Whatever may be said of the sorry logic, the jumbled, contradictory replies, of the decent citizen, he produces his effect. Far from exciting in one a mulish desire to visit Kalaupapa in spite of him, he nearly persuades one that it is better to stay away. If, with all mitigations, it is so bad as that- !

The plain truth is, I believe, that Island people are afraid of leprosy, though they are perfectly aware that their fear is groundless. They are probably justified in resenting the easy association, in the mind of the world at large, between leprosy and Hawaii. They feel rightly that they ought not to be made to pay for the fact that they are taking magnificent and notorious care of their lepers, while, in the backward Orient generally, no such strict tactics are adopted. "We segregate them and people talk; elsewhere they run about freely and no one pays any attention," is a fair enough complaint. They are sensitive, not without reason; and one does not wholly blame the Promotion Committee for omitting, in its excellent series of maps, any map whatsoever of Molokai -though the omission is inconvenient. Other factors have entered into their sensitiveness. Stevenson, to begin with, did them a bad turn by focussing the attention of the reading public on that remote promontory; doctors, of all people in the world, have sometimes been inconceivable cowards; there is always in every one's mind the rare case of the respectable white man or woman who has contracted the disease, God alone knows how. And underneath all is the fact that investigators are still sailing cautiously an uncharted sea. No one knows the whence, the wherefore, and the cure, for this disease. It is small comfort to know that typhus is transmitted by body-lice, because in a stricken country body-lice are not easily guarded against; but it is some comfort. Leprosy is difficult to get, and is probably contracted only by inoculation-yes: the difficulty lies in the "probably." Careful physicians will not speak of cures, only of "arrested cases." You cannot be very comfortable about anything so uncertain as all that. And, finally, though we all know how much greater is the menace of tuberculosis than that of leprosy, tuberculosis has not staggered down to us, a very metaphor for all that is horrible, from

the pages of the Bible. The only thing that the malihini may reproach the kamaainas for, in this connection, is ignorance of their own merits. By playing the ostrich about Kalaupapa they lose the finest chance in the world of being praised.

By our initial plea, before the Island attitude was clear to us, we had set in motion benevolent machinery that it would not have been good manners, by the lightest touch, either to accelerate or to stop. Some sporting instinct prevented us from ever quite saying, "Don't take any further trouble"; even as etiquette precluded any impatience over the unwinding of red tape. By the time the red tape was all unwound we could only, in decent calm, await the event we had invited. We could not have refused to go to Kalaupapa without presenting a rare spectacle of inconsistency; nor could we have gone with any silly sense of triumph, as importunate tourists who had at last got their way. It should be recorded here and not later that the visit was in the most solemn sense a great adventure, and that our thanks are eternally due to those who procured and those who gave the permission. One comes away with a desperate desire to pay tribute, and to cry out concerning many people that they have foully lied. From the little comedy of our gradual introduction to the scene we came to the very noble human drama enacting itself lonelily on the remote stage of windward Molokai.

To most Americans who have had no direct relations with the Hawaiian Islands Molokai automatically suggests Father Damien and Stevenson's incomparable "Open Letter." To rake up old scandals is caddish work; but not necessarily if the object is rehabilitation. One may tardily defend a dead man; and I fancy I am not the only person for whom Damien needed more defending than he got from R. L. S. In Honolulu, where the truth always co-existed with gossip, Damien has his rights. His name is no household word, but at least he is not, I fancy, scandalously thought of. But for a wider circle, Stevenson and the unfortunate Doctor Hyde, between them, have managed to malign Father Damien almost beyond redress. Most of us know about Damien solely from that unhappy controversy. It cannot be too firmly or

too often reiterated that Damien suffered an unmystical and truly glorious martyrdom without breaking one of his priestly VOWS. Dirty he was, apparently, as Stevenson says repeatedly in his magnificent polemic. Certainly he did not carry a bottle of lysol in his pocket; if he had, he would doubtless never have been, in the technical sense, a martyr. He worked incessantly for the health of the Settlement: for pure water, for clean houses, for sanitation, as any one not an expert could have understood it in the '70's and '80's. Damien, remember, was the first member of any religious body to concern himself with that purgatory-for no one pretends that Kalaupapa was a paradise then. And because there was no toil that he disdained, he worked with the lepers to build them houses, running the constant risk-a risk that in some unknown, unrecognized moment fulfilled itself fatally-of inoculation. The "torn and bleeding fingers" of the carpenterpriest encountered, over tools and timbers, the stumps and sores of his flock; and for Damien it can always have been only a question of time-only a question of time before that memorable day when, after a difficult exploration of the cañons of the great cliff (in search of pure water-supply for the Settlement), he drew his shoes off his tired feet, found one heel bleeding and lacerated, and felt no pain.

There is no need to go at length into the question here. Damien's own reports to the authorities, the long report from Mr. Reynolds (the contemporary superintendent of the Settlement) on Damien's work -called forth by the Stevenson-Hyde controversy-tell the tale quite clearly. Any one to whom the royal and Territorial archives are inaccessible can find enough for purposes of conviction in the appendices to Mr. Alexander Johnstone's book on "Stevenson in the Pacific." No one with taste can regret Stevenson's "Open Letter"; it is one of the finest polemics we have. But it is a pity that Stevenson's hero should have been also his victim, and ironic that Stevenson, in the end, should have seemed to agree (for I think most people read it that way) with Doctor Hyde and "the man in the Apia bar-room." Stevenson makes us all feel with him, for the moment, that even if the scandal is true it does not matter; but from the mo

ment that the scandal is not true it does matter immensely. There is all the difference in the world between a good man and a saint; between excusable human frailty and superhuman self-control. The leashes are off, the bars are down, then, for our enthusiasm, and Damien's very grave, hushed and shaded and small, beside his Kalawao church, becomes a different thing. To the sisters, too, Stevenson's is but a squinting tribute. Catholicism was never dear to him: whenever he comes face to face with Rome, whether it is François Villon writing the "Ballade pour sa Mère" or the Franciscan sisters disembarking at Kalaupapa, his admiration halts, his mouth is wry. He thinks them saintly poor-creatures; he boggles over the "pass-book kept with heaven." To him who does not love, it is seldom given wholly to see. I do not question the authenticity of the "ticket-office to heaven." It sounds like many a mild convent joke that I have heard from the lips of nuns. The most devout nun will talk with familiarity and gayety of the things that are most important to her; homely metaphors are on her lips for the most reverend facts. Religion is her business, and all her practical business, for her, is religion. The Pauline or the Miltonic mind may not find the Catholic practicality alluring, but the Catholic practicality is not for that any the less Christian. Of Mother Maryanne, Stevenson had nothing but good-in a little poem-to say. I love R. L. S. as much as one can love any man for style alone, and I am not tempted to quarrel with his "horror of moral beauty" that broods over Kalaupapa, or even "the population-gorgons and chimæras dire." But things have changed greatly since '89 and the days of the monarchy. In point of fact, at the present day, the moral beauty is without horror, and the "gorgons and chimeras dire" do not bulk big in the visitor's vision.

And now I have done with Stevenson. I have mentioned him because his scant pages have so long been, for many of us, our only document on Molokai. Scant though they are, they are the pages of a master; they are the best we have or are like to have; and it is fair that they should thus isolate themselves. The other unofficial accounts that I have seen or heard of-and they are not more than two or

three-are beneath contempt, and, justly enough, virtually unknown: writen from the safe haven of Honolulu and puffed out with hearsay, or else in the full panic of a visit that turned out to be precisely as bad as it was firmly expected to be. The California journalist who wrote that hands and feet, toes and fingers, were free in Kalaupapa for any one who would stoop to pick them up; the man who recorded the terrors of a twenty-four hours' stay-inventing them presumably from the superintendent's lanai, from which, in point of fact, he could not be induced to stir during his visit—are among the chief causes of the present difficulty of getting to Kalaupapa. A great work, physically, socially, morally, has been achieved there; and the quiet heroes who do not boast are very shy of being lied about. They are even shy of being talked about at all, and (though the official personnel, and, of course, the whole form of government, have changed since Stevenson's time) I do not make out that Island people are, even now, very enthusiastic about the Damien letter. Stevenson cannot have been popular in Honolulu. His constant tendency to stand by the Polynesian instead of the white man would not have made him so. His attack on Doctor Hyde kicked up a Kona storm in the old missionary aristocracy; and even those who had no personal affection for Doctor Hyde had much more admiration for him than for Stevenson's reprobate friend, King Kalakaua. It was probably the gutter gossip of Kalakaua's intimate circle that gave Stevenson his obvious misgivings about Damien's morality. Certainly he would have liked, if he could have done so, to contradict Doctor Hyde. Whatever one's political attitude to annexation, there can be no doubt that Kalakaua was, in feminine phrase, a "horror." One is not by way of reproaching R. L. S. for preferring him to the "missionaries," but one could not expect the "missionaries" to feel that Stevenson had chosen delicately. I fancy the traditional objection of the patriotic Islanders to having Molokai "written up" may have begun with Stevenson himself. This is, however, the merest inference of

my own.

The technique of leper-segregation in the Islands is admirably sane and simple.

The great majority of the lepers are Hawaiians, though there are some Chinese, some Portuguese, some Japanese, and usually a very few whites. All officials of whatever sort throughout the Territory -including policemen-have, as part of their regular duty, to report cases or suspected cases to the Board of Health. Many cases so reported are, of course, not leprous, but if the suspicion exists, examination is made. Obvious, or even doubtful, cases are then taken to the receiving-station at Kalihi (near Honolulu) and are kept there under observation and treatment for six months. If they are declared non-leprous, they are returned to their homes at government expense; if the disease is clinically present, they are sent to Kalaupapa. Kalaupapa, even, is not the exile terminable only by death that it has been called, for every year a number of patients are discharged from the Settlement itself. While it is unwise as yet to speak of cures, it is certain that the disease can sometimes be arrested, so that the patient is once more a perfectly harmless member of society. In such a case he is discharged on parole, his only duty being to report to the Board of Health once a month. The babies born at Kalaupapa are removed from their parents at birth to a well-equipped nursery, and come into no sort of contact with lepers thereafter. If, after a year, they are still "clean," they are taken to Honolulu and placed in the homes there provided for them (one for "non-leprous boys," one for "nonleprous girl's"). They are cared for, educated, and prepared for self-support. If, when grown, they are still "clean," they go out into the world and live their lives among their fellow beings. The system of removing babies at birth was entered on only seven years ago, and it is too early for positive statement; but so far, with one possible exception (this being a baby under observation at Kalaupapa when we were there), the children removed from their parents at birth have not contracted the disease. That Doctor Pratt and the Board of Health have succeeded in developing in Hawaiians a sane attitude to the disease is shown by the fact that hardly a week passes when some native does not enter Doctor Pratt's office in Honolulu and ask to be examined for leprosy. Gone are the days of Koolau

contributes nothing. The study, care, and treatment of leprosy in the Islands are financed by the Territorial government and carried on by the Territorial officials -notably, of course, the Board of Health, the resident physician, and the superintendent. All of these have faithfully worked together to the superb results that are there; more especially, perhaps, if distinctions can be made in such a devoted group, is credit due to the superintendent, Mr. McVeigh, who is lord of the domain. He is directly responsible for it all: provisioning the settlement, erecting new buildings, condemning and destroying old ones, making life sanitary, comfortable, practicable, for eight hundred souls-the brothers at the Baldwin Home, the sisters at the Bishop Home, the helpers and servants, as well as all the population of lepers themselves. He must arrange for every detail of life-no simple task in a community so cut off from the world. Landward the single trail over the pali behind is a dangerous one to mount or descend; and seaward the Kalaupapa landing, even for ships' boats manned by amphibious Kanakas, not always safe. Kalaupapa has been known to go six weeks without the possibility of communication by sea.

All responsibility for the Molokai lepers is, as I have said, assumed by the Territorial government. Houses are built for them if they wish it; a semi-weekly ration is issued to them; they need do no work whatever unless they choose, and if they do choose they are well paid. Those who have money of their own may have their own houses built to suit themselves. If the leper has a non-leprous husband, wife, or relative who wishes to come to the Settlement to live and care for him or her, it is permitted. There are some fiftyodd of these kokuas (helpers) who, though well themselves, make Kalaupapa their permanent home. (Men have been known to have two or three leper wives successively, women to have successive leper husbands, and still themselves remain "clean.") Friends of the lepers are allowed to make the journey to Kalaupapa to see them-talking with them, of course, only in a specially appointed house through a glass screen that prevents any contact. The life of the inhabitants of Kalaupapa is as normal in every way as it

can be made. If they choose to work in their gardens, the climate soon gives them a verdurous little paradise all their own. Those who can afford it, and desire it, may have, Hawaiian - fashion, beach-houses. The rough land between Kalaupapa and Kalawao is over-run by four hundred horses and donkeys, owned by lepers who scarcely ever mount them-pasturage, of course, free. Medical treatment is not obligatory, but is offered to all, and nearly all take it. Such, briefly, is the régime that science and pity have collaborated to produce. Arid it may sound when formally set down, but nothing so rigid was ever so little terrifying or institutional.

Of Wailuku and Lahaina I have spoken elsewhere, but my keenest "sense" of Lahaina perhaps came on that evening when we waited, after all the town had gone to bed, for the Mikahala to whistle for us. By the courtesy of the Inter-Island Steamship Company the Mikahala was to change its schedule (a wild, Conrad-ish schedule of minor ports and smaller islands, where docks are not and landings are made by the grace of God) and make a special call for us that night at Lahaina. It has come to seem to us that a perceptible portion of our lives has been spent at Lahaina waiting for steamers, and I fancy that the sense of long time thus spent comes chiefly from that imperishable evening. The long beach-front was dark; the Jap boys in the hotel had gone to bed; not a sampan showed a light; even the children, who apparently are the last to sleep in Lahaina, had forsaken the shore, and there was no sound of yellow and brown babies splashing out of the sea to croon strange syllables to the tune of "Tipperary"-a game they will keep up as long as there is a single light left on the dock. The only people up and dressed in the tropic night were we and the English proprietor of the hotel, who, with Arabian courtesy, beguiled our vigil with tales of longer vigils of his own in the Klondike rush.

A little after midnight the Mikahala's whistle came, and in due time a boat. swept darkly across the lapping waves, through the slit in the reef, and finally to the landing-stair. The Kanaka purser had come with it; I stretched out my hands, and to him and the boatmen I