weary, and after a repulse or two, Herrick became shy. There

were women enough who would have supported a far worse

and a 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 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

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