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 to-day) 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
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 his great renunciation, and slept
that first night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: