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 ink stains, 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

The Ebb-Tide