ld-maid meal served me by the Sisters, and ride home again, tired
enough, but not too tired. The girls have all dolls, and love dressing
them. You who know so many ladies delicately clad, and they who know so
many dressmakers, please make it known it would be an acceptable gift to
send scraps for doll dressmaking to the Reverend Sister Maryanne, Bishop
Home, Kalaupapa, Molokai, Hawaiian Islands.

I have seen sights that cannot be told, and heard stories that cannot be
repeated: yet I never admired my poor race so much, nor (strange as it
may seem) loved life more than in the settlement. A horror of moral
beauty broods over the place: that's like bad Victor Hugo, but it is the
only way I can express the sense that lived with me all these days. And
this even though it was in great part Catholic, and my sympathies flow
never with so much difficulty as towards Catholic virtues. The passbook
kept with heaven stirs me to anger and laughter. One of the sisters
calls the place "the ticket office to heaven." Well, what is the odds?
They do their darg, and do it with kindness and efficiency incredible;
and we must take folks' virtues as we find them, and love the better
part. Of old Damien, whose weaknesses and worse perhaps I heard fully, I
think only the more. It was a European peasant: dirty, bigoted,
untruthful, unwise, tricky, but superb with generosity, residual candour
and fundamental good-humour: convince him he had done wrong (it might
take hours of insult) and he would undo what he had done and like his
corrector better. A man, with all the grime and paltriness of mankind,
but a saint and hero all the more for that. The place as regards scenery
is grand, gloomy, and bleak. Mighty mountain walls descending sheer
along the whole face of the island into a sea unusually deep; the front
of the mountain ivied and furred with clinging forest, one viridescent
cliff: about half-way from east to west, the low, bare, stony promontory
edged in between the cliff and the ocean; the two little towns (Kalawao
and Kalaupapa) seated on either side of it, as bare almost as bathing
machines upon a beach; and the population--gorgons and chimaeras dire.
All this tear of the nerves I bore admirably; and the day after I got
away, rode twenty miles along the opposite coast and up into the
mountains: they call it twenty, I am doubtful of the figures: I should
guess it nearer twelve; but let me take credit for what residents
allege; and I was ridi