l!..."

He did not fancy living, like the mummies of the great Pharaohs, in a
luxurious tomb, anointed with perfume and surrounded with everything
necessary for nourishment and sleep. To be born, to grow up, to
reproduce oneself was not enough to form a history:--all the animals do
the same. Man ought to add something more which he alone
possesses,--the faculty of framing a future.... To dream! To the
heritage of idealism left by our forebears should be added a new ideal,
or the power of bringing it about.

Ferragut realized that in normal times, he would have gone to his death
just as he had lived, continuing a monotonous and uniform existence.
Now the violent changes around him were resuscitating the dormant
personalities which we all carry within us as souvenirs of our
ancestors, revolving around a central and keen personality the only one
that has existed until then.

The world was in a state of war. The men of Middle Europe were clashing
with the other half on the battlefields. Both sides had a mystic ideal,
affirming it with violence and slaughter just as the multitudes have
always done when moved by religious or revolutionary certainty accepted
as the only truth....

But the sailor recognized a profound difference in the two masses
struggling at the present day. One was placing its ideal in the past,
wishing to rejuvenate the sovereignty of Force, the divinity of war,
and adapt it to actual life. The other throng was preparing for the
future, dreaming of a world of free democracy, of nations at peace,
tolerant and without jealousy.

Upon adjusting himself to this new atmosphere, Ferragut began to feel
within him ideas and aspirations that were, perhaps, an ancestral
legacy. He fancied he could hear his uncle, the _Triton_, describing
the impact of the men of the North upon the men of the South when
trying to make themselves masters of the blue mantle of Amphitrite. He
was a Mediterranean, but just because the country in which he had been
born happened to be uninterested in the fate of the world, he was not
going to remain indifferent.

He ought to continue just where he was. Whatever Toni had told him of
Latinism and Mediterranean civilization, he now accepted as great
truths. Perhaps they might not be exact when examined in the light of
pure reason, but they were worth as much as the assurances of the
others.

He was going to continue his life of navigation with new enthusiasm. He
had faith, the ideals