aloft!” he sprang at the rigging like a cat.  We stood from under.  There was a breathless hush as the second order was given—­“Bear out on the yard-arm!” It was the fatal order at which the other men had lost their nerve and their lives!  As it rang out over the old ship, we gulped down our lumps and secretly thanked Him in the hollow of whose hand lie the seas.  The evolution was completed, and when the man of the foretop descended to the deck, half a dozen men gripped Hicks, and hugged him and kissed him with tears in their eyes.

Something really did happen in the foretop that day—­something happened to its captain, though nobody knew just what it was.  He came to the deck a changed man, and those who knew him best, felt it most.  We could not analyze it—­he could not himself.  I got into the secret by accident.  Some weeks later, it may have been months, an officer from another ship was lunching with a friend in our wardroom.  I served the lunch and overheard the following conversation: 

“Have you a signal man by the name of Hicks—­Billy Hicks—­on board?”

“Yes, what about him?”

“Well,” the officer said, smiling, “we were ten miles out at sea a few weeks ago when I noticed the signals flashing all over the heavens.  I was officer of the deck.  It was about seven bells in the first watch.  I called my signal officer, told him to take down what he read.”  He pulled out his notebook, still smiling and, spelling out the words, read: 

“God this is Billy Hicks.  I ain’t afraid of no bloomin’ man nor devil.  I ain’t afraid of no Davey Jones bleedin’ locker neither.  I ain’t like a bawlin baby afussin’ at his dad for sweeties.  I doant ask you for no favours but just one.  This is it—­when I strike the foretop to-morrow let me do it with the guts of a man what is clean and God dear God from this here day on giv me the feeling I use to have long ago when I nelt at my mother’s knee an said Our Father.  Good night dear God.”

I went out into the pantry of the wardroom, jotted down as much of this as I could remember, and it gave me a splendid introduction to the captain of the foretop.

The greatest problem of my life, and perhaps of any life at the age of twenty-one, was the problem of sex instinct.  I have often wondered why that problem is discussed so meagrely.  I have often wondered why, for instance, Kipling and Frank Bullen and W. Clark Russell, in discussing the life of soldiers and sailors with whom this is a specialized problem, have not frankly discussed the terrific battle that every full-blooded man must fight on this question.

The moment I arrived in that foreign port I was overwhelmed with a sense of personal freedom.  There I was, with a splendid physical organization that had just come into its own, and around me in the mess and on the ship’s deck and on the streets of the cities—­everywhere—­I heard nothing else but conversation on this problem.  To nine out of every ten men it was a joke.  It was laughed at, played with, and I knew, of course, that young men of my own age were being smashed on the rocks of this problem.