before this tale begins, turned suddenly upon the streets of San

Francisco by a vulgar and infuriated 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

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

The Ebb-Tide