te, may perhaps owe you something, if
your letter be the means of substituting once for all a credible
likeness for a wax abstraction. For, if that world at all remember you,
on the day when Damien of Molokai shall be named Saint, it will be in
virtue of one work: your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage.

You may ask on what authority I speak. It was my inclement destiny to
become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde. When I visited
the lazaretto Damien was already in his resting grave. But such
information as I have, I gathered on the spot in conversation with those
who knew him well and long: some indeed who revered his memory; but
others who had sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him with no
halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and through whose
unprepared and scarcely partial communications the plain, human features
of the man shone on me convincingly. These gave me what knowledge I
possess; and I learnt it in that scene where it could be most completely
and sensitively understood--Kalawao, which you have never visited, about
which you have never so much as endeavoured to inform yourself; for,
brief as your letter is, you have found the means to stumble into that
confession. "_Less than one-half_ of the island," you say, "is devoted
to the lepers." Molokai--"_Molokai ahina_," the "grey," lofty, and most
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