It was late. Long ago the band had broken up and marched
musically home, a motley troop of men and women, merchant
clerks and navy officers, dancing in its wake, arms about waist
and crowned with garlands. Long ago darkness and silence had
gone from house to house about the tiny pagan city. Only the
street lamps shone on, making a glow-worm halo in the umbrageous
alleys or drawing a tremulous image on the waters of the
port. A sound of snoring ran among the piles of lumber by the
Government pier. It was wafted ashore from the graceful
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