its meanings the
noise of conversation. There had just climbed aboard a poor Italian
woman carrying a baby in her arms.

"_Figlia mia_!... _Mia figlia_!..." she was wailing with disheveled
hair and eyes swollen by weeping.

In the moment of the shipwreck she had lost a little girl, eight years
old, and upon finding herself in the French steamer, she went
instinctively toward the prow in search of the same spot which she had
occupied on the other ship, as though expecting to find her daughter
there. Her agonized voice penetrated down the stairway: "_Figlia
mia_!... _Mia figlia!_"

Ulysses could not stand it. That voice hurt him, as though its piercing
cry were clawing at his brain.

He approached a group in the center of which was a young barefooted lad
in trousers and shirt open at the breast who was talking and talking,
wrapping himself from time to time in a shawl that some one had placed
upon his shoulders.

He was describing in a mixture of French and Italian the loss of the
_Californian_.

He had been awakened by hearing the first shot fired by the submersible
against his steamer. The chase had lasted half an hour.

The most audacious and curious were on the decks and believed their
salvation already sure as they saw their ship leaving its enemy behind.
Suddenly a black line had cut the sea, something like a long thorn with
splinters of foam which was advancing at a dizzying speed, in bold
relief against the water.... Then came a blow on the hull of the vessel
which had made it shudder from stem to stern, not a single plate nor
screw escaping tremendous dislocation.... Then a volcanic explosion, a
gigantic hatchet of smoke and flames, a yellowish cloud in which were
flying dark objects:--fragments of metal and of wood, human bodies
blown to bits.... The eyes of the narrator gleamed with an insane light
as he recalled the tragic sight.

"A friend of mine, a boy from my own country," he continued, sighing,
"had just left me in order to see the submersible better and he put
himself exactly in the path of the explosion.... He disappeared as
suddenly as if he had been blotted out. I saw him and I did not see
him.... He exploded in a thousand bits, as though he had had a bomb
within his body."

And the shipwrecked man, obsessed by this recollection, could hardly
attach any importance to the scenes following,--the struggle of the
crowds to gain the boats, the efforts of the officers to maintain
order, the dea