ing or aggressiveness; their heroism was that of traders capable
of suffering all kinds of adventures provided their stock ran no risks,
but becoming wild beasts if any one attacked their riches.

The members of the Athenaeum were all old, the only masculine beings in
the village. Besides them there were only the carbineers installed in
the barracks and various calkers making their mallets resound on the
hull of a schooner ordered by the Blanes brothers.

All the active men were on the sea. Some were sailing to America as
crew of the brigs and barks of the Catalunian coast. The more timid and
unfortunate ones were always fishing. Others, more valiant and anxious
for ready money, had become smugglers on the French coast whose shores
began on the other side of the promontory.

In the village there were only women, women of all kinds:--women seated
before their doors, making lace on great cylindrical pillows on their
knees, along whose length their bobbins wove strips of beautiful
openwork, or grouped on the street corners in front of the lonely sea
where their men were, or speaking with an electric nervousness that
oftentimes would break out suddenly in noisy tempests.

Only the parish priest, whose fishing recreations and official
existence were embittered by their constant quarrels, understood the
feminine irritability which embroiled the village. Alone and having to
live incessantly in such close contact, the women had come to hate each
other as do passengers isolated on a boat for many months. Besides,
their husbands had accustomed them to the use of coffee, the seaman's
drink, and they tried to beguile their tedium with strong cups of the
thick liquid.

A common interest, nevertheless, united these women miraculously when
living alone. When the carbineers inspected the houses in search of
contraband goods smuggled in by the men, the Amazons worked off their
nervous energy in hiding the illegal merchandise, making it pass from
one place of concealment to another with the cunning of savages.

Whenever the government officers began to suspect that certain packages
had gone to hide themselves in the cemetery, they would find there only
some empty graves, and in the bottom of them a few cigars between
skulls that were mockingly stuck up in the ground. The chief of the
barracks did not dare to inspect the church, but he looked
contemptuously upon Mosen Jordi, the priest, as a simpleton quite
capable of permitting tob