ock.
I can take you through any hospital or any slum in any of the great
cities of the world and show you a thousand times worse horrors. The
living death! The creatures that once were men! Bosh! You ought to see
those living deaths racing horses on the Fourth of July. Some of them
own boats. One has a gasoline launch. They have nothing to do but have
a good time. Food, shelter, clothes, medical attendance, everything, is
theirs. They are the wards of the Territory. They have a much finer
climate than Honolulu, and the scenery is magnificent. I shouldn't mind
going down there myself for the rest of my days. It is a lovely spot."

So Kersdale on the joyous leper. He was not afraid of leprosy. He said
so himself, and that there wasn't one chance in a million for him or any
other white man to catch it, though he confessed afterward that one of
his school chums, Alfred Starter, had contracted it, gone to Molokai, and
there died.

"You know, in the old days," Kersdale explained, "there was no certain
test for leprosy. Anything unusual or abnormal was sufficient to send a
fellow to Molokai. The result was that dozens were sent there who were
no more lepers than you or I. But they don't make that mistake now. The
Board of Health tests are infallible. The funny thing is that when the
test was discovered they immediately went down to Molokai and applied it,
and they found a number who were not lepers. These were immediately
deported. Happy to get away? They wailed harder at leaving the
settlement than when they left Honolulu to go to it. Some refused to
leave, and really had to be forced out. One of them even married a leper
woman in the last stages and then wrote pathetic letters to the Board of
Health, protesting against his expulsion on the ground that no one was so
well able as he to take care of his poor old wife."

"What is this infallible test?" I demanded.

"The bacteriological test. There is no getting away from it. Doctor
Hervey--he's our expert, you know--was the first man to apply it here. He
is a wizard. He knows more about leprosy than any living man, and if a
cure is ever discovered, he'll be that discoverer. As for the test, it
is very simple. They have succeeded in isolating the _bacillus leprae_
and studying it. They know it now when they see it. All they do is to
snip a bit of skin from the suspect and subject it to the bacteriological
test. A man without any visible symptom