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Owing to the delivery of all letters being deferred until the arrival of the weekly overland mail, it was three days before Geoffrey’s letter reached its destination two miles away.

The Reverend Mr. Fletcher boarded in the village, for though the Wesleyans and Roman Catholics possessed their mission stations, the Church of England had no local habitation within twenty miles of the county borders. The Mallows, at whose house he resided, belonged to the earlier pioneers, the family having been established in the days when the white man came alone into the native settlement and picked his wife from the bright-eyed kotiros of the hapu.^[1] The founder of the family slept in the graveyard, beneath the manoa trees on the summit of the hill, and his grave vibrated eternally to the tread of the ocean rollers on the bar. His descendants were in every township and settlement throughout the county. Some had sailed away and were heard from occasionally; others had sailed away and never been heard from.