When a leper is sent to Molokai, the Government provides him a house, and he receives, if an adult, three pounds of paiai or unmixed poi, per day, and three pounds of salt salmon, or five pounds of fresh beef, per week.  Beef is generally preferred.

They are allowed and encouraged to cultivate land, and their products are bought by the Health Board; but the disease quickly attacks the feet and hands, and disables the sufferers from labor.

There are two churches in the settlement, one Protestant, with a native pastor, and one Catholic, with a white priest, a young Frenchman, who has had the courage to devote himself to his co-religionists.

There is a store, kept by the Board of Health, the articles in which are sold for cost and expenses.  The people receive a good deal of money from their relatives at home, which they spend in this store.  The Government also supplies all the lepers with clothing; and there is a post-office.  The little schooner which carried me back to Honolulu bore over two hundred letters, the weekly mail from the leper settlement.

For the bad cases there is a hospital, an extensive range of buildings, where one hundred patients lay when I visited it.  These, being helpless, are attended by other lepers, and receive extra rations of tea, sugar, bread, rice, and other food.

Almost every one strong enough to ride has a horse; for the Hawaiians can not well live without horses.  Some of the people live on the shore and make salt, which you see stored up in pandanus bags under the shelter of lava bubbles.  When I was there a number were engaged in digging a ditch in which to lay an iron pipe, intended to convey fresh water to the denser part of the settlement.

Such is the life on the leper settlement of Molokai; a precipitous cliff at its back two thousand feet high; the ocean, looking here bluer and lovelier than ever I saw it look elsewhere on three sides of it; the soft trade-wind blowing across the lava-covered plain; eternal sunshine; a mild air; horses; and the weekly excitement of the arrival of the schooner from Honolulu with letters.  There is sufficient employment for those who can and like to work—­and the Hawaiian is not an idle creature; and altogether it is a very contented and happy community.  The Islander has strong feelings and affections, but they do not last long, and the people here seemed to me to have made themselves quickly at home.  I saw very few sad faces, and there were mirth and laughter, and ready service and pleasant looks all around us, as we rode or walked over the settlement.

And now, you will ask, what does a leper look like?  Well, in the first place, he is not the leper of the Scriptures; nor, I am assured, is the disease at all like that which is said to occur in China.  Indeed, the poor Chinese have been unjustly accused of bringing this disease to the Islands.  With the first shipload of Chinese brought to these Islands came two lepers “white as snow,” having, that is to say, a disease very different from that which now is called leprosy here.  They were not allowed to land, but were sent back in the ship which brought them out.