confinement sufficed, and they fled. It would not occur to any leper now-so vivid is that chapter of tradition to go to Kalawao for treatment, and even did Kanaka psychology change, the hospital is scarcely now in condition or in funds to take care of them. Not without relief did we turn from this grave of humanitarian hopes to make one more call in Kalawao -on Brother Dutton at the Baldwin Home.

This was the scene of Damien's labors and his death. Across the grassy road is Damien's church and beside it his grave. The Home itself, where he lived, is now under Brother Dutton's charge, and after the long years nothing remains of principle or aspect that gave it the name of "Damien's Chinatown." Mai pake (the "Chinese Evil") is Hawaiian for leprosy; and it so happened that of the group of lepers on Brother Dutton's tiny porch some ten or a dozen-through which we

Kalaupapa "Molokai light," the federal light

had to make our way, only one, a Chinaman, could positively not be looked at.

Brother Dutton's little crowded porch. was my fire-test; after that there was nothing in Kalaupapa I could not face. A curious medley of emotions is the reward of the visitor to Kalaupapa, and one of the hardest with which to deal is this sudden fear, face to face with a leper who is all but touching you, of not striking the human, right note. It does not happen often-it is pitifully true that half the visible population of the Settlement would be unsuspected by the layman of any dread illness. I honestly believe that the worst of it is the mere knowing that they are lepers. But now and then one is flung suddenly on the mercy of one's instincts. There is no time to decide whether to look or not to look; to fix the exact shade of decent attention between aversion and curiosity. One must not stare, one must not shrink; and the vision

of unspeakable disfigurement, just because it is so rare, finds one unprepared and praying inwardly, after the visual shock, that one's smile was in the right place and the movement of one's eyes and muscles decorous and unhasty. In a case like that one's ancestors are responsible, and one hopes, for their credit, that the smile which feels a little stiff has not looked so. For to give pain to one of these unfortunates would be high treason to the spirit of the place. Their manners never fail. We had read that they thrust themselves upon the visitor in eagerness of welcome; we had heard from the decent citizen that they shrank from being looked at. Both statements were in intent discouraging, and neither is true. You walk through Kalawao and Kalaupapa as you might walk through any Hawaiian village, and if there is embarrassment, it is all on your side. No one intrudes himself on your path; no one shrinks from your

sight. They expect to look and be looked at, and their greetings are too frequent and too spontaneous for self-consciousness of any sort. Perhaps they seem a hint more cordial than folk in the other islands, but their lives are, after all, far emptier of strangers than even in Kalapana or Kaimu. Save for the worst stricken, they are less apathetic than the men pounding poi or mending fish-nets on the shores of Hawaii or Maui. They are a little more glad to see you, but they quite realize that you are none of their business. The extraordinary naturalness of the Settlement is its great feature both to eye and mind. Much of one's visit is, in a sense, without incident, because there is nothing "special" to stare at. You meet people going about their business or pass them sitting on their porches, just as elsewhere. Some of the leper homes are as charming as any of their size in Honolulu; some are desolate like cer

tain shacks in Hauula or Olaa. There may be a riot of foliage or a barren enclosure. Here, as elsewhere, there is a difference in human beings-that is all. Prizes are offered yearly for the best garden, but it is apparently held no sin not to compete. Never was philanthropy less stern. Beretania Street, King Streetthe grassy roads take the names of Honolulu streets; and there is pathos in that, but it is a brave gesture, too. There is a Catholic Red Cross Society in Kalaupapa (the Calvinistic and Mormon pastors were not interested"), and lepers out of their strength minister to lepers in their weakness delivering medicines, calling on the sick and reporting cases to the physicians, waiting at table on "holiday fête occasions"-doing whatsoever their hands find to do.

Remember, too, that the human comedy goes on in Kalaupapa as well as elsewhere. Litigation and "swipes" (a villainous drink brewed from any vegetable thing that will ferment) are as dear to the leper as to the "clean" Kanaka, and it is hard to dissuade him from pursuing them. Most of the disputes are settled out of court by Mr. McVeigh at his garden gate -how satisfactorily in general can be inferred from the expression with which well-nigh all faces are turned to him; but sometimes the full pomp and joy of a lawsuit is achieved. There are a courthouse and a jail, a native judge and a native policeman (both lepers); every facility, indeed, for the happy airing of quarrels in formal fashion. With "swipes," Mr. McVeigh admitted, he has his troubles: he sometimes makes eight or ten arrests a month. They will never learn; like children, they are unquenchably hopeful; potato-parings, or almost anything else, will serve; and a little group goes up the pali or into a graveyard or to any other appropriate spot and drinks until discovered. "You see, if we could only have a saloon," mused the superintendent, with tender irony, "it would be an ideal existence." Every now and then a request for divorce comes from Kalaupapa to the proper official in Honolulu. "Please divorce me from my husband [or wife] in" is apt to be all that is said. Leprosy is ground for divorce in the Islands; and, while many follow a stricken spouse to Molokai, many, of course, do

not. In such a case the leper, man or woman, is apt to find an affinity in the Settlement itself and to want freedom to marry there. The "clean" helpmeet left at home is, one supposes, freer to indulge his fancy without such formalities than the leper under constant supervision; which would account for the oddness of divorce proceedings' starting from this end. It sounds grotesque at first, but it is part of the high normality of Kalaupapa. And many of the lepers are personable creatures-still magnificent in strength, and showing to the eye no hint of ruin. Moreover, Doctor Goodhue, the resident physician, performs many operations, especially in cases of the tubercular type, for purely æsthetic reasons. In the wisdom of his heart he turns beauty doctor, and they look in a glass and find comfort. Let loose in Kalaupapa a shrill eugenist from the East, and you would soon have a Kanaka hell. It is cause for thanking God that the Settlement is managed by men who can make science and religion walk hand in hand. This, too, was a question that preoccupied the ascetic Damien, to whom marriage was a sacrament and fornication of the devil: it was Damien who first pleaded that husbands and wives should not be separated against their will.

"Damien's Chinatown," as I have said, no longer hints of the slum. Brother Dutton had a long Civil War experience to prepare him for his work at Kalawao, and the compound of the Baldwin Home, with snow-white cottages set round a noble greensward that centres in an immense lauhala palm, has a sort of military exquisiteness. His study was filled with shelves on which books and medicines disputed the space. The low door gave on the crowded porch; at one end is the little room where sores are dressed; somewhere beyond, I am told, is Damien's own bedroom, where his successor sleeps. He at least had time, while he served Damien, to worship the man, for he is unwilling, I believe, even to stray from Kalawao-to be out of sight, as it were, of Damien's very footprints. Happily Damien is like to be the last (as he was, immortally, the first) of Molokai martyrs. Of saints, uncanonized, it has held many, and will yet hold more. As always happens, when the world goes in

The Bishop Home for women and girls at Kalaupapa corresponds to the Baldwin Home for men and boys at Kalawao; and here, even in the sisters' tiny cottage facing out on their green compound, was the authentic convent atmosphere. Mother Maryanne, in her little parlor, was the blood-kin of all superiors I have ever known: the same soft yellowed skin, with something both tender and sexless in the features; the same hint of latent authority in the quiet manner; the same gentle aristocratic gayety; the same tacit endeavor to make human pity co-terminous with God's. Like other superiors I have known, from childhood up, she seemed an old, old woman who had seen many things. It was only when one stopped to think of the precise nature of those things which, in thirty years on Molokai, Mother Maryanne has seen, that the breath failed

century. She confessed apologetically that the night had been hot and sleep difficult. And once again the malihinis felt sheer impotent rage that they could not, with their own hands, wrench the federal dynamo from its magnificent foundations and give Mother Maryanne an electric fan. Rage, however, is the distinguishing mark of the malihini-no such emotion stalks abroad in heroic Kalaupapa. "You wouldn't think we'd be busy here," Mother Maryanne ventured, smiling," but there is a good deal to do." So natural has it come to seem, to five sisters, to manage life for some eighty-odd lepers. The youngest inmate of the Bishop Home is five, the oldest eighty. It was not hard to imagine the sisters busy. As we walked out across the compound, set round with cottages, a sister-pink-and-white and blooming-waved her free hand at us from a

porch. The other hand held the bandaged stump of a leper. Beside the two a woman squatted on the lanai; a creature of no age or race, her head a mere featureless lump. Yet just beyond the compound, where the new home for advanced cases is building, the leper luna ran up to consult Mr. McVeigh, and a finer-looking Kanaka I have never seen-whiter teeth, more stalwart shoulders, or a gayer smile. These are the contrasts of Kalaupapa; such are the hierarchies of the doomed. It was not in ourselves that we found the even temper to face these things as naturally as the sights of any street: the place carries its own antidote to its own sights. All have worked together to produce that miraculous morale which immunizes even the stranger within their gates. Yet we grew to feel, both of us, that we bore that morale like an icon with us in the person of the superintendent himself. The duties and the "spheres" of the others are limited; he alone is everywhere, and all things are subject to him. No matter how admirable his collaborators, that

wondrous fabric of science and pity, of common sense and cheerfulness, might fall to pieces like a hut of twigs if he did not keep it whole.

The hospital is the last western outpost of the Settlement; very close to the pali it looks from the roadstead. Most lepers on Molokai die of other things than leprosy

intercurrent diseases, which their weakened systems cannot resist. Even so, the hospital is bound to be a place of last resort. We did not go in, though the chance was given us. Only a physician, a priest, or a friend, only some one who can minister to the remnant of a creature there lying helpless, has a right, we simultaneously felt, to enter. I have been in a big hospital and seen patients who were to die in an hour or two, and not willingly would I again feel so indecent as I did then. Mr. McVeigh thought our decision right, though he told us that there were now and then visitors who wanted most of all to see the hospital. To each his own code; but our inhibitions laid a check, at that point, on our passion for fact. We