years. She bore one child, which died, and soon after she, too, died, to the pakeha-Maori's great sorrow. His one-eyed wife, the lady of Otapawa, had left her unwilling husband some months before he took Rihi in Maori marriage.
Amongst the primitive arts of the Maori with which "Ringiringi" became familiar about this time was that of moko, or tattooing. The kauae tattooing—on chin and lips—was still universal amongst the native women, though few of the men now submitted their faces to the chisel or the needle of the tattooing artist. A popular form of tattooing amongst both sexes was that technically known as tiki-hopé, the scroll-patterns on the thighs and other parts of the body usually concealed by the waist-shawl. The white man saw numbers of women as well as men decorated in this fantastic fashion. In fact, he was so thoroughly Maori by this time that he was about to undergo the operation himself, in the winter of 1867, when living at the village Te Paka, near the old fort Otapawa. He had the ngarahu, or kapara, the blue-black pigment, ready for the dusky engraver, and would shortly have been made pretty for life in Maori eyes had not the tattooing been peremptorily forbidden.
"I wanted my face tattooed," says Bent, "for I was as wild as any Maori then. I intended to have the curves called tiwhana, or arches, tattooed on my forehead, over the eyes, and the kawekawe lines on
