t and Monday morning.
Despatches from Gibraltar say that pieces of a boat and several
semaphore flags belonging to the cruiser came ashore at Ceuta and
Tarifa this afternoon."

THE TERRIBLE SOLOMONS*

From "South Sea Tales," BY JACK LONDON

*Reprinted by courtesy of the Macmillan Co.

There is no gainsaying that the Solomons are a hard-bitten bunch of
islands. On the other hand, there are worse places in the world. But
to the new chum who has no constitutional understanding of men and life
in the rough, the Solomons may indeed prove terrible.

It is true that fever and dysentery are perpetually on the walk-about,
that loathsome skin diseases abound, that the air is saturated with a
poison that bites into every pore, cut, or abrasion and plants
malignant ulcers, and that many strong men who escape dying there
return as wrecks to their own countries. It is also true that the
natives of the Solomons are a wild lot, with a hearty appetite for
human flesh and a fad for collecting human heads. Their highest
instinct of sportsmanship is to catch a man with his back turned and to
smite him a cunning blow with a tomahawk that severs the spinal column
at the base of the brain. It is equally true that on some islands,
such as Malaita, the profit and loss account of social intercourse is
calculated in homicides. Heads are a medium of exchange, and white
heads are extremely valuable. Very often a dozen villages make a
jack-pot, which they fatten moon by moon, against the time when some
brave warrior presents a white man's head, fresh and gory, and claims
the pot.

All the foregoing, is quite true, and yet there are white men who have
lived in the Solomons a score of years and who feel homesick when they
go away from them. A man needs only to be careful--and lucky--to live
a long time in the Solomons; but he must also be of the right sort. He
must have the hall-mark of the inevitable white man stamped upon his
soul. He must be inevitable. He must have a certain grand
carelessness of odds, a certain colossal self-satisfaction, and a
racial egotism that convinces him that one white is better than a
thousand niggers every day in the week, and that on Sunday he is able
to clean out two thousand niggers. For such are the things that have
made the white man inevitable. Oh, and one other thing--the white man
who wishes to be inevitable, must not merely despise the lesser breeds
and think a lot of himself; he mus