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