of their bandages, looked like horrid, partially
decomposed cadavers. It was a sight to make one shudder and devoutly
hope that a cure for this awful disease may soon be discovered. These
extreme cases are cared for carefully and their last hours are made as
comfortable as possible.

[Illustration: CONCRETE KITCHEN AND LAVATORY BUILDINGS AND NATIVE
RESIDENCES.]

As we came, out three Catholic sisters entered the women's ward to do
what they could for the patients there.

Shortly before leaving the colony we were led to a small concrete
structure (near the furnace where all combustible waste is burned), and
as the door was opened we saw before us on a concrete slab four bodies
so wasted and shrivelled that they seemed scarcely human. These were
those who had at last been cured in the only way that this dread
disease admits of cure. About forty per month are released by death, and
those we saw were the last crop of the here _merciful_ not "dread
reaper."

At the back of the colony we met four lepers of incipient stages
carrying a long box on their shoulders. Just as they came abreast of us
they set it down, to rest themselves, and we saw that in the box was
another "cured" leper. He was being carried to the cemetery not only
"unhonored and unsung" but also "unwept": not a single friend nor
relative followed his wasted body to its final resting place. After this
pitiful spectacle, added to the horrors of the hospital wards, we were
not sorry to turn our steps back toward the boat. As we passed through
the fence at the "dead line," going away from the colony, we were
compelled to wade through a shallow box of water containing a small
percentage of carbolic acid which disinfected the soles of our shoes,
the only things about us that had come in actual contact with the leper
colony. In this way all visitors when they leave the colony are
compelled, not to "shake its dust from their feet" but to wash its germs
from their soles.

As an antidote for dissatisfaction with one's lot in life, or as an
object lesson for the pessimists who claim there is no unselfishness in
the world, or as an illustration of the value of the medical missionary,
this little island, lying "somewhere east of Suez" between the Sulu and
the China Seas, is not easily surpassed.

IV. FROM ZAMBOANGA TO SINGAPORE.

When the North German Lloyd steamer "Sandakan" left the dock at
Zamboanga she had in the first cabin only three passengers, a Rus