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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 cocoanut 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 book, Robert Herrick
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