d like natives, but still
retaining some foreign element of gait or attitude, still perhaps with
some relic (such as a single eye-glass) of the officer and gentleman,
they sprawl in palm-leaf verandahs and entertain an island audience with
memoirs of the music-hall. And there are still others, less pliable,
less capable, less fortunate, perhaps less base, who continue, even in
these isles of plenty, to lack bread.

At the far end of the town of Papeete, three such men were seated on the
beach under a _purao_-tree.

It was late. Long ago the band had broken up and marched musically home,
a motley troop of men and women, merchant clerks and navy officers,
dancing in its wake, arms about waist and crowned with garlands. Long
ago darkness and silence had gone from house to house about the tiny
pagan city. Only the street-lamps shone on, making a glow-worm halo in
the umbrageous alleys, or drawing a tremulous image on the waters of the
port. A sound of snoring ran among the piles of lumber by the Government
pier. It was wafted ashore from the graceful clipper-bottomed
schooners, where they lay moored close in like dinghies, and their crews
were stretched upon the deck under the open sky or huddled in a rude
tent amidst the disorder of merchandise.

But the men under the _purao_ had no thought of sleep. The same
temperature in England would have passed without remark in summer; but
it was bitter cold for the South Seas. Inanimate nature knew it, and the
bottle of cocoa-nut oil stood frozen in every bird-cage house about the
island; and the men knew it, and shivered. They wore flimsy cotton
clothes, the same they had sweated in by day and run the gauntlet of the
tropic showers; and to complete their evil case, they had no breakfast
to mention, less dinner, and no supper at all.

In the telling South Sea phrase, these three men were _on the beach_.
Common calamity had brought them acquainted, as the three most miserable
English-speaking creatures in Tahiti; and beyond their misery, they knew
next to nothing of each other, not even their true names. For each had
made a long apprenticeship in going downward; and each, at some stage of
the descent, had been shamed into the adoption of an _alias_. And yet
not one of them had figured in a court of justice; two were men of
kindly virtues; and one, as he sat and shivered under the _purao_, had a
tattered Virgil in his pocket.

Certainly, if money could have been raised upon the b