"Ah, you thief!"...

And down would fall his enormous hand, soft and heavy as a fencing gauntlet.
Ulysses believed him quite capable of climbing the bridge, and declaring that navigation could not go on because of his having exhausted the leathern bottles of amethyst-colored liquid proceeding from the Sierra de Espadan.
In the ports, his short-sighted eyes recognized immediately the nationality of the boats anchored on both sides of the _Mare Nostrum_.
His nose would sniff the air sadly.

"Nothing!..." They were unsavory barks, barks from the North that prepared their dinner with lard or butter,--Protestant barks, perhaps.
Sometimes he would sneak along the gunwale, following an intoxicating trail until he planted himself in front of the galley of the neighboring boat, breathing in its rich perfume.

"Hello, brothers!" Impossible to fool him, they were probably Spaniards and, if not, they were from Genoa or Naples,--in short, were compatriots accustomed to live and eat in all latitudes just as though they were in their own little inland sea.

Soon they would begin a speech in the Mediterranean idiom, a mixture of Spanish, Provencal and Italian, invented by the hybrid peoples of the African coast from Egypt to Morocco.