But next day—his whole heart and soul bound up in the work of making everybody around him happy and hopeful—Antonio seemed to have never a care in the world. And high above the whirr or noise of his workshop, at all hours of the day his strangely musical voice might be heard raised in song.
Teenie would take a little mandoline he had purchased for her at the Cape, and on which she could already play, and go and sit beside him for hours, accompanying him as he sang.
Idyllic this, surely.
True, but the cheery voice and the pleasant smile may hide many a deep-seated grief, as the sunshine glimmer on the waves hides the dark rocks in the black depths of the unfathomable ocean.
CHAPTER V
A LONG LOST DERELICT
The great Greenland whale and her huge gambolling calf had gone—returned to the North, guided by instinct, let us call it, in making her way on and on day after day through the lonesome ocean. And instinct in this case is but a God-given gift.
“Reason raise o’er instinct as you can,
In this ’tis God directs, in that ’tis man.”
But many other whales were seen, and not only these, but awful sharks, even the hammer-headed Zygæna would at times raise their heads above the sea, and all draped in weeds, they looked triply terrible. So startling were these apparitions, that Teenie used to cry out with fear when she saw them.
The birds were a constant study. The puzzle was this: Why did these birds, and beasts, and strange creatures of various kinds, come to spend a portion of the year in so dreary an ocean?
“It seems to me,” said Antonio one evening when asked the question, “that the Sea of Sargasso is a kind of health-resort for delicate birds and beasts, such as whales and fur seals, of which we have seen so many.”