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
suggestion from his neighbour, was torn for some minutes by that
cruel ecstasy, and left spent and without voice or courage when
it passed. If a man had pity to spend, Papeete beach, in that
cold night and in that infected season, was a place to spend it