Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/69

Rh any one about whose case there is any doubt. There is a hospital near Honolulu where all doubtful cases are sent, and the physician in charge keeps them there until the certainty of the presence or absence of the disease is settled beyond question.

"The doctor who accompanied us through the settlement assured us that leprosy is neither epidemic nor contagious in the ordinary sense of the latter word. It can only be communicated by an abraded surface coming in contact with a leprous sore; and he said that the practice among the natives of many persons smoking the same pipe had done much to spread the disease. He shook hands freely with the victims of leprosy during our visit, and did not take the trouble to wear gloves, even when the hands of the others were covered with sores.

"He told us that the disease first showed itself by a slight swelling under the eyes and in the lobes of the ears; then the fingers contracted like birds' claws, the face swelled into ridges that were smooth and shiny, and later these ridges broke into festering sores. Sometimes these symptoms on the face do not appear, the attacks being principally on the hands and feet. The fingers and toes wither and decay; they seem to dry up and shrink, as we saw several persons whose finger-nails were on their knuckles, the fingers having shrunk away and disappeared.

"It is a curious circumstance that the victims of leprosy rarely suffer pain. The decay of the extremities is gradual, and the shiny ridges on the face may be pinched with the fingers or punctured with a pin without giving any sensation. Among the nine hundred and odd persons in the leper settlement we saw very few sad faces. The people were enjoying themselves very much as they would in Honolulu—talking and laughing, walking or lounging about, or riding horses, and in one place they were playing a game that evoked a good deal of shouting and hilarity. Many were at work in the fields and gardens, or making salt along the shore. There is a leper governor for the settlement, and the usual number of subordinates that such a place requires. There is a store where goods are sold at cost, and many of the lepers