Some nights at the hour when the lighthouses were beginning to pierce the coming dusk with their fresh shafts of light, he would become melancholy and, forgetting the difference in their age, would talk with his nephew as though he were a sailor companion.

He regretted never having married....  He might have had a son by this time.  He had known many women of all colors—­white, red, yellow, and bronze—­but only once had he really been in love, very far away on the other side of the planet, in the port of Valparaiso.

He could still see in imagination a certain graceful Chilean maiden, wrapped in her great black veil like the ladies of the Calderonian theater, showing only one of her dark and liquid eyes, pale and slender, speaking in a plaintive voice.

She enjoyed love-songs, always provided that they were sung “with great sadness”; and Ferragut would devour her with his eyes while she plucked the guitar, chanting the song of Malek-Adhel and other romances about “Roses, sighs and Moors of Granada,” that from childhood the doctor had heard sung by the Berbers of his country.  The simple attempt at taking one of her hands always provoked her modest resistance....  “That, then....”  She was ready to marry him; she wished to see Spain....  And the doctor might have fulfilled her wishes had not a good soul informed him that in later hours of the night, others were accustomed to come in turns to hear her romantic solos....  Ah, these women! and then, on recalling the finale of his trans-oceanic idyl, Ferragut would become reconciled to his celibacy.

Late in the Fall the notary had to go in person to the Marina to make his brother give Ulysses up.  The boy held the same opinion as did his uncle.  The very idea of losing the winter fishing, the cold sunny morning, the spectacle of the great tempests, just for the silly reason that the Institute had commenced, and he must study for his bachelor’s degree!...

The following year Dona Cristina tried to prevent the Triton’s carrying off her son, since he could learn nothing but bad words and boastful bullying in the old home of the Ferraguts.  And trumping up the necessity of seeing her own family, she left the notary alone in Valencia, going with her boy to spend the summer on the coast of Catalunia near the French frontier.

This was Ulysses’ first important journey.  In Barcelona he became acquainted with his uncle, the rich and talented financier of the Blanes 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.