desolate island--along all its northern side plunges a front of precipice
into a sea of unusual profundity. This range of cliff is, from east to
west, the true end and frontier of the island. Only in one spot there
projects into the ocean a certain triangular and rugged down, grassy,
stony, windy, and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater: the
whole bearing to the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the same relation
as a bracket to a wall. With this hint you will now be able to pick out
the leper station on a map; you will be able to judge how much of Molokai
is thus cut off between the surf and precipice, whether less than a half,
or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a tenth--or, say a twentieth; and
the next time you burst into print you will be in a position to share
with us the issue of your calculations.

I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness of
that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to behold. You,
who do not even know its situation on the map, probably denounce
sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in your
pleasant parlour on Beretania Street. When I was pulled ashore there one
early morning, there sat with me in the boat two sisters, bidding
farewell (in humble imitation of Damien) to the lights and joys of human
life. One of these wept silently; I could not withhold myself from
joining her. Had you been there, it is my belief that nature would have
triumphed even in you; and as the boat drew but a little nearer, and you
beheld the stairs crowded with abominable deformations of our common
manhood, and saw yourself landing in the midst of such a population as
only now and then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare--what a
haggard eye you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards
the house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had you found every
fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital and
seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost unrecognisable, but
still breathing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have
understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from which the nerves
of a man's spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the brightness of
the sun; you would have felt it was (even today) a pitiful place to visit
and a hell to dwell in. It is not the fear of possible infection. That
seems a little thing when compared with the pain, the pity, and the