Ferragut laughed at his cousin’s simplicity.  He wanted to command a vessel again, but one of his own, without being obliged to consider the restrictions of the ship owners.  He could permit himself this luxury.  It would be like an enormous yacht, ready to set forth according to his tastes and convenience, yet at the same time bringing him in untold profits.  Perhaps his son might in time become director of a maritime company, this first ship laying the foundation of an enormous fleet in the years to come.

He knew every port in the world, every highway of traffic, and he would be able to find the places where, lacking transportation facilities, they paid the highest freight rates.  Until now he had been a salaried man, brave and care-free.  He was going to begin an absolutely independent life as a speculator of the sea.

Two months afterwards he wrote from England saying that he had bought the Fingal, a mail packet of three thousand tons that had made trips twice a week between London and a port of Scotland.

Ulysses appeared highly delighted with the cheapness of his acquisition.  The Fingal had been the property of a Scotch captain who, in spite of his long illness, had never wished to give up command, dying aboard his vessel.  His heirs, inland men tired by their long wait, were anxious to get rid of it at any price.

When the new proprietor entered the aft saloon surrounded with staterooms,—­the only habitable place in the ship,—­memories of the dead came forth to meet him.  On the wall-panels were painted the heroes of the Scotch Iliad,—­the bard Ossian with his harp, Malvina with the round arms and waving golden tresses, the undaunted warriors with their winged helmets and protruding biceps, exchanging gashes on their shields while awaking the echoes of the green lochs.

A deep and spongy arm chair opened its arms before a stove.  There the owner of the ship had passed his last years, sick at heart and with swollen legs, directing from his seat a course that was repeated every week across the foggy winter waves tossing bits of ice snatched from the icebergs.  Near the stove was a piano and upon its top an orderly collection of musical scores yellowed by time,—­La Sonnambula, Lucia, Romances of Tosti, Neapolitan songs, breezy and graceful melodies that the old chords of the instrument sent forth with the fragile and crystalline tinkling of an old music box.  The poor old captain with sick heart and legs of stone had always turned to the sea of light for distraction.  It was music that made appear in the foggy heavens the peaks of Sorrento covered with orange and lemon trees, and the coast of Sicily, perfumed by its flaming flora.

Ferragut manned his boat with friendly people.  His first mate was a pilot who had begun his career in a fishing smack.  He came from the same village as Ulysses’ ancestors, and he remembered the Dotor with respect and admiration.  He had known this new captain when he was a little fellow and used to go fishing with his uncle.  In those days Toni was already a sailor on a coast-trading vessel, and his superiority in years had then justified his using the familiar thee and thou when talking with the lad Ulysses.