We were all glad enough to follow the Captain’s suggestion. Several of the men were commissioned to take turns standing watch; and the rest of us were not long in seeking much needed sleep. Within a few minutes, the deep and regular breathing from the nearby bunks informed me that my companions had temporarily forgotten the day’s adventures. For my own part, exhausted as I was, I could not so readily find relief. The events not only of the past few hours, but of many months, came trooping before my mind in continuous blurred procession; I was obsessed by my own imaginings, and from a dim half-consciousness, I would awaken time after time to a vivid re-experiencing of some almost forgotten episode. And, strangely enough, my reveries were concerned mainly with a single phase of my life--the phase I was now living. My youth and early manhood might almost not have existed, for all that I remembered of them now; but I did sharply recall how, at the outbreak of war more than a year ago, I had decided abruptly upon the action that had plunged me into my present plight. Resigning my position at Northeastern University, where I had been serving as instructor in classic Greek, I had enlisted in the navy, and had promptly been sent to an officers’ training school, from which I had emerged as Ensign. Friends had commended me upon my patriotism, yet it was not patriotism, but rather the greed for adventure, that had motivated my decision; and now, as I looked back, it seemed ironic to me that my previous uneventful days had been so much more pleasant than any of my adventures. There was, however, one factor which had served to make those days enjoyable, a factor without which even the most active life would be barren indeed--and that factor was one which could have no place in wartime. Frequently, as I tossed and struggled fitfully on my narrow bunk, there flashed before me out of the darkness the blue eyes and laughing face of one whom I could scarcely recall without a pang; and I lived again with Alma Huntley those sparkling days among the Vermont hills, when she was to me all that life was, and I won her promise of devotion among the scented pines and to the music of rippling waters ... That day was long past, yet how actually it came back to mind! And how acutely memory brought back a later day, when her cheeks were moist and I held her in a minute-long embrace, and mutual vows and soft murmurings were exchanged, and then there came the sharpness of “Farewell!” and she was gone, lost amid a blur of faces, and I marched sedately on while the world was blotted out in loneliness and grief ... Oh, why had I left her, plunging thus among these unknown horrors?... Fervently, as I lay there listening to the uncanny bellowings from the ghostly world without, I longed to reach out my arms to her, to hold her warmly, to speak to her, and to hear her speak, if only one loved word....