One reason for this predominating sense of happiness was the fact that all the passengers, after struggling with nausea and sleeplessness during those miserable, crawling, endless hours in the doleful grave of their cabins, had learned to appreciate the value of mere healthy existence. Merely to live, merely to live! That was the cry that rang in every step, every laugh, every word, drowning all care. None of those concerns which each of them had dragged on board, whether from Europe or America, now had the least might. Merely to live was to win in the great lottery. They knew sunshine follows rain, and they said to themselves, "If worse comes to worst, you will willingly put up with bread and salt and a hoe and a vegetable garden, and no one in the world will be a happier mortal than you." Those promenading men and women were each glad of the other's existence. They loved one another and were ready without hesitation to commit all sorts of follies, deeming them mere bagatelles, which on solid land they would never have condoned in themselves. Their rejoicing was a crucible melting together all the barriers by which convention divides man from man. They experienced a sense of relief and liberation, and drew in deep breaths of this atmosphere of freedom. At the captain's order, the band set up its music stands and instruments on deck amidships; and when the blithe strains resounded through the whole of the _Roland_, that was the climax of festivity. For half an hour it seemed as if the few clouds floating in the blue sky, the steamer, the people on the steamer, and the ocean had agreed to dance a quadrille. For moments at a time the waves would form the droll, chubby-cheeked face of a jolly old man. All at once the dreadful old man of the sea had turned good-humoured. He even seemed to be in a jocular mood and displayed a certain clumsy vanity in letting his puppets, swarms of flying fish, dance their dance, too, in a circle about the _Roland_. Perhaps, at his bidding, a whale would soon be spouting. Indeed, within a few minutes, the immigrants on the fore-deck were shouting, "Dolphins!" The gentlemen could not for any length of time avoid Ingigerd. "Theridium triste, the gallows spider, you know," said Wilhelm, as they approached her. "How so?" said Frederick, slightly startled. "You know what a gallows spider does near an ant nest. It sits on the top of its blade of grass, and when a myrmidon passes below, it throws a little skein of cobweb at its head. The ant does the rest. It gets tangled up until it is absolutely helpless, and then the tiny little spider comfortably eats it up." "If you had seen her dance," said Frederick, "you would be more inclined to assign her the role of the ant throttled by the spider." "I don't know who," said Wilhelm, "but some poet says, the sex is strongest when it is weak."