THE MAORI "The moving finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on.

Nor all your piety or wit Can lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wash out a word of it." The first colonists of New Zealand were brown men from the South Seas.
It was from Eastern Polynesia that the Maoris unquestionably came.
They are of the same race as the courteous, handsome people who inhabit the South Sea Islands from Hawaii to Rarotonga, and who, in Fiji, mingle their blood with the darker and inferior Melanesians of the west.

All the Polynesians speak dialects of the same musical tongue.

A glance at Tregear's Comparative Maori-Polynesian Dictionary will satisfy any reader on that point.

The Rarotongans call themselves "Maori," and can understand the New Zealand speech; so, as a rule, can the other South Sea tribes, even the distant Hawaiians.