very
night, beating the bad women of cheap lodging houses, and setting the
whole town in an uproar whenever he had come off a heavy winner in some
gambling-dive of the slums.

It was on one of these sprees that he took the foolish step which cost
his mother days and days of lamentation and weeping. Tonet, with some
other boys of his kind, went and joined the navy. Life in the Cabanal
had grown too tame for them, and the wine there had lost its flavor. And
the time came when the wretched scamp, in a blue sailor suit, a white
cap cocked over one ear, and a bundle of clothes over his shoulders,
dropped in to bid Dolores and his mother good-by, on his way to
Cartagena where he had been ordered to report for service.

Good riddance, after all! _Sina_ Tona was fond of her boy, but he
wouldn't be getting into trouble again for a while! What a pity, though,
for that poor girl Rosario, so modest and unassuming and never saying a
word, who took her sewing down to the beach with Roseta, and was always
timidly asking whether _sina_ Tona had had any word from Tonet. As time
went on, the three women from the old hulk there on the shore followed
all the voyages and stops of the schoolship _Villa de Madrid_ with Tonet
on board as able seaman. And how excited they would get when the postman
would throw down on the wet counter a narrow envelope, sometimes sealed
with red wax and then again with bread dough, and a complicated address
written all over it in huge fat letters: "_For sinora tona The Woman who
keeps The little cafe near The barn on the Beach._"

A strange exotic perfume seemed to come from the four pages of rough
paper--a suggestion of trees and flowers the poor women did not know, of
tempestuous seas, of shores draped in rosy mists under skies of fire, of
Cuban negroes and Philippine Chinese, or of great cities of South
America. What a boy, eh? What a lot he would have to talk about when he
came home! Perhaps that crazy idea he had had of going away to see the
world would be the making of him in the end. And _sina_ Tona, with a
return of the preference which made her idolize her younger son, felt an
occasional flare of jealous anger as she pictured her Tonet, her fine
brave little boy, off on that navy vessel under the strict discipline of
cross officers, while the other one, the Rector, whom she had always
thought a sleepy-head, was getting on in the world like anything, and
had come to be quite a person in fishing circles