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 hand

you could take without a blush. But there was no redeeming

grace about the other, who called himself sometimes Hay and

sometimes Tomkins, and laughed at the discrepancy; who had

been employed in every store in Papeete, for the creature was

able in his way; who had been discharged from each in turn, for

he was wholly vile; who had alienated all his old employers so

that they passed him in the street as if he were a dog, and all

his old comrades so that they shunned him as they would a

creditor.

Not long before, a ship from Peru had brought an influenza,

and it now raged in the island, and particularly in Papeete. From

all round the purao arose and fell a dismal sound of men

coughing, and strangling as they coughed. The sick natives, with

the islander's impatience of a touch of fever, had crawled from

their houses to be cool and, squatting on the shore or on the

beached canoes, painfully expected the new day. Even as the

crowing of cocks goes about the country in the night from farm to

farm, accesses of coughing arose, and spread, and died in the

distance, and sprang up again. Each miserable shiverer caught the

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