ted German Jew, he had broken the last
bonds of self-respect, and upon a sudden Impulse, changed his name and
invested his last dollar in a passage on the mail brigantine, the City
of Papeete. With what expectation he had trimmed his flight for the
South Seas, Herrick perhaps scarcely knew. Doubtless there were fortunes
to be made in pearl and copra; doubtless others not more gifted than
himself had climbed in the island world to be queen's consorts and
king's ministers. But if Herrick had gone there with any manful purpose,
he would have kept his father's name; the alias betrayed his moral
bankruptcy; he had struck his flag; he entertained no hope to reinstate
himself or help his straitened family; and he came to the islands (where
he knew the climate to be soft, bread cheap, and manners easy) a skulker
from life's battle and his own immediate duty. Failure, he had said, was
his portion; let it be a pleasant failure.

It is fortunately not enough to say 'I will be base.' Herrick continued
in the islands his career of failure; but in the new scene and under the
new name, he suffered no less sharply than before. A place was got, it
was lost in the old style; from the long-suffering of the keepers of
restaurants he fell to more open charity upon the wayside; as time went
on, good nature became weary, and after a repulse or two, Herrick became
shy. There were women enough who would have supported a far worse and a
far uglier man; Herrick never met or never knew them: or if he did both,
some manlier feeling would revolt, and he preferred starvation. Drenched
with rains, broiling by day, shivering by night, a disused and ruinous
prison for a bedroom, his diet begged or pilfered out of rubbish heaps,
his associates two creatures equally outcast with himself, he had
drained for months the cup of penitence. He had known what it was to
be resigned, what it was to break forth in a childish fury of rebellion
against fate, and what it was to sink into the coma of despair. The time
had changed him. He told himself no longer tales of an easy and perhaps
agreeable declension; he read his nature otherwise; he had proved
himself incapable of rising, and he now learned by experience that he
could not stoop to fall. Something that was scarcely pride or strength,
that was perhaps only refinement, withheld him from capitulation; but
he looked on upon his own misfortune with a growing rage, and sometimes
wondered at his patience.

It was no