that so emphatically slams in a man's face the door of self-
respect. And to Herrick, who was conscious of talents and
acquirements, who looked down upon those humble duties in
which he was found wanting, the pain was the more exquisite.
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