January 25th. Hamlin's day on the mountain. The carriers who were to get off Monday with another shipment of birds, and then were to get off yesterday, finally got off today. I imagine they thought they were getting off in good season. As our time in Kupei is drawing to a close, I might do well to turn back to the question of the natives. I don't think I have acquired any further information about the nature of their philosophy, their arts and crafts, or their legends. I have learned to believe two things about them most determinedly, and, as far as further data goes, that is all. One is that they have a fine, innate, spontaneous sense of humor. The other is that they have no reflective fear of death; that they regard death, for the most part, as a good deal of a joke. Of the native sense of humor a great deal ought to be said. The information one gets from a plantation manager, as well as the impression one gets in walking about a plantation on Bougainville and seeing the Kanaka at work, sullen, listless and wretched-looking, incor- porate into opposite points of view. Again it is not pleasant to be one who after a few desultory months at a place, turns around and tells men who have spent the better part of their lives there that their opinions about it are wholly in error. It is with no intention of doing this that I take up the cudgels on the minority side. The Kanaka on a plantation is not the real Kanaka any more than a farmer