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 would long ago have sacrificed that last

possession; but the demand for literature, which is so marked a

feature in some parts of the South Seas, extends not so far as

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