Yet here lived, not very many years ago, a considerable population, who have left the marks of an almost incredible industry in numerous fields inclosed between walls of lava rock well laid up; and in what is yet stranger, long rows of stones, like the windrows of hay in a grass field at home, evidently piled there in order to secure room in the long, narrow beds thus partly cleared of lava which lay between, to plant sweet-potatoes.

As I rode over the trails worn in the lava by the horses of the old inhabitants, I thought this plain realized the Vermonter's saying about a piece of particularly stony ground, that there was not room in the field to pile up the rocks it contained.
Yet on this apparently desert space, within a quarter of a century more than a thousand people lived contentedly and prosperously, after their fashion; and this though fresh water is so scarce that many of them must have carried their drinking water at least two or even three miles.

And here now live, among the lepers, or rather a little apart from them at one side of the plain, about a hundred people, the remnant of the former population, who were too much attached to their homes to leave them, and accepted sentence of perpetual seclusion here, in common with the lepers, rather than exile to a less sterile part of the island.
When we had descended the cliff, a short ride brought us to the house of a luna, or local overseer, a native who is not a leper; and of this house, being uncontaminated, we took possession.
By a law of the kingdom it is made the duty of the Minister of the Interior, and under him of the Board of Health, to arrest every one suspected of leprosy; and if a medical examination shows that he has the disease, to seclude the leper upon this part of Molokai.
Leprosy, when it is beyond its very earliest stage, is held to be incurable.

He who is sent to Molokai is therefore adjudged civilly dead.
His wife, upon application to the proper court, is granted a decree of absolute divorce, and may marry again; his estate is administered upon as though he were dead.

He is incapable of suing or being sued; and his dealings with the world thereafter are through and with the Board of Health alone.
In order that no doubtful cases may be sent to Molokai there is a hospital at Kalihi, near Honolulu, where the preliminary examinations are made, and where Dr.Trousseau, the skillful physician of the Board of Health, son of the famous Paris physician of the same name, retains people about whom he is uncertain.
The leper settlement at Molokai was begun so long ago as 1865; but the law requiring the seclusion of lepers was not enforced under the late king, who is believed to have been himself a sufferer from this disease, and who, at any rate, by constantly granting exemptions, discouraged the officers of the law.