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reside at the Springs, Mr. Bell. He’s at Harpoon. Only a few minutes by road. A very very fine doctor.”
    “I meant Dr. James Ackrington.”
    Mr. Questing did not answer immediately. He offered Dikon a cigarette, lit one himself, and rang the bell again.
    “Dr. Ackrington,” Dikon repeated.
    “Oh, yes. Ye-e-s. The old doctor. Quite a character.”
    “Doesn’t he live at the hostel?”
    “That is correct. Yes. That is the case. The old doctor’s retired now, I understand.”
    “He’s something of an authority on muscular and nervous complaints, isn’t he?”
    “Is that so?” said Mr. Questing. “Well, well, well. The old doctor, eh? Quite a character. Well, now, Mr. Bell, I’ve a little suggestion to make. I’ve been wondering if you’d be interested in a wee trip to the Springs. I’m driving back there to-morrow. It’s a six hours’ run and I’d be very very delighted to take you with me. Of course the suite won’t be poshed up by then. You’ll see us in the raw, sir, but any suggestions you cared to make…”
    “Do you live there, Mr. Questing?”
    “You can’t keep me away from the Springs for long,” cried Mr. Questing evasively. “Now about this suggestion of mine…”
    “It’s very kind of you,” said Dikon thoughtfully. He rose to his feet and held out his hand. “I’ll tell Mr. Gaunt about it. Thank you so much.”
    Mr. Questing wrung his hand excruciatingly.
    “Good-bye,” said Dikon politely.
    “I’m staying here to-night, Mr. Bell, and I’ll be right on the spot if…”
    “Oh yes. Perfectly splendid. Good-bye.”
    He returned to his employer.
    Late on the afternoon of Saturday the eighteenth, old Rua Te Kahu sat on the crest of a hill that rose in an unbroken curve above his native village. The hill formed a natural barrier between the Maori reserve lands and the thermal resort of Wai-ata-tapu Springs where the Claires lived. From where he sat Rua looked down to his right upon the sulphur-corroded roof of the Claires’ house, and to his left upon the smaller hip-roofs of his own people’s dwelling houses and shacks. From each side of the hill rose plumes of steam, for the native
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was built near its own thermal pools. Rua, therefore, sat in a place that became him well. Behind his head, and softened by wreaths of steam, was the shape of Rangi’s Peak. At his feet, in the warm friable soil, grew manuka scrub.
    He was an extremely old man, exactly how old he did not choose to say; but his father, a chief of the Te Rarawa tribe, had set his mark to the Treaty of Waitangi, not many years before Rua, his youngest child, was born. Rua’s grandfather, Rewi, a chieftain and a cannibal, was a neolithic man. To find his European counterpart, one would look back beyond the dawn of civilization. Rua himself had witnessed the full impact of the white man’s ways upon a people living in a stone age. He had in turn been warrior, editor of a native newspaper, and member of Parliament. In his extreme age he had sloughed his European habits and returned to his own sub-tribe and to a way of life that was an echo in a minor key of his earliest youth.
    “My great-great-grandfather is a hundred,” bragged little Hoani Smith at the Harpoon primary school. “He is the oldest man in New Zealand. He is nearly as old as God.
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!”
    Rua was dressed in a shabby suit. About his shoulders he wore a blanket, for nowadays he felt the cold. Sartorially he was rather disreputable, but for all that he had about him an air of greatness. His head was magnificent, long and shapely. His nose was a formidable beak, his lips thin and uncompromising. His eyes still held their brilliance. He was a patrician, and looked down the long lines of his ancestry until they met in one of the canoes of the first Polynesian sea-rovers. One would have said that his descent must have been free from the coarsening of Melanesian blood. But for his colour, a light brown, he looked for all the world like a Jacobite