had seen enough to fill out easily the visual tale of terror to the utmost, if we chose. I will not pretend that natural distaste did not, in my case, aid manners. Probably it did; though I know that one could have borne in Kalaupapa things one could not bear elsewhere. When your eyes have encountered a man whose blind face is one undulating purple sore, or a man whose mouth is a great, gashed-in triangle, seeming to fill the whole countenance from eyes to chin, you would be singularly dull if you could not guess at any mutilation disease is capable of. In any case, it was very clear to us, as we stood making our quick decision in the midst of all that tropic sweetness, that we were doing the mannerly thing. It may be that our refusal cost us an invitation to visit the home for advanced casesthough I doubt it. At all events, it was according to the very spirit of the Settlement not to go and stare, uselessly and with a layman's ignorance, at those who must, by no will of their own, offend every sense. Neither of us has ever regretted for a moment our moral squeamishness.

Before going across to the "movie"

theatre we visited the nursery-established, I believe, largely through the efforts of Governor Pinkham while serving on the Board of Health. He has always been keenly interested in the welfare of the lepers. Thirteen babies rolled and played and gurgled in the big sun-room. They represent the birth-rate for last, year. At one end of the house is a small room where one or two cribs are placed against a glass partition. Here the parents can come and look at their children. No caress is possible, and before the babies are old enough to have any feeling of human kindness they are, if "clean," taken to Honolulu. Provision is made for them there as I have elsewhere described it. It is the saddest spot, if you like, in Kalaupapa; more lingeringly sad, perhaps, to us even than to the victims of this especial destiny. Shall I seem callous if I recall the fact that Hawaiians, though devoted to children in general, are quite as apt to give their first-born away at birth as to adopt an eleventh when they have already ten at home? Both are characteristic gestes to a Kanaka. It is quite the thing to give your baby to your best

friend; sometimes you get the best friend's baby in exchange, and sometimes you do not. At all events, that well-known trait of Hawaiian psychology was all we had to comfort us, and I pass it on for mitigation. Across the hospital compound, on the lanai of the matron's own cottage, a girl baby crawled about by herself-under observation for a spot on her arm. They had good hope that the spot was meaningless: may her isolation, ere this, be over!

It was time to be getting back to the Mikahala, which was patiently waiting in the roadstead until we should be ready to go. But we had still to see the little "movie" theatre and the ice-making plant. Mr. R. K. Bonine, of Honolulu, installed the "movie" apparatus for the government. A plaster screen in the open fronts a score of rough benches, lightly roofed over. Twice a week the inhabitants of Kalaupapa gather on the benches, and Mr. McVeigh shows them films. It was good to see, good to know about; so was the ice-making plant. But again we wished our hands held the price of a dynamo. The Territorial government taxes itself almost beyond its power to do the magnificent work it does; those in authority, doctors and laymen, spend and are spent in all good faith, doing their day's work in the manner of strong men, the world over, with little talk and many deeds. Sometime, we may hope, leprosy will be stamped out in the Eight Islands, and the sorry gift of the Orient to Hawaii will be forgotten. But I should like to think that before the hospital goes to welcome ruin it will be electric-lighted. I should even like to think that Mother Maryanne, before she dies, will have an electric fan. And I am very impatient with the useless monster, perfect in all its parts, that purrs in seclusion over at Kalawao. Nowhere, for example, could a few miles of wire do more good. But federal red tape must go on unwinding; and doubtless I have said already too much for the proper pride of the Territorial officials. When they have sufficed to so much, perhaps it is the last word of tactlessness to reveal the fact that there is anything they have not been able to do. I hope I may without tactlessness record that there was real regret in bidding Mr.

McVeigh good-bye, for it is not often that one meets unexpectedly, in the flesh, with a great man.

We had company back in our boat to the Mikahala-a handful of Hawaiians, deck-passengers, who had come over to visit stricken friends. The crowd on the landing was pathetic enough; the little white cloud of waving handkerchiefs more piteous than farewell gestures on other wharves. There were tears among our companions, and the stout young woman in the white holoku who took at once to the comfort of cigarettes wept the most. It was good to realize that in one little way we had served; for the Mikahala, having orders to wait for us, had given the other visitors a longer time than usual. Back in our exiguous staterooms we were at liberty to be fearfully ill in perfect peace while the Mikahala churned her way across the channel to Lahaina.

If lurid words have seemed here unwontedly to fail me, it is because Kalaupapa is not, in strictest truth, lurid. Sights so horrid as some of the inhabittants we encountered I shall not, I hope, soon behold again. But to say that the bulk of one's impressions, or the dominant recollection, is horrible would be to lie damnably. Not to admit that the spectacle of kindness and blitheness and sturdy common sense is, to the end, unmarred would be to show oneself incapable of registering fact. Any imagination can construct the tragedies that must inevitably drag out a slow length in Kalaupapa. I am not trying to whitewash fate or to rehabilitate pain. But the mere fact that those discharged go unwillingly means much; for the Hawaiians have no instinctive horror of the disease, and a man can go back to his own people without difficulty. If any one thinks it is easy to construct an exile which the exiled shall love and love when he has leprosy-let him go and give unneeded advice to those who have made Kalaupapa what it is. I have no pen for "uplift"; and it is a sorry chance that it is so. For I have never seen anything in our contemporary chaos of prophylactic legislation and humanitarian hysteria one half so humanly fine as what has been done, as quietly as the coral-insect builds the reef, on the low promontory of windward Molokai.

T comes as a surprise to reasonable people to observe that in the last analysis it is not reason which makes history. A vital question involving peace or war came up in the American Congress at Washington the other day; the pros and cons were debated exhaustively; but when the day of the vote came hundreds of responsible lawmakers were seen swayed by a power not born of argument, a passion not known since the Spanish war. It was not pros and cons which turned the scales; a cry of "Stand by the President" swept the representatives into line with an unashamed whirlwind of loyalty to country and the country's leader. Logic is the careful hewing of steps up a mountain; emotion sums years of hewing. It is attainment, whether reached by steps or by a flight of inspiration. The sights and sounds which stand for things loved in childhood have a hold well-nigh undying on later life. Millions of men march to death knowing little or nothing of the reason why-knowing that they follow their country's flag; it is enough. An appeal to honor, and armies rush to the guns; a catchword of patriotism, and stately legislative bodies toss away formulas and arrive, white-hot, at certainty. One must, indeed, look to it that the rudder is made of the oak of the brain, yet the breeze which fills the sails and drives the ship is forever the rushing, mighty wind of the spirit.

There are officers of the United States navy to-day, stately captains, wellgirthed, and more than one admiral, who, meeting each other in China or at a club in Washington, shake their heads reminiscently and drop their voices as one speaks of "The night when Jerry Vane took hashish." It was of a 22d of February, that historic night thirty years back, and the U. S. S. John Paul Jones

was celebrating the Truth Teller's birth in Caribbean waters. The event which made the night memorable had been preparing for two days. Two days' back the junior officer of the ship had picked up a book on narcotics in the doctor's cabin; the book was well written and told tales to fire a young daredevil.

"I want to stimulate my imagination; I want to see what it's like," urged Jerrold Vane.

The doctor had happened to find some hashish. Vane had a winning way, and the doctor was young and careless, too, and very wrongly the small phial of thickish brown liquid was carried off in Vane's pocket when he said good night. The next day experiments were not in order, but early in the afternoon of the 22d he measured what the unwise doctor had told him was a dose, and then a drop or two, and swallowed it.

There were doings in Vane's cabin that afternoon. The story goes that he set his alarm-clock at intervals of half an hour and took naps with it under his ear. Between naps many fellow officers called on him, and there was unholy mirth heard through his door. In any case, he appeared at dinner in a state of excitement, from which he dropped to sleep at intervals, waking, flamboyant, to delight the table with cheerful madness. Every one on the ship knew what had happened, and, moreover, the lad was the spoiled child of the ward-room. They filled him up, finally, with black coffee and stood him on his feet. He was a Virginian, and most Southern boys are born speechmakers; this one noticeably so.

Slight and small, he stood swaying, smiling, and rubbed his knuckles into eyes brilliant with the drug. Then he caught sight, on the wall of the far end of the ward-room, of a photograph of Washington draped in the American flag. He shot out an arm.

"Old Glory!" he shouted. "The col

ors of our country-our n-nation's f-flag! The red lines are dripping blood of soldiers and sailors, the stars of the States are s-set in the blue of hope everlasting, eternal-f'rever-'n' ever-'n' ever."

The two rows of uniformed men looked up at the lad doubtfully. Yet these sentiments, if not too new, were right; in fact, there was something in the abandon of the young voice which thrilled one, thrilled and mystified. It was interesting to know what this nice boy was going to say under the influence of hashish. Jerry Vane had a knack of keeping one interested as to what he was going to say; he was going to bare his soul now, apparently; well, let it come; it was a perfectly good young soul, and a little banal spreadeagleism on Washington's birthday was not reprehensible.

"You've stuck me up here to make a speech," young Vane went on jovially, "and what you expect is a few remarks about our refined Christian homes, far, far away, and those who love us and miss us, and a gabby talk like that leading up to hip, hip, hooray for the star-spangled banner and the glorious land of freedom. Isn't that the size of it? Well, gentlemen, I can keep on talking that way as long's you like-jus' as long's you like. I don't think my genius would ever get smitten with locomotor ataxia down that road. Long's-you like

The flashing black eyes roved with an invitation to laughter which met with instant answer; to a man the officers chuckled indulgently; to a man they glanced at the captain sitting with his elbows on the table, staring inscrutably at the boy. The boy bent forward and tossed out a hand.

"Let's get to the point. Get to the point-cheers. On your feet, gentlemen, and swing her out for the nation and the father of it-America-George Washington-let her go-three times three!"

There was that in the lad's manner which, although much cheering had been already done, sent the chairs flying backward and the long tableful of officers springing to their feet. Jerrold Vane was modest, as became his youth, on ordinary occasions; that he should take command in this manner, being accounted for by the drug, was amusing. In any case, it

was the captain's affair, as long as the captain let him run on-and the captain, watching, let him run on. The captain stood and cheered with the rest. And with that, before the deep, ordered baying was fairly over, the boy's head flung back and a scream of laughter astounded the table. His arms swung like a windmill; his lithe body swayed to the limit of this side and that.

"A joke!" the boy roared. "One gigantic, international joke-the whole shooting-match-the American nation!" Lieutenant Armstrong, sitting next, shot a hand to Vane's arm. "Control yourself, Mr. Vane."

Vane, as if frozen by the touch, was as still as a statue; he turned his head slowly, glared down. Then a radiant smile broke; he bent and lifted the big hand on his arm, kissed it reverently, and replaced it before its owner.

"Oh, damn control, dearie!" he threw at Armstrong. "Can't you let a fellow enjoy himself?"

Armstrong, through the laughter, looked at the captain. "Let him alone. I'm interested to see how this stuff affects the brain," the captain spoke down the table.

The boy sped straight past the jog of the interruption. "Anybody who'll stop and think," he announced, "will know that this in-intensive enthusiasm about G. Washington and our country is the colossal joke of history. G. Washington was a good old top and a Briton, and that's why he had the sand in his gizzard to kick up a row. He caught England when her hands were t-tied with France and Spain, and he whipped her with a few rag-tags and bobtails, who thereafter made a high-sounding composition and called themselves a nation! For the love of the board of health! Think about that! We were a handful of colonists, and we're just a bigger handful now. What about a land where whole communitiespolitical parties of foreigners speak, read newspapers in a foreign tongue, live with foreign customs? That's us! Is that a nation? Could there be an Italian party in France, do you think? Can you picture a Russian party in Germany? There's no common blood, no inheritance, no history