, _Che_!"

Ulysses, who was pacing the bridge, received the news with
indifference. "War?... What war is that?..." But upon learning that
Germany and Austria had begun hostilities with France and Russia, and
that England was just intervening in behalf of Belgium, the captain
began quickly to calculate the political consequences of this
conflagration. He could see nothing else.

Toni, less disinterested, spoke of the future of the vessel.... Their
misery was at last at an end! Freightage at thirteen shillings a ton
was going to be henceforth but a disgraceful memory. They would no
longer have to plead for freight from port to port as though begging
alms. Now they were on the point of achieving importance, and were
going to find themselves solicited by consignors and disdainful
merchants. The _Mare Nostrum_ was going to be worth its weight in gold.

Such predictions, though Ferragut refused to accept them, began to be
fulfilled in a very short time. Ships on the ocean routes suddenly
became very scarce. Some of them were taking refuge in the nearest
neutral ports, fearing the enemy's cruisers. The greater part were
mobilized by their governments for the enormous transportation of
material that modern war exacts. The German corsairs, craftily taking
advantage of the situation, were increasing with their captures the
panic of the merchant marine.

The price of freight leaped from thirteen shillings a ton to fifty,
then to seventy, and a few days later to a hundred. It couldn't climb
any further, according to Captain Ferragut.

"It will climb higher yet," affirmed the first officer with cruel joy.
"We shall see tonnage at a hundred and fifty, at two hundred.... We are
going to become rich!..."

And Toni always used the plural in speaking of the future riches
without its ever occurring to him to ask his captain a penny more than
the forty-five dollars that he was receiving each month. Ferragut's
fortune and that of the ship, he invariably looked upon as his own,
considering himself lucky if he was not out of tobacco, and could send
his entire wages home to his wife and children living down there in the
_Marina_.

His ambition was that of all modest sailors--to buy a plot of land and
become an agriculturist in his old age. The Basque pilots used to dream
of prairies and apple orchards, a little cottage on a peak and many
cows. He pictured to himself a vineyard on the coast, a little white
dwelling with an arbor under