A Lesson Learned in “A Sailor Boy’s Tale” “The Sailor Boy’s Tale” is a story with an obvious moral. This is the old adage “what goes around comes around.” Many times in this story, situations arise in which this cliché is apparent. This saying applies to much of life, and this story does a wonderful job of showing how often this comes up. The story opens with a scene that supports this cliché. The boy sees a bird struggling to free itself from a bundle of rope it has become hung up in. After a short time of contemplating the situation, the boy makes the decision to scale the mast and free the bird. It took the boy quite some effort to get up to the height at which