Early in his fall, he had ceased to be able to make remittances;

shortly after, having nothing but failure to communicate, he

ceased writing home; and about a year 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

bad 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

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