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The Ebb-Tide by Robert Louis Stevenson;Lloyd Osbourne
page 6 of 192 (03%)
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
barrier reef on which the breakers whitened. The moon shone
too, with bull's-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the stalwart
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