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 the ways and habits of thought of a
Kanaka; but he had the wit to recognise the fact, and the good sense to
laugh at" [over] "it. A plain man it seems he was; I cannot find he was
a popular."

_B_. "After Ragsdale's death" [Ragsdale was a famous Luna, or overseer,
of the unruly settlement] "there followed a brief term of office by
Father Damien which served only to publish the weakness of that noble
man. He was rough in his ways, and he had no control. Authority was
relaxed; Damien's life was threatened, and he was soon eager to resign."

_C_. "Of Damien I begin to have an idea. He seems to have been a man of
the peasant class, certainly of the peasant type: shrewd; ignorant and
bigoted, yet with an open mind, and capable of receiving and digesting a
reproof if it were bluntly administered; superbly generous in the least
thing as well as in the greatest, and as ready to give his last shirt
(although not without human grumbling) as he had been to sacrifice his
life; essentially indiscreet and officious, which made him a troublesome
colleague; domineering in all his ways, which made him incurably
unpopular w