g only on one thing, that men were beneath
contempt. The old hulk, that served them as lair, was a sort of vantage
point from which they were able to follow the war between the two
families.

"Men! Men! What fleas!" _sina_ Tona would say, with a glance at the
picture of the patrolman, who seemed to be the presiding genius of the
place. "Men! Crooks every one of them, not worth the rope to hang them
with!" And Roseta, with her big bright sea-green eyes--the eyes of a
virgin who knows all about the world and is quite sure of herself--would
murmur for once approvingly: "And those who are not scamps like Tonet
are like the Rector--puddingheads!"

CHAPTER III

A FAMILY ENTERPRISE

Though spring had not yet come, the sun was so hot, that day, that the
Rector and Tonet, to talk things over down on the beach, had sought out
the shade of an old boat drawn up high and dry on the sand. There would
be plenty of time to get their tan on when they got out to sea. The two
men talked slowly and sleepily as if the glare and the heat along shore
had gone to their heads. A real day, come now! Who would have thought
Easter was still a week away, when, usually, there were squalls all the
time and sudden tempests.

The sky, overflowing with sunlight, had a whitish sheen. A few silver
clouds were lazily drifting along like handfulls of foam scattered
hap-hazard over the expanse of heaven; and from the heated sands a damp
radiation was shimmering, giving tremulous, hazy outlines to objects in
the distance. Nothing was going on along the beach itself. The _casa del
bous_, where the launching oxen were idly chewing their cud, rose with
its red roof and its blue trimmings, over long lines of boats drawn up
on shore to make a sort of nomad city with streets and cross roads, much
like a Greek encampment of the Heroic Age, when the triremes were used
for entrenchments. The lateen masts, gracefully tilted forward, with
their points blunt and fat, looked like a forest of headless lances. The
tarred ropes twined and intertwined like lichens and vines. Under the
big sails, which had been lowered to the decks, a whole people of
amphibians was swarming,--red legs bare and caps pulled down over
ears--repairing nets or tending galley fires where fish were frying with
appetizing fragrance. The hulls, of wide bilge, painted white or blue,
stretched away along the glaring shore, like big-bellied sailors lying
on their backs and taking the sun.