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ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY R. K. BONINE

O begin with Kalaupapa on the note of comedy sounds perhaps strange; yet there was comedy, of the serious sort, in our approach to it. Nor would it be easy to translate that complicated adventure without some hint of the states of mind we encountered and traversed. We had not long been on the shores of Oahu-the scent of the maile wreaths still hung about us-when we discovered that our desire to visit Kalaupapa (the leper settlement on Molokai) was going to make us unpopular. Decent citizens, unless they belong to the autocratic and efficient Board of Health, do not think about Kalaupapa. They prefer not to. If put with their backs to the wall, by the innocent and tactless malihini, they deliver themselves of language which in its mingling of beauty and blasphemy is Apocalyptic, no less. They tell you in flowery words that the Settlement is unbelievably beautiful (which it is); that there is not a happier group of people in the world than the Kalaupapa lepers; that their wellnigh painless existence is compounded of "movies," ball-games, horse-races, and lotus-eating idleness; that it is with the utmost difficulty that any of them, if paroled, are induced to leave. So far, so good; and they are very near the truth. Why, in that case, should the decent citizen so resent one's interest in this paradise? Just as one is putting that question

to oneself, it is answered by the decent citizen. They don't like to think about leprosy; it is not a nice subject; they wonder at you for liking to talk about it; hang you, why can't you take their word about Kalaupapa without preposterously and morbidly wishing to go there? Nobody goes there except on business; the lepers don't like to be made a show of; the Islanders don't want it written up; they have trouble enough now with fools on the "Coast" who think the whole Hawaiian soil a sort of culture for the disease; and, anyhow, there are more lepers in Minnesota than in the whole Territory of Hawaii. (I was quite unable to substantiate this, later, in Minnesota.) Nothing would induce them to visit Kalaupapa: not because they are afraid, for there is no danger; not because they do not wish to look upon horrors, for there are no horrors to look upon; not because they are afraid of sympathetic suffering, for of course the lepers are happy; chiefly, one is forced to infer, because they themselves are "nice." The next inference, about oneself, comes all too quickly. Even the mild mention of Stevenson does not justify one before men. And the result of the last cartridge one has to shoot-"Why, if there is no horror, don't you want the rest of the world, stirred up by Stevenson and others, to know it?"-is the mere sulky re-statement of the fact that they do not want the rest of the world to know anything about it at all. Copyright, 1916, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved.

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