the actor who becomes a theatrical manager, of the
author who branches out into publishing, of the engineer with a hobby
for odd inventions who becomes the proprietor of a factory. His
romantic love for the sea and its adventures was now overshadowed by
the price and consumption of coal, by the maddening competition that
lowered freight rates, and by the search for new ports with fast and
remunerative freight.

The _Fingal_ which had been rebaptized by its new proprietor with the
name of _Mare Nostrum_, in memory of his uncle, turned out to be a
dubious purchase in spite of its low price. As a navigator Ulysses had
been most enthusiastic upon beholding its high and sharp prow disposed
to confront the worst seas, the slenderness of the swift craft, its
machinery, excessively powerful for a freight steamer,--all the
conditions that had made it a mail packet for so many years. It
consumed too much fuel to be a profitable investment as a transport of
merchandise. The captain during his navigation could now think only of
the ravenous appetite of the boilers. It always seemed to him that the
_Mare Nostrum_ was speeding along with excess steam.

"Half speed!" he would shout down the tube to his first engineer.

But in spite of this and many other precautions, the expense for fuel
was enormously disproportioned to the tonnage of the vessel. The boat
was eating up all the profits. Its speed was insignificant compared
with that of a transatlantic steamer, though absurd compared with that
of the merchant vessels of great hulls and little machinery that were
going around soliciting cargo at any price, from all points.

A slave of the superiority of his vessel and in continual struggle with
it, Ferragut had to make great efforts in order to continue sailing
without actual heavy loss. All the waters of the planet now saw the
_Mare Nostrum_ specializing in the rarest kind of transportation.
Thanks to this expedient, the Spanish flag waved in ports that had
never seen it before.

Under this banner, he made trips through the solitary seas of Syria and
Asia Minor, skirting coasts where the novelty of a ship with a smoke
stack made the people of the Arabian villages run together in crowds.
He disembarked in Phoenician and Greek ports choked up with sand that
had left only a few huts at the foot of mountains of ruins, and where
columns of marble were still sticking up like trunks of lopped-off palm
trees. He anchored near to the terr