STEVENSON AMONG THE LEPERS.

Auckland Star, Volume XXX, Issue 274, 18 November 1899, Page 3 (Supplement)

STEVENSON AMONG THE LEPERS.

In the October instalment of Robert Louis Stevenson's letters now appearingl in "Scribner," we have the author's description of his visit to Molokai, where he saw Father Da.mien and his lepers. Stevenson was strongly affected. He wrote thus to his wife:

Presently we came up with the leper promontory; lowland, quite bar;» and bleak and harsh, a little town of wooden hoiises, two churches, a landing stair, all unsightly, sour, northerly, lying athwart the sunrise, with the great wall of the pali cutting the world out on the south. . . . I do

not know how it would have been with me had the sisters not been there. My horror of the horrible is about my weakest point; but the moral loveliness at my elbow blotted all else out; and when- I found that one of them was crying, poor soul, quietly under her veil, I cried a little myself; then I felt as right as a trivet, only a little crushed to be there so uselessly.

In a letter to Mr Colvin, he gives a further impression:

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.

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 a hero all the more for that.