of menace in their utterance--the idea of one monstrous and complex
life! The sea lived: it could crawl backward and forward; it could
speak!--it only feigned deafness and sightlessness for some malevolent
end. Thenceforward she feared to find herself alone with it. Was it
not at her that it strove to rush, muttering, and showing its white
teeth, ... just because it knew that she was all by herself? ... Si
quieres aprender a orar, entra en el mar! And Concha had well learned
to pray. But the sea seemed to her the one Power which God could not
make to obey Him as He pleased. Saying the creed one day, she repeated
very slowly the opening words,--"Creo en un Dios, padre todopoderoso,
Criador de cielo y de la tierra,"--and paused and thought. Creator of
Heaven and Earth? "Madrecita Carmen," she asked,--"quien entonces hizo
el mar?" (who then made the sea?).

--"Dios, mi querida," answered Carmen.--"God, my darling.... All things
were made by Him" (todas las cosas fueron hechas por El).

Even the wicked Sea! And He had said unto it: "Thus far, and no
farther." ... Was that why it had not overtaken and devoured her when
she ran back in fear from the sudden reaching out of its waves? Thus
far....? But there were times when it disobeyed--when it rushed
further, shaking the world! Was it because God was then asleep--could
not hear, did not see, until too late?

And the tumultuous ocean terrified her more and more: it filled her
sleep with enormous nightmare;--it came upon her in dreams,
mountain-shadowing,--holding her with its spell, smothering her power
of outcry, heaping itself to the stars.

Carmen became alarmed;--she feared that the nervous and delicate child
might die in one of those moaning dreams out of which she had to arouse
her, night after night. But Feliu, answering her anxiety with one of
his favorite proverbs, suggested a heroic remedy:--

--"The world is like the sea: those who do not know how to swim in it
are drowned;--and the sea is like the world," he added.... "Chita must
learn to swim!"

And he found the time to teach her. Each morning, at sunrise, he took
her into the water. She was less terrified the first time than Carmen
thought she would be;--she seemed to feel confidence in Feliu; although
she screamed piteously before her first ducking at his hands. His
teaching was not gentle. He would carry her out, perched upon his
shoulder, until the water rose to his own neck; and ther