as the Maoris were. He didn't dream of such a thing at the time,
for he did not believe that one of them had the pluck to venture out
after dark. But savage superstition must give way to savage hate.
The girl's last "try-on" was to come down to the school fence,
and ostentatiously sharpen a table-knife on the wires,
while she scowled murderously in the direction of the schoolmistress,
who was hanging out her washing. August looked, in her dark, bushy,
Maori hair, a thoroughly wild savage. Her father had murdered her mother
under particularly brutal circumstances, and the daughter
took after her father.

The teacher called her and said: "Now, look here, my lady,
the best thing you can do is to drop that nonsense at once"
(she had dropped the knife in the ferns behind her),
"for we're the wrong sort of people to try it on with.
Now you get out of this and tell your aunt -- she's sneaking there
in the flax -- what I tell you, and that she'd better clear out of this quick,
or I'll have a policeman out and take the whole gang into town in an hour.
Now be off, and shut that gate behind you, carefully, and fasten it."
She did, and went.

The worst of it was that the August romance copy was useless. Her lies
were even less reliable and picturesque than the common Jones Alley hag lie.
Then the teacher thought of the soft fool he'd been, and that made him wild.
He looked like a fool, and was one to a great extent,
but it wasn't good policy to take him for one.

Strange to say, he and others had reason to believe that August respected him,
and liked him rather than otherwise; but she hated his wife,
who had been kind to her, as only a savage can hate. The younger pupils