ghbours. Bob Acres said he found that "a man may have a deal of
valour in him without knowing it," and it is equally true that a man may be
more chicken-hearted than he himself suspects. Only the occasion discovers
of what stuff we are made--whether we are heroes or cowards, saints or
sinners. A blustering manner will not reveal the one any more than a long
face will reveal the other.

The merit of this sailor's heroism was that it was done with
calculation--in cold blood, as it were, with that
"two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage" of which Napoleon spoke as the real
thing. Many of us could do brave things in hot blood, with a sudden rush of
the spirit, who would fail if we had time, as this man had, to pause and
think, to reckon, to doubt, to grow cold and selfish. The merit of his deed
is that it was an act of physical courage based on the higher quality of
moral courage.

Nor because a man fails in the great moment is he necessarily all a coward.
Mark Twain was once talking to a friend of mine on the subject of courage
in men, and spoke of a man whose name is associated with a book that has
become a classic. "I knew him well," he said, "and I knew him as a brave
man. Yet he once did the most cowardly thing I have ever heard of any man.
He was in a shipwreck, and as the ship was going down he snatched a
lifebelt from a woman passenger and put it on himself. He was saved, and
she was drowned. And in spite of that frightful act I think he was not a
coward. I know there was not a day of his life afterwards when he would not
willingly and in cold blood have given his life to recall that shameful
act."

In this case the failure was not in moral courage, but in physical courage.
He was demoralised by the peril, and the physical coward came uppermost. If
he had had time to recover his moral balance he would have died an
honourable death. It is no uncommon thing for a man to have in him the
elements both of the hero and the coward. You remember that delightful
remark of Mrs. Disraeli, one of the most characteristic of the many quaint
sayings attributed to that strange woman. "Dizzy," she said, "has wonderful
moral courage, but no physical courage. I always have to pull the string of
his shower bath." It is a capital illustration of that conflict of the
coward and the brave man that takes place in most of us. Dizzy's moral
courage carried him to the bath, but there his physical courage failed him.
He could not pull the string