es family,--one of his mother's brothers, proprietor of a great
hardware shop situated in one of the damp, narrow and crowded streets
that ran into the Rambla. He soon came to know other maternal uncles in
a village near the Cape of Creus. This promontory with its wild coasts
reminded him of that other one where the _Triton_ lived. The first
Hellenic sailors had also founded a city here, and the sea had also
cast up amphoras, little statues and petrified bits of iron.

The Blanes family had gone much to sea. They loved it as intensely as
did the doctor, but with a cold and silent love, appreciating it less
for its beauty than for the profits which it offered to the fortunate.
Their trips had been to America, in their own sailing vessels,
importing sugar from Havana and corn from Buenos Ayres. The
Mediterranean was for them only a port that they crossed carelessly on
departure and arrival. None of them knew the white Amphitrite even by
name.

Moreover, they did not have the devil-may-care and romantic appearance
of the bachelor of the _Marina_, ready to live in the water like an
amphibian. They were gentlemen of the coast who, having retired from
the sea, were entrusting their barks to captains who had been their
pilots,--middle class citizens who never laid aside the cravat and silk
cap that were the symbols of their high position in their natal town.

The gathering-place of the rich was the Athenaeum,--a society that in
spite of its title offered no other reading matter than two Catalunian
periodicals. A large telescope mounted on a tripod before the door used
to fill the club members with pride. For the uncles of Ulysses, it was
enough merely to put one eyebrow to the glass to be able to state
immediately the class and nationality of the ship that was slipping
along over the distant horizon line. These veterans of the sea were
accustomed to speak only of the freight cargoes, of the thousands and
thousands of dollars gained in other times with only one round trip,
and of the terrible rivalry of the steamship.

Ulysses kept hoping in vain that sometimes they would allude to the
Nereids and other poetic beings that the _Triton_ had conjured around
his promontory. The Blanes had never seen these extraordinary
creatures. Their seas contained fish only. They were cold, economical
men of few words, friends of order and social preferment. Their nephew
suspected that they had the courage of men of the sea but without
boast