Champagne, and very, very rackety. The news of the D-T fight has just floated in. N.B. Tom's analysis of catching butterflies. If you stand on the ridge, all the butterflies passing from one side to the other must come over. Monday, September 26. (Tulagi). The recruiters of the Solomons are an interesting study in the days when buccaneers and pirates are supposedly dead and buried. They are made up of the hardest boiled type of humanity and they maintain their characters without a lull. Recruiters sometimes own their own ship and some- times are hired by a second party to go out for that purpose. They take the ship they are in charge of, some tobacco, money and jimjams, and start out for some island which the reports favor as having niggers who are willing to recruit. To recruit a nigger means to persuade him to sign on for labor for two years at the rate of a pound a month with tobacco and board thrown in. In return for the nigger's signing the recruiter is made to profit, being paid fifteen pounds for his trouble. In this regard it is very similar to the old African slave trade. The recruiter runs his ship into a passage and fires off his cannon. This notifies the natives that there is a recruiter ship in the offing ready to sign them on. The recruiter then anchors perhaps for as long as ten days waiting for the niggers who live back in the bush and who heard the gun to work their way to the coast. Sometimes the niggers take a week or ten days to make up their minds whether they are going to sign on or not. When they decide to come they go out to the ship and the recruiter says to them, "You fellar wantum work alongside big feller master, plenty kaikai, curry rice, tobacco?" Then the nigger replies, "Me lookem." Often niggers are willing to sign on when their tribe does