A sketch of poor-class Maoris



The new native-school teacher, who was "green", "soft", and poetical,
and had a literary ambition, called her "August", and fondly hoped
to build a romance on her character. She was down in the school registers
as Sarah Moses, Maori, 16 years and three months. She looked twenty;
but this was nothing, insomuch as the mother of the youngest child
in the school -- a dear little half-caste lady of two or three summers --
had not herself the vaguest idea of the child's age, nor anybody else's,
nor of ages in the abstract. The church register was lost
some six years before, when "Granny", who was a hundred, if a day,
was supposed to be about twenty-five. The teacher had to guess the ages
of all the new pupils.

August was apparently the oldest in the school -- a big, ungainly,
awkward girl, with a heavy negro type of Maori countenance,
and about as much animation, mentally or physically, as a cow.
She was given to brooding; in fact, she brooded all the time.
She brooded all day over her school work, but did it fairly well.
How the previous teachers had taught her all she knew was a mystery
to the new one. There had been a tragedy in August's family
when she was a child, and the affair seemed to have cast a gloom
over the lives of the entire family, for the lowering brooding cloud
was on all their faces. August would take to the bush when things went wrong
at home, and climb a tree and brood till she was found and coaxed home.
Things, according to pa gossip, had gone wrong with her
from the date of the tragedy, when she, a bright little girl,
was taken -- a homeless orphan -- to live with a sister,