, crew by crew, their
clothes and blankets in rolls over their backs, looked like the bands of
_almogavars_ that gathered, of old, on the beach of Salou, to sail, in
like craft or worse ones, to the conquest of Majorca. A savor of the
historic, of the antique, hovered about that fleet and about each
separate craft, which took you back, perforce, to sea legends of the
Middle Ages, when the triangular sails of Aragon were as dreaded of the
Moors of Andalusia as of the isles that lay smiling in the classic seas
of Greece.

The whole village was down on the shore. Women and children were running
here and there, trying to identify, in the forests of masts, of
crossing and criss-crossing cordage, the boats where their own men were.
It was the annual excursion into the deserts of the sea, the recurring
foray out into danger to snatch bread from the mysteries of the deep,
which sometimes gives up its treasures peacefully and without a
struggle, but at others hangs on to them and threatens the plucky
Argonaut with death.

Down over the gang-planks from wharf to deck moved a procession of bare
feet, yellow trousers, sun-baked faces, all that miserable flock of
human beings who are born, live and die, on that shore there, knowing
nothing of the world that lies beyond that blue horizon. Hunger, on the
starting-line, as it were, for a race with death at the signal of
opulence! Men condemned to ignorance and filth and danger, that, inland,
other men may sit down before glossy linen table-cloths, and feel their
mouths water before a succulent lobster's claw on a creamy cod swimming
in luscious sauce!

The sun was hanging low. The last flies of summer, their huge bellies
swollen and their wings sluggish, were buzzing about in the golden
afternoon, gleaming with a sputtering fire. Away to the horizon, which
the peak of the Mongo broke with a blotch of haze, like an island
floating in the distance, the sea stretched calm and tranquil. Good
weather! Good weather! That was the burden of every woman's tongue, as
the boats swallowed up crew after crew. With good luck, there would soon
be good things a-plenty in every house! Now the "cats" were almost the
only sailors left on shore. They were still running up and down the
wharves, stamping barefoot on the pitchy floorings, doing the last
errands of the captains, putting the hard-tack aboard, and a final cask
of wine!

And the sun was down. Everybody--more than a thousand men in all, ther