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 now the fourth month completed, and still there was no change or
sign of change. The moon, racing through a world of flying clouds of
every size and shape and density, some black as inkstains, some delicate
as lawn, threw the marvel of her southern brightness over the same
lovely and detested scene: the island mountains crowned with the
perennial island cloud, the embowered city studded with rare lamps, the
masts in the harbour, the smooth mirror of the lagoon, and the mole of
the barrier reef on which the breakers whitened. The moon shone too,
with bull's-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the stalwart frame of the
American who called himself Brown, and was known to be a master-mariner
in some disgrace; and on the dwarfish person, the pale eyes and
toothless smile of a vulgar and bad-hearted cockney clerk. Here was
society for Robert Herrick! The Yankee skipper was a man at least: he
had sterling qualities of tenderness and resolution: he was one whose
hand you could take without a blush. But there was no redeeming grace
about the other, who called himself sometimes Hay and sometimes Tomkins,
and laughed at the discrepancy; who had been employed in every store in
Papeete, for the creature was able in his way; who had been discha