t he could read, from the looks of it, just what
there was underneath.

He would sit up forward on the boat, and describe the bumps on the
bottom as though he were on a wagon roughing the road-ruts. With one
glance he could tell whether your boat was over the kelp grounds, or
over the mud-banks, called _El Fanch_, or over those mysterious
submarine hillocks, called the _Pedrusquets_, where the fishermen were
always in terror of losing their nets on the sharp crags that cut the
seines to shreds. Between the _Muralls de Confit_, the _Bareta de
Casaret_ and the _Roca de Espioca_, lay deep tortuous gullies far down
under the sea. _Tio_ Batiste could drag a net through the winding
channel there without catching on a single rock, and without scooping up
a mass of kelp that would break your tackle through. A dark night of
fog! Not a lighthouse visible! Thick gloom ten feet ahead! One taste of
the mud on your net, and the old wizard would say where you were to a
hundred yards. Only a salmon or a squid could have been the teachers of
that wondrous learning! And _tio_ Batiste knew many other useful
things--that you should not cast your seine on Hallowe'en, for instance,
unless you wanted to bring up a corpse; or that the man who carried the
Cross of the Grao on Good Friday would never die at sea.

For that matter he had spent all his life on shipboard. By the time he
was ten, he could show callouses under his arm-pits, from hauling at the
lines. He had a dozen trips to Cuba to his credit--not the kind of trips
youngsters brag about nowadays, because they've been across as waiters
or barbers on a big liner--but real voyages, in good old-fashioned
_faluchas_, better built than they make them now, that went out with
wine and came back with sugar, and were owned by gentlemen in cape-coats
and top-hats! And every trip with a lamp on board, lighted at the wick
floating in the oil bowl before the Christ of the Grao! And a rosary
every night on board, without fail, unless you wanted something awful to
happen! Those were the days, according to _tio_ Batiste, the real days,
for sailormen. And as he cursed on, the wrinkles would wiggle all over
his face, and his ancient goatee would whip up and down; while vicious
bits of forecastle obscenity would punctuate his contempt for the
irreligion and the conceit of the younger generation of salts.

Pascualo liked to hear the old man talk. There was something of his old
master, _tio_ Borrasca, ab