disgust of the visitor's surroundings, and the atmosphere of affliction,
disease, and physical disgrace in which he breathes. I do not think I am
a man more than usually timid; but I never recall the days and nights I
spent upon that island promontory (eight days and seven nights), without
heartfelt thankfulness that I am somewhere else. I find in my diary that
I speak of my stay as a "grinding experience": I have once jotted in the
margin, "_Harrowing_ is the word"; and when the _Mokolii_ bore me at last
towards the outer world, I kept repeating to myself, with a new
conception of their pregnancy, those simple words of the song--

"'Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen."

And observe: that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement purged,
bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital and the Bishop-
Home excellently arranged; the sisters, the doctor, and the missionaries,
all indefatigable in their noble tasks. It was a different place when
Damien came there and made this great renunciation, and slept that first
night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: alone with pestilence;
and looking forward (with what courage, with what pitiful sinkings of
dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores and stumps.

You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful abound
in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and nurses. I
have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the nurses. But
there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as Kalawao and
Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like every inch of
length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of the impression; for
what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum of human suffering by
which he stands surrounded. Lastly, no doctor or nurse is called upon to
enter once for all the doors of that gehenna; they do not say farewell,
they need not abandon hope, on its sad threshold; they but go for a time
to their high calling, and can look forward as they go to relief, to
recreation, and to rest. But Damien shut-to with his own hand the doors
of his own sepulchre.

I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao.

_A_. "Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully remembered in the
field of his labours and sufferings. 'He was a good man, but very
officious,' says one. Another tells me he had fallen (as other priests
so easily do) into something of