whose shade he could smoke his pipe while
all his family, children and grandchildren, were spreading out the
harvest of raisins on the frame-hurdles.

A familiar admiration like that of an ancient squire for his paladin,
or of an old subaltern for a superior officer, bound him to Ferragut.
The books that filled the captain's stateroom recalled his agonies upon
being examined in Cartagena for his license as a pilot. The grave
gentlemen of the tribunal had made him turn pale and stutter like a
child before the logarithms and formulas of trigonometry. But just let
them consult _him_ on practical matters and his skill as master of a
bark habituated to all the dangers of the sea, and he would reply with
the self-possession of a sage!

In the most difficult perils,--days of storm and sinister shoals in the
neighborhood of the treacherous coasts, Ferragut could decide to rest
only when Toni replaced him on the bridge. With him, he had no fear
that, through carelessness, a wave would sweep across the deck and stop
the machinery, or that an invisible ledge would drive its stony point
into the vitals of the vessel. He held the helm to the course
indicated. Silent and immovable he stood, as though sleeping on his
feet; but at the right moment he always uttered the brief word of
command.

He was very skinny, with the dried up leanness of the bronzed
Mediterranean. The salt wind more than his years had tanned his face,
wrinkling it with deep crevices. A capricious coloring had darkened the
depths of these cracks while the part exposed to the sun appeared
washed several shades lighter. His short stiff beard extended over all
the furrows and crests of his skin. Furthermore, he had hair in his
ears, hair in the nasal passages, coarse and vibrating growths, ready
to tremble in moments of wrath or admiration.... But this ugliness
disappeared under the light of his little eyes with pupils between
green and olive color,--mild eyes with a canine expression of
resignation, when the captain made fun of his beliefs.

Toni was a "man of ideas." Ferragut only knew of his having four or
five, but they were hard, crystallized, tenacious, like the mollusks
that stick to the rocks and eventually become a part of the stony
excrescence. He had acquired them in twenty-five years of Mediterranean
coast service by reading all the periodicals of lyric radicalism that
were thrust upon him on entering the harbors. Furthermore, at the end
of every journ