The unfortunate
governor's ukase had precipitated a general debauch for all hands. It
was hours after sunset, and the men wanted to see anybody try to put them
on board. They went around inviting the authorities to try to put them
on board. In front of the governor's house they were gathered thickest,
bawling sea-songs, circulating square faces, and dancing uproarious
Virginia reels and old-country dances. The police, including the
reserves, stood in little forlorn groups, waiting for the command the
governor was too wise to issue. And I thought this saturnalia was great.
It was like the old days of the Spanish Main come back. It was license;
it was adventure. And I was part of it, a chesty sea-rover along with
all these other chesty sea-rovers among the paper houses of Japan.

The governor never issued the order to clear the streets, and Axel and I
wandered on from drink to drink. After a time, in some of the antics,
getting hazy myself, I lost him. I drifted along, making new
acquaintances, downing more drinks, getting hazier and hazier. I
remember, somewhere, sitting in a circle with Japanese fishermen, Kanaka
boat-steerers from our own vessels, and a young Danish sailor fresh from
cowboying in the Argentine and with a penchant for native customs and
ceremonials. And with due and proper and most intricate Japanese
ceremonial we of the circle drank saki, pale, mild, and lukewarm, from
tiny porcelain bowls.

And, later, I remember the runaway apprentices--boys of eighteen and
twenty, of middle class English families, who had jumped their ships and
apprenticeships in various ports of the world and drifted into the
forecastles of the sealing schooners. They were healthy, smooth-skinned,
clear-eyed, and they were young--youths like me, learning the way of
their feet in the world of men. And they WERE men. No mild saki for
them, but square faces illicitly refilled with corrosive fire that flamed
through their veins and burst into conflagrations in their heads. I
remember a melting song they sang, the refrain of which was:

"'Tis but a little golden ring,
I give it to thee with pride,
Wear it for your mother's sake
When you are on the tide."

They wept over it as they sang it, the graceless young scamps who had all
broken their mothers' prides, and I sang with them, and wept with them,
and luxuriated in the pathos and the tragedy of it, and struggled to make
glimmering inebriated ge