t
also supplies all the lepers with clothing; and there is a post-office.
The little schooner which carried me back to Honolulu bore over two
hundred letters, the weekly mail from the leper settlement.

For the bad cases there is a hospital, an extensive range of buildings,
where one hundred patients lay when I visited it. These, being helpless,
are attended by other lepers, and receive extra rations of tea, sugar,
bread, rice, and other food.

Almost every one strong enough to ride has a horse; for the Hawaiians can
not well live without horses. Some of the people live on the shore and
make salt, which you see stored up in pandanus bags under the shelter of
lava bubbles. When I was there a number were engaged in digging a ditch
in which to lay an iron pipe, intended to convey fresh water to the denser
part of the settlement.

Such is the life on the leper settlement of Molokai; a precipitous cliff
at its back two thousand feet high; the ocean, looking here bluer and
lovelier than ever I saw it look elsewhere on three sides of it; the soft
trade-wind blowing across the lava-covered plain; eternal sunshine; a mild
air; horses; and the weekly excitement of the arrival of the schooner from
Honolulu with letters. There is sufficient employment for those who can
and like to work--and the Hawaiian is not an idle creature; and altogether
it is a very contented and happy community. The Islander has strong
feelings and affections, but they do not last long, and the people here
seemed to me to have made themselves quickly at home. I saw very few sad
faces, and there were mirth and laughter, and ready service and pleasant
looks all around us, as we rode or walked over the settlement.

And now, you will ask, what does a leper look like? Well, in the first
place, he is not the leper of the Scriptures; nor, I am assured, is the
disease at all like that which is said to occur in China. Indeed, the
poor Chinese have been unjustly accused of bringing this disease to the
Islands. With the first shipload of Chinese brought to these Islands
came two lepers "white as snow," having, that is to say, a disease very
different from that which now is called leprosy here. They were not
allowed to land, but were sent back in the ship which brought them out.

The Hawaiian leprosy, on the other hand, has been known here for a quarter
of a century, and men died of it before the first Chinese were brought
hither. The name Mai-Pakeh was given it by