sixty tons. In reality, she was a true balancelle, with two short
masts raking forward and two curved yards, each as long as her
hull; a true child of the Latin lake, with a spread of two enormous
sails resembling the pointed wings on a sea-bird's slender body,
and herself, like a bird indeed, skimming rather than sailing the
seas.

Her name was the Tremolino. How is this to be translated? The
Quiverer? What a name to give the pluckiest little craft that ever
dipped her sides in angry foam! I had felt her, it is true,
trembling for nights and days together under my feet, but it was
with the high-strung tenseness of her faithful courage. In her
short, but brilliant, career she has taught me nothing, but she has
given me everything. I owe to her the awakened love for the sea
that, with the quivering of her swift little body and the humming
of the wind under the foot of her lateen sails, stole into my heart
with a sort of gentle violence, and brought my imagination under
its despotic sway. The Tremolino! To this day I cannot utter or
even write that name without a strange tightening of the breast and
the gasp of mingled delight and dread of one's first passionate
experience.



XLI.



We four formed (to use a term well understood nowadays in every
social sphere) a "syndicate" owning the Tremolino: an