lowly up the Calle
Grande through the hot sand. He moved without a destination in his
mind. The little town was languidly stirring to its daily life.
Golden-skinned babies tumbled over one another in the grass. The sea
breeze brought him appetite, but nothing to satisfy it. Throughout
Coralio were its morning odors--those from the heavily fragrant
tropical flowers and from the bread baking in the outdoor ovens of
clay and the pervading smoke of their fires. Where the smoke cleared,
the crystal air, with some of the efficacy of faith, seemed to remove
the mountains almost to the sea, bringing them so near that one might
count the scarred glades on their wooded sides. The light-footed
Caribs were swiftly gliding to their tasks at the waterside. Already
along the bosky trails from the banana groves files of horses were
slowly moving, concealed, except for their nodding heads and plodding
legs, by the bunches of green-golden fruit heaped upon their backs.
On doorsills sat women combing their long, black hair and calling,
one to another, across the narrow thoroughfares. Peace reigned in
Coralio--arid and bald peace; but still peace.

On that bright morning when Nature seemed to be offering the lotus on
the Dawn's golden platter "Beelzebub" Blythe had reached rock bottom.
Further descent seemed impossible. That last night's slumber in
a public place had done for him. As long as he had had a roof to
cover him there had remained, unbridged, the space that separates a
gentleman from the beasts of the jungle and the fowls of the air. But
now he was little more than a whimpering oyster led to be devoured on
the sands of a Southern sea by the artful walrus, Circumstance, and
the implacable carpenter, Fate.

To Blythe money was now but a memory. He had drained his friends of
all that their good-fellowship had to offer; then he had squeezed
them to the last drop of their generosity; and at the last,
Aaron-like, he had smitten the rock of their hardening bosoms for the
scattering, ignoble drops of Charity itself.

He had exhausted his credit to the last _real_. With the minute
keenness of the shameless sponger he was aware of every source in
Coralio from which a glass of rum, a meal or a piece of silver could
be wheedled. Marshalling each such source in his mind, he considered
it with all the thoroughness and penetration that hunger and thirst
lent him for the task. All his optimism failed to thresh a grain of
hope from the chaff