I see him on the deck among his doomed fellows, watching the disappearing
boat until the final plunge comes and all is over. The sea never took a
braver man to its bosom. "Greater love hath no man than this ..."

Can you read that story without some tumult within you--without feeling
that humanity itself is ennobled by this great act and that you are, in
some mysterious way, better for the deed? That is the splendid fruit of all
such sublime sacrifice. It enriches the whole human family. It makes us
lift our heads with pride that we are men--that there is in us at our best
this noble gift of valiant unselfishness, this glorious prodigality that
spends life itself for something greater than life. If we had met this
nameless sailor we should have found him perhaps a very ordinary man, with
plenty of failings, doubtless, like the rest of us, and without any idea
that he had in him the priceless jewel beside which crowns and coronets are
empty baubles. He was something greater than he knew.

How many of us could pass such a test? What should I do? What would you do?
We neither of us know, for we are as great a mystery to ourselves as we are
to our neighbours. 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