Leaving Dr. Biccard with the ladies, I walked on to inspect the lepers and the buildings in which they were housed. Here I saw human beings kenneled worse than dogs. In a long, low, thatched shed some forty poor creatures were stowed away. Both varieties of the disease, the tubercular and anæsthetic, could here be studied. Some I saw with their faces shiny, discolored and swollen, others with both hands and feet dropping off joint by joint; one man especially attracting my attention, whose nose, eyes, tongue and cheeks had all rotted away, and who, with a voice piping shrill and cracked, could barely make himself understood. He was a horrid, loathsome mass of putrid humanity. One fact, however, struck me at the time, that neither this man nor any of the other inmates complained of bodily pain. The building in which they were housed was such that I could not help picturing in my mind a spark igniting the thatch and a fire taking place in this hovel; how the poor wretches, sixty per cent. of whom were unable to leave their beds, would in their helplessness be burnt alive, possibly only too glad to find surcease of sorrow, at least in this world. [Illustration: LEPER DEPARTMENT.—ROBBEN ISLAND. ] Here were black, half-caste and white all mixed together in hideous confusion, but, thank heaven! no females; the latter had been removed, I learned, some time before to Old Somerset hospital, not alas, however, until cohabitation had produced its results in beings almost, I fear, inevitably doomed to a life worse than death, and recalling Coleridge’s lines in his “Ancient Mariner” “The nightmare Death in life is she Who chills men’s blood with cold.” These woe-begone creatures were allowed to go to the mainland if they wished once every three months, according to the criminally absurd enactments then in force. Of this opportunity many availed themselves, never returning, but sowing the seeds of a disease, hereditary and possibly contagious, as some believe it to be, broadcast through the land with impunity.