next to the bathroom where she sorted the mail; quite often I had helped her there. One of her sons still lived there, and I wondered if the lovely old peonie roses still grew along the front verandah. This was where we turned off to our old home, and my heart was full to overflowing as the years fell away—and I was once again a girl with my brothers on our ponies; remembering the exhilaration of standing up high in the stirrups, with the wind whistling through my hair, as I yodelled and sang at the top of my voice, galloping along on my pony. The hills that had seemed so high in my youth were now, strangely, not high at all, and the great gullies were only mild now. Soon we were drawing up at the old familiar gateway, under the same old pine tree, where we had played houses and swung on our favourite branches. Some dogs started to bark from their kennels behind the hedge—just where my Dad had once tied his dogs—some sheep across the gully made their old familiar sounds, and I stepped out of the car and walked away into the darkening night. I went towards the place where our cowbails, shed and stables used to be, but there was only one little bail behind the same old macrocarpa; the old stables, gig sheds and fodder sheds, were all gone. When I was at a safe distance from the others I sobbed aloud, great tears streamed unheeded down my cheeks, and I cried in anguish, ‘Oh Mother! Oh Father! if only you were here tonight, and I was coming back to you both, here in these old beloved surroundings and old familiar sounds.’ But they were several hundred miles away, sleeping side by side in a little hillside cemetery. The years fell away, and there we were again, a little family unit, in the place where we had been so close and so secluded, where no outside influences had been able to intrude, where every experience had been kept shining bright by the dew of memory; where we had run and rollicked and climbed the live-long day, where we loved to run through a field of waving and billowing oats, making tracks—to Father's dismay—where we had watched them reaping the harvest, and the men standing the stooks, and then the horses and drays bringing home the sheaves. How we loved to play hide and seek around those stacks on our ponies, whooping and colliding and waving sticks like red Indians! My brother asked if I wished to come up to the old house, as the inhabitants had issued a kind welcome; and so I stood once more in the old kitchen, and recognized many familiar things. I bit my lip and clenched my hands, as the kind young woman led us up the passage—there was my Mother's room—and the boys' room—and then we were out on to the old verandah, and there was Mother's pink fuchsia! ‘Oh please could I have just a little piece of this fuchsia!’ I asked, and I could feel those times crowding in and pushing away the present. I looked through the darkness at the familiar trees—the clothes line—the tarata tree, where I had my photo taken by two strange men who had called one day. I looked at the old familiar scene, and marvelled that things could change so little and yet so much. Gone was my husband and all our children, for they had no part with me in this, gone were the years between; for in these surroundings, I was in my childhood again. But I had to return, and soon I was thanking the young couple for so kindly accepting this intrusion; we shook hands, and went back the twenty miles to the city. All the way I was silent, for I had been into another world; I had said in my heart, ‘Roll back the Years’.

Mr B. E. Souter, Deputy Secretary for Maori Affairs and Deputy Maori Trustee, is acting secretary and Maori Trustee during the absence abroad of Mr J. K. Hunn. Mr Hunn left last week on a six-month private holiday during which he will visit the U.S.A., Britain and Europe. Before joining the Maori Affairs Department in 1950, Mr Souter was for three years officer in charge at Auckland in the Price Control Division, Industries and Commerce Department. He was assistant district officer at Auckland for the Maori Affairs Department from 1950 to 1954, when he was appointed district officer, Whangarei, in charge of the North Auckland Maori Affairs Department district. From there he went in 1957 to the Department's head office in Wellington as assistant secretary, later becoming Deputy Secretary. Mr Souter is a member of the New Zealand Society of Accountants. He was for many years a prominent tennis player, and is a vice-president of the Wellington Lawn Tennis Association, a member of its management committee, and a selector. Mr Souter is also on the council of the New Zealand Lawn Tennis Association.