We've just time for a whiskey and soda. I've a carriage outside.
It won't take us five minutes to get down to the wharf."

To the wharf we drove. Some forty sad wretches, amid their mats,
blankets, and luggage of various sorts, were squatting on the
stringer piece. The Noeau had just arrived and was making fast to a
lighter that lay between her and the wharf. A Mr. McVeigh, the
superintendent of the settlement, was overseeing the embarkation,
and to him I was introduced, also to Dr. Georges, one of the Board
of Health physicians whom I had already met at Kalihi. The lepers
were a woebegone lot. The faces of the majority were hideous--too
horrible for me to describe. But here and there I noticed fairly
good-looking persons, with no apparent signs of the fell disease
upon them. One, I noticed, a little white girl, not more than
twelve, with blue eyes and golden hair. One cheek, however, showed
the leprous bloat. On my remarking on the sadness of her alien
situation among the brown-skinned afflicted ones, Doctor Georges
replied:-

"Oh, I don't know. It's a happy day in her life. She comes from
Kauai. Her father is a brute. And now that she has developed the
disease she is going to join her mother at the settlement. Her
mother was sent down three years ago--a very bad case."

"You can't always tell from appearances," Mr. McVeigh explained.
That man there, that big chap, who looks the pink of condition, with
nothing the matter with him, I happen to know has a perforating
ulcer in his foot and another in his shoulder-blade. Then there are
others--there, see that girl's hand, the one who is smoking the
cigarette. See her twisted fingers. That's the anaesthetic form.