His love for it was somewhat like that which the friar has for his cell; but this cell was a secular one, and entering it after a tempestuous night on the bridge, or a trip ashore in most curious and foreign ports, he found it always the same, with his papers and books untouched on the table, his clothes hanging from their hooks, his photographs fixed on the walls.  The daily spectacle of seas and lands was always changing—­the temperature, the course of the stars, and the people that one week were bundled up in winter greatcoats, and were clad in white the week after, hunting the heavens for the new stars of another hemisphere....  Yet his cozy little stateroom was always the same, as though it were the corner of a planet apart, unaffected by the variations of this world.

Upon awaking in it, he found himself every morning enwrapped in a greenish and bland atmosphere as though he might have been sleeping in the bottom of an enchanted lake.  The sun traced over the whiteness of his ceiling and sheets a restless network of gold whose meshes constantly succeeded each other.  This was the reflection of the invisible water.  When his ship was immovable in the ports, there always came in through his window the whirling noise of the cranes, the cries of the stevedores and the voices of those who were in the neighboring vessels.  On the high sea the cool and murmuring silence of immensity used to fill his sleeping room.  A wind of infinite purity that came perhaps from the other side of the planet—­slipping past thousands of leagues, over the salty deserts without touching a single bit of corruption—­would come stealing into Ferragut’s throat like an effervescent wine.  His chest always expanded to the impulses of this life-giving draught as his eyes roved over the sparkling, luminous blue of the horizon.

Here in his home, the first thing that he saw through the window upon awaking was a Catalunian edifice, rich and monstrous, like the palaces that the hypnotist evolves in his dreams,—­an amalgamation of Persian flowers, Gothic columns, trunks of trees, with quadrupeds, reptiles and snails among the cement foliage.  The paving wafted up to him through its drains the fetidity of sewers dry for lack of water; the balconies shed the dust of shaken rugs; the absurd palace appropriated, with the insolence of the new-rich, all the heaven and sun that used to belong to Ferragut.

One night he surprised his relatives by informing them that he was about to return to the sea.  Cinta assented to this resolution in painful silence, as though she had foreseen it long before.  It was something inevitable and fatal that she must accept.  The manufacturer, Blanes, stammered with astonishment.  Return to his life of adventures, when the great gentlemen of the district were becoming interested in his personality!...  Perhaps in the next elections they might have made him a member of the municipal council!