and, afterwards, with an aunt-by-marriage. They treated her, 'twas said,
with a brutality which must have been greatly exaggerated by pa-gossip,
seeing that unkindness of this description is, according to all
the best authorities, altogether foreign to Maori nature.

Pa-gossip -- which is less reliable than the ordinary washerwoman kind,
because of a deeper and more vicious ignorance -- had it
that one time when August was punished by a teacher (or beaten
by her sister or aunt-by-marriage) she "took to the bush" for three days,
at the expiration of which time she was found on the ground
in an exhausted condition. She was evidently a true Maori or savage,
and this was one of the reasons why the teacher with the literary ambition
took an interest in her. She had a print of a portrait of a man
in soldier's uniform, taken from a copy of the `Illustrated London News',
pasted over the fireplace in the whare where she lived,
and neatly bordered by vandyked strips of silvered tea-paper.
She had pasted it in the place of honour, or as near as she could get to it.
The place of honour was sacred to framed representations
of the Nativity and Catholic subjects, half-modelled, half-pictured.
The print was a portrait of the last Czar of Russia, of all the men
in the world; and August was reported to have said that she loved that man.
His father had been murdered, so had her mother. This was one of the reasons
why the teacher with the literary ambition thought he could get a romance
out of her.

After the first week she hung round the new schoolmistress, dog-like --
with "dog-like affection", thought the teacher. She came down often
during the holidays, and hung about the verandah and back door
for an hour or so; then, by-and-bye, she'd be gone. Her brooding
seemed less aggressive on such occasions. The teacher reckoned that