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to and could attend. If the list of guests for a particular function did not come up to the number invited to attend that function, the skipper detailed others of us to attend. That was an official order.
We were at Gibraltar, on our way home. On the night before we were to sail one of the British regiments stationed on the Rock gave a dinner to which a number of us were invited. It was a very gala occasion, even for that particular mess, which was famous for its cooks and for its cellar. The dinner was long and excellent, and the wines offered with it plentiful and of the best.
After dinner the senior medical officer of the mess challenged me to make a punch that would go his one better. I believe I did not let our national honor at the punchbowl down. I know it was very late when the party broke up. I started to walk down the crooked, narrow streets of the Rock, in company with one of the officers from our ship, who had been particularly attentive to my brew of punch. Not that he was overcome by it. Rather it had stimulated his imagination and started him on his hobby, which was naval aviation, then still in the experimental stages. He began to expatiate fervently on the future of flying and the wonderful exhilaration felt by the flier when he takes off into space. . . .
At this my friend actually did take off. With outflung arms he stepped into space and disappeared over the edge of the Rock of Gibraltar. I had a horrible moment, waiting for the splash of his body in the sea below. But no splash came. I peered over the edge of the path, striking matches to see if a ledge of rock could have conveniently caught him. It wasn't a ledge of rock, but a geranium bed in the garden of a resident of Gibraltar whose house abutted on a road just below the one we were going down by.
The fall had knocked the wind and the poetry out of my friend simultaneously. He made no further attempt to fly. Instead, he sprawled in the geraniums and protested to me that he was a seriously injured man and unable to return to the ship. I convinced him, in nautical language and in short order, that he would have
