neralisations on life and romance. And one last
picture I have, standing out very clear and bright in the midst of
vagueness before and blackness afterward. We--the apprentices and I--are
swaying and clinging to one another under the stars. We are singing a
rollicking sea song, all save one who sits on the ground and weeps; and
we are marking the rhythm with waving square faces. From up and down the
street come far choruses of sea-voices similarly singing, and life is
great, and beautiful and romantic, and magnificently mad.

And next, after the blackness, I open my eyes in the early dawn to see a
Japanese woman, solicitously anxious, bending over me. She is the port
pilot's wife and I am lying in her doorway. I am chilled and shivering,
sick with the after-sickness of debauch. And I feel lightly clad. Those
rascals of runaway apprentices! They have acquired the habit of running
away. They have run away with my possessions. My watch is gone. My few
dollars are gone. My coat is gone. So is my belt. And yes, my shoes.

And the foregoing is a sample of the ten days I spent in the Bonin
Islands. Victor got over his lunacy, rejoined Axel and me, and after
that we caroused somewhat more discreetly. And we never climbed that
lava path among the flowers. The town and the square faces were all we
saw.

One who has been burned by fire must preach about the fire. I might have
seen and healthily enjoyed a whole lot more of the Bonin Islands, if I
had done what I ought to have done. But, as I see it, it is not a matter
of what one ought to do, or ought not to do. It is what one DOES do.
That is the everlasting, irrefragable fact. I did just what I did. I
did what all those men did in the Bonin Islands. I did what millions of
men over the world were doing at that particular point in time. I did it
because the way led to it, because I was only a human boy, a creature of
my environment, and neither an anaemic nor a god. I was just human, and
I was taking the path in the world that men took--men whom I admired, if
you please; full-blooded men, lusty, breedy, chesty men, free spirits and
anything but niggards in the way they foamed life away.

And the way was open. It was like an uncovered well in a yard where
children play. It is small use to tell the brave little boys toddling
their way along into knowledge of life that they mustn't play near the
uncovered well. They'll play near it. Any parent knows tha