Quotation from: The Cruise of the Snark

Written by: Jack London


In Molokai the people are happy. I shall never forget the
celebration of the Fourth of July I witnessed there. At six o'clock
in the morning the "horribles" were out, dressed fantastically,
astride horses, mules, and donkeys (their own property), and cutting
capers all over the Settlement. Two brass bands were out as well.
Then there were the pa-u riders, thirty or forty of them, Hawaiian
women all, superb horsewomen dressed gorgeously in the old, native
riding costume, and dashing about in twos and threes and groups. In
the afternoon Charmian and I stood in the judge's stand and awarded
the prizes for horsemanship and costume to the pa-u riders. All
about were the hundreds of lepers, with wreaths of flowers on heads
and necks and shoulders, looking on and making merry. And always,
over the brows of hills and across the grassy level stretches,
appearing and disappearing, were the groups of men and women, gaily
dressed, on galloping horses, horses and riders flower-bedecked and
flower-garlanded, singing, and laughing, and riding like the wind.
And as I stood in the judge's stand and looked at all this, there
came to my recollection the lazar house of Havana, where I had once
beheld some two hundred lepers, prisoners inside four restricted
walls until they died. No, there are a few thousand places I wot of
in this world over which I would select Molokai as a place of
permanent residence. In the evening we went to one of the leper
assembly halls, where, before a crowded audience, the singing
societies contested for prizes, and where the night wound up with a
dance. I have seen the Hawaiians living in the slums of Honolulu,
and, having seen them, I can readily understand why the lepers,
brought up from the Settlement for re-examination, shouted one and
all, "Back to Molokai!"

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