with her hands, then setting her feet upon them that she might know
where they were; and, finally, after she had broken the soil, throwing
the mould over the weeds with her hands.

The labours of agriculture in New Zealand are, in this way, rendered
exceedingly toilsome, by the imperfection of the only instruments which
the natives possess. Hence, principally, their extreme desire for iron.
Marsden, in the "Journal of his Second Visit," gives us some very
interesting details touching the anxiety which the chiefs universally
manifested to obtain agricultural tools of this metal. One morning, he
tells us, a number of them arrived at the settlement, some having come
twenty, others fifty miles. "They were ready to tear us to pieces," says
he, "for hoes and axes. One of them said his heart would burst if he
did not get a hoe."

They were told that a supply had been written for to England; but "they
replied that many of them would be in their graves before the ship would
come from England, and the hoes and axes would be of no advantage to
them when dead. They wanted them now. They had no tools at present, but
wooden ones to work their potato-grounds with; and requested that we
would relieve their present distress."

When he returned from his visit to Shukehanga, many of the natives of
that part of the country followed him, with a similar object, to the
settlement. "When we left Patuona's village," says he, "we were more
than fifty in number, most of them going for an axe or a hoe, or some
small edge-tool. They would have to travel, by land and water, from a
hundred to a hundred and forty miles, in some of the worst paths,
through woods, that can be conceived, and to carry their provisions for
their journey. A chief's wife came with us all the way, and I believe