surprise; for they
could not comprehend why I was so anxious to
be executed. I proceeded:

"Yes, my Maori brothers hear that I speak
well. I will speak better. I will open their
hearts, their ears, their eyes. That rangatira
(pointing to my accuser) has shut them. The
Maori law says that the rangatira is sacred. I
am a rangatira. I am a white rangatira. In
my country the earth shakes when I walk. I
want rain. I look up. The rain comes. I
want sun. I look up. The sun comes. I am
holy. That rangatira has raised his hand against
me. He has thrown me in the air. I no longer
stood. I, a rangatira, my back touched the
ground. I claim his life."

The tables were completely turned. The
commissioner rose in such a hurry to
congratulate me, that he overturned his seat of
justice. My companions in misfortune rushed
forward, and almost embraced me, while, at a
sign from the old chiefs, my late triumphant
enemy was brought before me in the dread
predicament from which I had so recently escaped.
He looked so very crestfallen, that I
was unable to refrain from a burst of laughter,
on which, he hastened to inform me that by
another provision of the same law, his fate lay
entirely in my hands, and that if I chose to
exercise it, I had the power of pardon. I was
pleased enough to hear this, and, making him
the object of my clemency, only told him to
prepare our boats for sea before he departed.
He was more than willing to do this, and having
finished his task, came to the house where
we were enjoying the best supper the commissioner
could provide, and insisted upon an enormous
amount of embracing and nose-rubbing,
before he would leave me.

His companions had previously gone with
many expressions of respect and attachment,
and so we were at last left to enjoy our grog,
and to laugh (though I could not laugh quite
as heartily as usual, for the next day or two)
over the incidents of the court-martial.

* As much as five hundred acres of land is sometimes
given for one of these greenstones, which, when
acquired, is never parted with, being even buried in
the same grave as the chief.

§ Nothing is so great an insult to a Maori as to
tell him that he does not walk, but crawls. The
Maories have a tradition that, when their forefathers
descended from the skies, they found the
island inhabited by crawling men, who were afterwards
changed into dogs.

CASE FOR THE PRISONER.

AT six o'clock on Monday morning, the 29th
of January, 1827, the Dover mail-coach, mud-
bespattered and travel-stained, pulled up before
the General Post-office in Lombard-street, and
the official porters in attendance flung themselves
upon it, and dragged from it the receptacle
for letters (then containing correspondence
from France, from foreign countries transmitting
through France, and from Dover itself), which,
in official language, was known as the mail-
portmanteau. The guard, cold, stiff, and tired,
tumbled off his perch, stamped his feet on the
pavement, yawned, stretched himself, and
literally "lent a hand" towards the removal
of the mail-portmanteau by just touching it in
its descent with his four fingers; the coachman,
also cold, stiff, and tired, let his benumbed left
hand give to the motion of the four jaded horses,
which, dank and steaming, stretched their necks,
and yawed about with their heads and shook
their bodies, rattling their harness in a dismal
manner. All the passengers had dismounted
long ago, the guard had stepped inside the
office to settle some little matter in connexion
with the waybill, the few stragglers always
waiting about to see the coaches come in
had been cheaply edified and were moving off,
the coachman had jerked the horses' heads into
the air preparatory to walking them round to
the stable, when a pale-faced clerk with a pen
behind his ear came rushing out of the little
side-door, tumbling over the guard, and exclaiming,
"Hold hard, for God's sake! The
mail has been robbed!"

When the two official porters carried the mail-
portmanteau into the Foreign Office of the
General Post-office, they placed it before the clerk
waiting to receive it. There was little time to
count and sort and despatch the letters; the clerk
knew that in order to get through his work he
must have quick eyes and nimble fingers; and in
a minute he had unbuckled the flaps of the square