Firth's Tower, at Matamata.

Some day, as likely as not, there will be a story of adventurous New Zealand written around a certain relic of pioneering days at Matamata, the tall square tower built by the first white settler of the district, Mr. J. C. Firth. It stands in the old homestead grounds at Matamata, between the modern busy little town and the Waihou River. It is nowadays a true “ivy-mantled tower,” and I can well imagine that its thick and tangled garment of foliage harbours a moping owl that “doth to the moon complain.” It looks a place for moreporks. On the day I visited it the leafage that densely covered the concrete hold was humming with bees, busy about its sweet sticky flowerets. So luxuriously have the creepers grown that it is not easy from a distance to make out the square of the tower; it resembles a close grown grove of trees.

“Firth's Tower,” standing alongside the old station homestead, is of comparatively modern construction; it was intended as a kind of baronial keep, perhaps, by J. C. Firth when it was built in the early Eighties, for there was then no danger of attack by hostile Maoris. It replaced a timber tower built in the ‘Sixties, when there was real fear of the Hauhaus; this building was burned down. It could stand a little siege to-day. This loopholed concrete tower with walls eighteen inches thick would be safe against fire as well as firearms.

The square tower is nearly fifty feet high and is sixteen feet square. There are two floors above the ground floor and on top there was a small watch-tower. The upper parts are pierced for rifle fire. These firing apertures are about fifteen inches long by four inches wide on the outside; they slant inward to larger dimensions, in order to give play to the defenders' rifles, after the usual design in the old military blockhouses. A stairway, now removed, gave access to the upper storeys.

Firth's Tower seems to have been modelled somewhat after the plan of the old stone keeps and peels on the Scottish border, such towers as those to which the merry raiders retired after harrying their neighbours, and within which they were safe as long as food and water held out. Some day it may figure as a rallying place and refuge for the local farming community—in a romantic New Zealand cinema thriller.

A Long-Distance Tryst.

Our pioneer settlers, in the spacious days of the past, thought little of long horseback journeys. In that era, long before railways and motor-cars had made transit easy and luxurious, the horse was the only long-distance time-saver for the New Zealander; and they raised good horses in those days. Some of us have covered a few thousands of miles on horseback in our time, but the growing-up generation knows little of the saddle. (Perhaps our new Governor-General, Lord Galway, a famous lover of good horses and the hunt, will do something to stimulate a healthy return to horsemanship in the Dominion.)

A veteran of the pioneering years in the Upper Waikato, a friend of mine, cast back in his memory the other day and recalled some incidents of the ‘Seventies.

“There were two brothers,” he said, “who had come from the Tamaki, near Auckland, and who had undertaken ploughing contracts on the Roto-o rangi estate, on the old Frontier line, before they settled on their own farms, which had to be broken in from a wild state. The elder brother was courting his Kate at the Tamaki but it was a long way to go, quite a hundred miles. Yet he did it frequently, riding the hundred miles on the Saturday and returning to the station by Monday. He'd leave very early in the morning, ride the tracks and cross the unbridged streams—there was only a punt on the Waikato River at Ngaruawahia, and the other rivers had none—travel the Great South Road, and reach the Tamaki at night, do his courting, and off again next day.”

There was a quick-travelling lover for you; but the hardy lads of those Waikato days did not regard it as anything out of the way. They bred splendid horses then, hacks that could carry a man's weight and last the long day at a steady tireless gait. Good riders, too, who could nurse a horse along.

The other brother, also, used to make week-end trips to the Tamaki to see his parents. On one occasion he rode down there from Roto-o-rangi on the Saturday. On the following evening the men at the frontier station were astonished to see his horse, without rider or saddle or bridle, come trotting up and put his head over the gate. He had got out of the paddock at the Tamaki farm, apparently not finding the company or the feed to his taste, and made a quick journey home. Two hundred miles in two days may seem a knock-out journey for horseflesh, yet they could do it in those times. He must have swum the Waikato River at Ngaruawahia on his return journey; the puntman would scarcely be likely to give a stray horse a free passage.

At the Wellington Police Court the other day while a witness was under examination, counsel suddenly hurried across to the “box” and told him he was “on fire!” Smoke was actually issuing from the man's coat pocket although he was blissfully ignorant of the fact. When he hastily pulled out his pipe it was half-full of burning tobacco. It appeared that he had removed the pipe from his mouth when he entered the Court, thrust it into his pocket, and forgotten all about it. Smokers are often very careless in that way—and in another way. They'll go on smoking tobacco reeking with nicotine and never realise their danger until their health gives way. Nicotine, it cannot too often be insisted, is poisonous stuff and brands rich in it should be rigorously avoided. The safe and sure way is to smoke the genuine “toasted.” The five brands of the real thing—Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendish, Riverhead Gold and Desert Gold are unapproached for quality, and being toasted are perfectly harmless.*