hem, whose
health had been preserved by some sort of charm, but one of themselves.
And the awful curse had not fallen on him by accident, as it had fallen
upon _them_, but he had sought it, wilfully, deliberately, for their
sakes. Thus, out of his very distress, came a new joy to Father
Damien.

Armed with this knowledge he grew more cheerful than he had ever been
before, till the people wondered at him. He held more frequent services
in the churches which had sprung up, held classes for the boys, and
taught them some of the games that he himself had played in the far-away
days in Belgium. The boys were pleasant, well-mannered children, with
the strangest names, some native nicknames, others picked up by their
fathers from the white people and given to their sons, whereas often
they should have been kept for their daughters. In the class of Father
Conradi there were Mrs. Tompkins, The Emetic, Susan, Jane Peter, Eyes of
Fire, The River of Truth, The First Nose, The Window; while in Honolulu,
from which many of them had come, lived their friends, Mrs. Oyster, The
Man who Washes his Dimples, Poor Pussy, The Stomach, and The Tired
Lizard. We should like to know what their sisters were called, but they
were not Father Conradi's business. The Father also took the greatest
interest in the experiments which the Sisters of Mercy were carrying on
in their school, not only to stop the spread of the disease, but to cure
it, for a healing oil had been discovered which had worked marvels in
many people. He encouraged the love of music and singing which existed
among the exiles, whose most precious possession was a kind of
barrel-organ which could play forty tunes, a present from a Scotch lady.
This barrel-organ was never absent from any of the entertainments which,
with the priests and doctors for audience, the lepers got up from time
to time. It even played its part in a performance on one Christmas Day,
which consisted of scenes from Belshazzar's feast. Unluckily it was so
dark that it was not easy for the audience to know exactly what was
going on, but they _did_ perceive that the Babylonish king sat the whole
time with his head on his arms and his arms on the table, like the
Dormouse in the play of 'Alice in Wonderland.' However, the actors were
intensely pleased with themselves, and that was all that mattered.

* * * * *

Father Damien lived for nearly six years after he became a leper, and as
l