rocedure, and inquired the nature of the appeals. They were
all the same; all from leper parents, all pleading to have their clean
children retained in that abode of sorrow, and all alleging the same
reason--_aloha nuinui_--an extreme affection. Such was the extreme
affection of Kaahumanu for Kanihonui; by which she indulged her
wantonness in safety and he died. But love has a countenance more
severe.

The scenes I am about to describe, moving as they were to witness, have
thus an element of something weak and false. Sympathy may flow freely
for the leper girl; it may flow for her mother with reserve; it must not
betray us into a shadow of injustice for the government whose laws they
had attempted to evade. That which is pathetic is not needfully wrong.

I walked in a bright sun, after a grateful rain, upon the shore beyond
Hookena. The breeze was of heavenly freshness, the surf was jubilant in
all the caves; it was a morning to put a man in thought of the
antiquity, the health and cleanness of the earth. And behold! when I
came abreast of the little pest-house on the lava, both the doors were
open. In front, a circle of some half-a-dozen women and children sat
conspicuous in the usual bright raiment; in their midst was a crouching
and bowed figure, swathed in a black shawl and motionless; and as I drew
more near, I was aware of a continuous and high-pitched drone of song.
The figure in the midst was the leper girl; the song was the
improvisation of the mother, pouring out her sorrow in the island way.
"That was not singing," explained the schoolmaster's wife on my return,
"that was crying." And she sketched for me the probable tenor of the
lament: "O my daughter, O my child, now you are going away from me, now
you are taken away from me at last," and so on without end.

The thought of the girl so early separated from her fellows--the look
of her lying there covered from eyesight, like an untimely
birth--perhaps more than all, the penetrating note of the
lament--subdued my courage utterly. With the natural impulse, I began to
seek some outlet for my pain. It occurred to me that, after two years in
the woods, the family affairs might well have suffered, and in view of
the transplantation, clothes, furniture, or money might be needful. I
believe it was not done wisely, since it was gone about in ignorance; I
dare say it flowed from a sentiment no more erect than that of
Polynesians; I am sure there were many in England