op
vertically with extended wings from the heights of the steep-sloped
shore. Even the smallest crustaceans had the advantage of him.

Suddenly he felt all his weakness, all his misery, while his blood
continued crimsoning the little lakes among the rocks. Closing his eyes
to die, he saw in the darkness a pale face, hands that were deftly
weaving delicate laces, and before night should descend forever upon
his eyelids, he moaned a childish cry:

"_Mama_!... _Mama_!..."

Three months afterward upon arriving at Barcelona, he found his mother
just as he had seen her during his death-agony on the Portuguese
coast.... Some fishermen had picked him up just as his life was ebbing
away. During his stay in the hospital he wrote many times in a light
and confident tone to Dona Cristina, pretending that he was detained by
important business in Lisbon.

Upon seeing him enter his home, the good lady dropped her eternal
lace-work, turned pale and greeted him with tremulous hands and
troubled eyes. She must have known the truth; and if she did not know
it, her motherly instinct told her when she saw Ulysses convalescent,
emaciated, hovering between courageous effort and physical breakdown,
just like the brave who come out of the torture chamber.

"Oh, my son!... How much longer!..."

It was time that he should bring to an end his madness for adventure,
his crazy desire for attempting the impossible, and encountering the
most absurd dangers. If he wished to follow the sea, very well. But let
it be in respectable vessels in the service of a great company,
following a career of regular promotion, and not wandering capriciously
over all seas, associated with the international lawlessness that the
ports offer for the reinforcement of crews. Remaining quietly at home
would be best of all. Oh, what happiness if he would but stay with his
mother!...

And Ulysses, to the astonishment of Dona Cristina, decided to do so.
The good senora was not alone. A niece was living with her as though
she were her daughter. The sailor had only to go down in the depths of
his memory to recall a little tot of a girl four years old, creeping
and frolicking on the shore while he, with the gravity of a man, had
been listening to the old secretary of the town, as he related the past
grandeurs of the Catalunian navy.

She was the daughter of a Blanes (the only poor one in the family) who
had commanded his relatives' ships, and had died of yellow fever in