ed like broken fragments of electric globes.

When it was absolutely tranquil and the ship remained immovable with
drooping sail, the stars passing slowly from one side of the mast to
the other, the delicate medusae, that the slightest wave was able to
crush, would come to the surface floating on the waters, around the
island of wood. There were thousands of these umbrellas filing slowly
by, green, blue, rose, with a vague coloring similar to oil-lights,--a
Japanese procession seen from above, that on one side was lost in the
mystery of the black waters and incessantly reappeared on the other
side.

The young pilot loved navigation in a sailing ship,--the struggle with
the wind, the solitude of its calms. He was far nearer the ocean here
than on the bridge of a transatlantic liner. The bark did not beat the
sea into such rabid foam. It slipped discreetly along as in the
maritime silence of the first millennium of the new-born earth. The
oceanic inhabitants approached it confidently upon seeing it rolling
like a mute and inoffensive whale.

In six years Ulysses changed his boat many times. He had learned
English, the universal language of the blue dominions, and was
refreshing himself with a study of Maury's charts--the sailors'
Bible--the patient work of an obscure genius who first snatched from
ocean and atmosphere the secret of their laws.

Desirous of exploring new seas and new lands, he did not stop in the
usual travel zones or ports, and the British, Norwegian, and North
American captains received cordially this good-mannered official so
little exacting as to salary. So Ulysses wandered over the oceans as
had the king of Ithaca over the Mediterranean, guided by a fatality
which impelled him with a rude push far from his country every time
that he proposed to return to it. The sight of a boat anchored near by
and ready to set sail for some distant port was a temptation that
invariably made him forget to return to Spain.

He traveled in filthy, old, happy-go-lucky sea-tramps, in which the
crews used to spread all the sails to the tempest, get drunk and fall
asleep, confident that the devil, friend of the brave, would awaken
them on the following morning. He lived in white boats as silent and
scrupulously clean as a Dutch home, whose captains were taking wife and
children with them, and where white-aproned stewardesses took care of
the galley and the cleaning of the floating hearthside, sharing the
dangers of th