He was seeing the defenseless and peaceable throng crowding to the
boats that were capsizing; the women throwing themselves into the sea
with children in their arms; all the deadly confusion of a
catastrophe.... Then the submarine arising to contemplate its work; the
Germans grouped on the decks of dripping steel, laughing and joking,
satisfied with the rapid result of their labors; and for a distance of
many miles the sea was filled with black bulks dragged slowly along by
the waves--men floating on their backs, immovable, with their glassy
eyes fixed on the sky; children with their fair hair clinging like
masks to their livid face; corpses of mothers pressing to their bosom
with cold rigidity little corpses of babies, assassinated before they
could even know what life might mean.

When reading the account of these crimes, Toni had naturally thought of
his own wife and children, imagining what their condition might have
been on that steamer, experiencing the same fate as its innocent
passengers. This imagination had made him feel so intense a wrath that
he even mistrusted his own self-control on the day that he should again
encounter German sailors in any port.... And Ferragut, an honorable
man, a good captain whose praises every one was sounding, could he
possibly aid in transplanting such horrors as these to the
Mediterranean?...

Poor Toni!... He did not know how to express himself properly, but the
very possibility that his beloved sea might witness such crimes gave
new vehemence to his indignation. The soul of Doctor Ferragut appeared
to be reviving in this rude Mediterranean sailor. He had never seen the
white Amphitrite, but he trembled for her with a religious fervor,
without even knowing her. Was the luminous blue from which had arisen
the early gods to be dishonored by the oily spot that would disclose
assassination _en masse_!... Were the rosy strands from whose foam
Venus had sprung to receive clusters of corpses, impelled by the
waves!... Were the sea-gull wings of the fishing-boats to flee
panic-stricken before those gray sharks of steel!... Were his family
and neighbors to be terrified, on awakening, by this floating cemetery
washed to their doors during the night!...

He was thinking all this, he was seeing it; but not succeeding in
expressing it, so he limited himself to insisting upon his protest:

"No!... I won't tolerate it in our sea!"

Ferragut, in spite of his impetuous character, now ad