eretania Street. "You miserable little ----" (here is a word I
dare not print, it would so shock your ears). "You miserable little ----,"
he cried, "if the story were a thousand times true, can't you see you are
a million times a lower ---- for daring to repeat it?" I wish it could be
told of you that when the report reached you in your house, perhaps after
family worship, you had found in your soul enough holy anger to receive it
with the same expressions; ay, even with that one which I dare not print;
it would not need to have been blotted away, like Uncle Toby's oath, by
the tears of the recording angel; it would have been counted to you for
your brightest righteousness. But you have deliberately chosen the part of
the man from Honolulu, and you have played it with improvements of your
own. The man from Honolulu--miserable, leering creature--communicated the
tale to a rude knot of beach-combing drinkers in a public-house, where (I
will so far agree with your temperance opinions) man is not always at his
noblest; and the man from Honolulu had himself been drinking--drinking, we
may charitably fancy, to excess. It was to your "Dear Brother, the
Reverend H. B. Gage," that you chose to communicate the sickening story;
and the blue ribbon which adorns your portly bosom forbids me to allow you
the extenuating plea that you were drunk when it was done. Your "dear
brother"--a brother indeed--made haste to deliver up your letter (as a
means of grace, perhaps) to the religious papers; where, after many
months, I found and read and wondered at it; and whence I have now
reproduced it for the wonder of others. And you and your dear brother
have, by this cycle of operations, built up a contrast very edifying to
examine in detail. The man whom you would not care to have to dinner, on
the one side; on the other, the Reverend Dr. Hyde and the Reverend H. B.
Gage: the Apia bar-room, the Honolulu manse.

But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to your fellow-men; and
to bring it home to you, I will suppose your story to be true. I will
suppose--and God forgive me for supposing it--that Damien faltered and
stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose that, in the horror
of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of incipient disease, he, who
was doing so much more than he had sworn, failed in the letter of his
priestly oath--he, who was so much a better man than either you or me,
who did what we have never dreamed of daring--he