Every summer Raymond had a two-weeks’ holiday, which he spent at Middleborough with some relatives of his father’s.  He had the pronounced love of the sea that is usual with those born and bred in seaport towns.  His earliest memories went back to great deep-water ships, their jib-booms poking into the second-story windows of the city front, their decks hoarsely melodious with the yo-heave-yo of straining seamen.  The smell of tar, the sight of enormous anchors impending above the narrow street, the lofty masts piercing the sky in a tangle of ropes and blocks, the exotic cargoes mountains high—­all moved him like a poem.  He knew no pleasure like that of sailing his cousin’s sloop; he loved every plank of her dainty hull; it was to him a privilege to lay his hand to any task appertaining to her, however humble or hard.  To calk, to paint, to polish brasswork; to pump out bilge; to set up the rigging; to sit cross-legged and patch sails; and, best of all, to put her lee rail under in a spanking breeze and race her seaward against the mimic fleet—­Ah, how swiftly those bright days passed, how bitter was the parting and the return, all too soon, to the dingy offices of the railroad.

It never occurred to him to think his own lot hard, or to contrast himself with other men of his age, who at forty-two were mostly substantial members of society, with interests, obligations, responsibilities, to which he himself was an utter stranger.  Under the iron bondage of his mother he had remained a child.  To displease her seemed the worst thing that could befall him; to win her commendation filled him with content.  But there were times, guiltily remembered and put by with shame, when he longed for something more from life; when the sight of a beautiful woman on the street reminded him of his own loneliness and isolation; when he was overcome with a sudden surging sense that he was an outsider in the midst of these teeming thousands, unloved and old, without friends or hope or future to look forward to.  He would reproach himself for such lawless repining, for such disloyalty to his mother.  Was not her case worse than his?  Did she not lecture him on the duty of cheerfulness, she the invalid, racked with pains, with nerves, who practised so pitifully what she preached?  The tears would come to his eyes.  No, he would not ask the impossible; he would go his way, brave and uncomplaining, and let the empty years roll over his head without a murmur against fate.

But the years, apparently so void, were screening a strange and undreamed-of part for him to play.  The Spaniards, a vague, almost legendary people, as remote from Raymond’s life as the Assamese or the cliff-dwellers of New Mexico, began to take on a concrete character, and were suddenly discovered to be the enemies of the human race.  Raymond grew accustomed to the sight of Cuban flags, at first so unfamiliar, and then, later, so touching in their significance.  Newspaper pictures of Gomez and