ho
had pulled and hauled on the same sheets and tackles, relieved one
another's wheels, laid out side by side on the same jib-boom when she was
plunging into it and looked to see who was missing when she cleared and
lifted. So we drank with all, and all treated, and our voices rose, and
we remembered a myriad kindly acts of comradeship, and forgot our fights
and wordy squabbles, and knew one another for the best fellows in the
world.

Well, the night was young when we arrived in that public house, and for
all of that first night that public house was what I saw of Japan--a
drinking-place which was very like a drinking-place at home or anywhere
else over the world.

We lay in Yokohama harbour for two weeks, and about all we saw of Japan
was its drinking-places where sailors congregated. Occasionally, some
one of us varied the monotony with a more exciting drunk. In such
fashion I managed a real exploit by swimming off to the schooner one dark
midnight and going soundly to sleep while the water-police searched the
harbour for my body and brought my clothes out for identification.

Perhaps it was for things like that, I imagined, that men got drunk. In
our little round of living what I had done was a noteworthy event. All
the harbour talked about it. I enjoyed several days of fame among the
Japanese boatmen and ashore in the pubs. It was a red-letter event. It
was an event to be remembered and narrated with pride. I remember it
to-day, twenty years afterward, with a secret glow of pride. It was a
purple passage, just as Victor's wrecking of the tea-house in the Bonin
Islands and my being looted by the runaway apprentices were purple
passages.

The point is that the charm of John Barleycorn was still a mystery to me.
I was so organically a non-alcoholic that alcohol itself made no appeal;
the chemical reactions it produced in me were not satisfying because I
possessed no need for such chemical satisfaction. I drank because the
men I was with drank, and because my nature was such that I could not
permit myself to be less of a man than other men at their favourite
pastime. And I still had a sweet tooth, and on privy occasions when
there was no man to see, bought candy and blissfully devoured it.

We hove up anchor to a jolly chanty, and sailed out of Yokohama harbour
for San Francisco. We took the northern passage, and with the stout west
wind at our back made the run across the Pacific in thirty-seven days