The hall is simply a plain, wooden structure, capable of containing two or three hundred people. The Saint, when describing it in a letter home, said it was "a big, wooden barn with a floor to it." However, we voted this statement to be libellous, and cautioned the Saint on the misuse of terms. The Pahi Town Hall is not to be rashly designated with opprobrious epithets. Such as it is, it serves us well, by turns as chapel, court-house, music-hall, and ball-room.
On the night in question the hall was brilliantly illuminated with candles and kerosene lamps. The benches were filled with an eagerly expectant audience, brown and white, who applauded loudly when the Pahi Minstrels emerged from a little boarded room in one corner, and took up their positions on the platform at the end of the hall. Then, for two mortal hours, there was a dismal and lugubrious travesty of the performances of that world-famous troupe which never performs out of London.
But our audience were not captiously critical, and received our well-meant but weak attempts to please them with hearty pleasure and vigorous applause; and when we finally took ourselves off down to the river to wash our faces, every one declared we were a great success, as they busied themselves in clearing the hall for the dancing that was to follow.
It is not my purpose to describe the entire spree. I have merely alluded to it in order to record one of its incidents, which may fittingly conclude this brief account of our Maori neighbours; moreover, it is an illustration of something I said once before about caste and class prejudices.
Of the four young English ladies who were present at the spree, three were known to us as the daughters or sisters of settlers in the district. The fourth was a visitor from Auckland, who was staying with some friends in the district, and had come with them to the township. Miss "Cityswell" I will call her, the name will do as well as another.
Now, it is the praiseworthy custom of settlers' wives in the bush, to ask their unmarried lady friends from the city to visit them as much as possible. There is a dearth of feminine society in the newer districts; and the most insignificant miss, on her travels from house to house up country, receives pretty nearly as much homage and attention as did the Queen of Sheba on her visit to King Solomon. If she be matrimonially inclined--and, to do them justice, our colonial ladies are not backward in that respect--she has an infinite variety of choice among suitors eligible and ineligible. But on that head more anon.