Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE OLD CALABOOSE. DESTINY AT THE DOOB The old calaboose in which the waifs had so long harbored, was a low, rectangular enclosure of building, at the corner of a shady western avenue, and a little townward of the British Consulate. Within was a grassy court, littered with wreckage and the traces of vagrant occupation. Six or seven cells opened from the court; the doors, that had once been locked on mutinous whalermen, rotting before them in the grass. No mark remained of their old destination, except the rusty bars upon the windows. The floor of one of the cells had been a little cleared; a bucket (the last remaining piece of furniture of the three caitiffs) stood full of water by the door, a half cocoanut-shell beside it for a drink- ing-cup; and on some ragged ends of mat Huish sprawled asleep, his mouth open, his face deathly. The glow of the tropic afternoon, the green of sun- bright foliage, stared into that shady place through door and window; and Herrick, pacing to and fro on the coral floor, sometimes paused, and laved his face and neck with tepid water from the bucket.His long arrears of suffering, the night's vigil, the insults of the morning, and the harrowing business of the letter had strung him to that point when pain is almost pleasure, time shrinks to a mere point, and death and life appear indifferent. To and fro he paced like a caged brute, his mind whirling through the universe of thought and memory; his eyes, as he went, skimming the legends on the wall. The crumbling whitewash was all full of them, Tahitian names, and French and English, and rude sketches of ships under sail, and men at fisticuffs. It came to him of a sudden that he too must leave upon these walls the memorial of his passage. He paused before a clean space, took th...