[
    {
        "text": "The Project Gutenberg eBook of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, By Mark Twain",
        "text2": "The Project Gutenberg eBook of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn\r\nThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.\r\n\r\nTitle: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn\r\n\r\nAuthor: Mark Twain\r\n\r\nIllustrator: E. W. Kemble\r\n\r\nRelease date: June 29, 2004 [eBook #76]\r\nMost recently updated: November 16, 2023\r\n\r\nLanguage: English\r\n\r\nCredits: David Widger\r\n*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN ***\r\nADVENTURES\r\nOF\r\nHUCKLEBERRY FINN\r\n(Tom Sawyer\u2019s Comrade)\r\nBy Mark Twain\r\nCONTENTS.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER I.\r\nCivilizing Huck.\u2014Miss Watson.\u2014Tom Sawyer Waits.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER II.\r\nThe Boys Escape Jim.\u2014Torn Sawyer\u2019s Gang.\u2014Deep-laid Plans.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER III.\r\nA Good Going-over.\u2014Grace Triumphant.\u2014\u201cOne of Tom Sawyers\u2019s Lies\u201d.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER IV.\r\nHuck and the Judge.\u2014Superstition.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER V.\r\nHuck\u2019s Father.\u2014The Fond Parent.\u2014Reform.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER VI.\r\nHe Went for Judge Thatcher.\u2014Huck Decided to Leave.\u2014Political\r\nEconomy.\u2014Thrashing Around.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER VII.\r\nLaying for Him.\u2014Locked in the Cabin.\u2014Sinking the Body.\u2014Resting.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER VIII.\r\nSleeping in the Woods.\u2014Raising the Dead.\u2014Exploring the Island.\u2014Finding Jim.\u2014Jim\u2019s Escape.\u2014Signs.\u2014Balum.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER IX.\r\nThe Cave.\u2014The Floating House.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER X.\r\nThe Find.\u2014Old Hank Bunker.\u2014In Disguise.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XI.\r\nHuck and the Woman.\u2014The Search.\u2014Prevarication.\u2014Going to Goshen.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XII.\r\nSlow Navigation.\u2014Borrowing Things.\u2014Boarding the Wreck.\u2014The Plotters.\u2014Hunting for the Boat.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XIII.\r\nEscaping from the Wreck.\u2014The Watchman.\u2014Sinking.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XIV.\r\nA General Good Time.\u2014The Harem.\u2014French.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XV.\r\nHuck Loses the Raft.\u2014In the Fog.\u2014Huck Finds the Raft.\u2014Trash.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XVI.\r\nExpectation.\u2014A White Lie.\u2014Floating Currency.\u2014Running by Cairo.\u2014Swimming Ashore.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XVII.\r\nAn Evening Call.\u2014The Farm in Arkansaw.\u2014Interior Decorations.\u2014Stephen Dowling Bots.\u2014Poetical Effusions.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XVIII.\r\nCol. Grangerford.\u2014Aristocracy.\u2014Feuds.\u2014The Testament.\u2014Recovering the Raft.\u2014The Wood\u2014pile.\u2014Pork and Cabbage.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XIX.\r\nTying Up Day\u2014times.\u2014An Astronomical Theory.\u2014Running a Temperance Revival.\u2014The Duke of Bridgewater.\u2014The Troubles of Royalty.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XX.\r\nHuck Explains.\u2014Laying Out a Campaign.\u2014Working the Camp\u2014meeting.\u2014A Pirate at the Camp\u2014meeting.\u2014The Duke as a Printer.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXI.\r\nSword Exercise.\u2014Hamlet\u2019s Soliloquy.\u2014They Loafed Around Town.\u2014A Lazy Town.\u2014Old Boggs.\u2014Dead.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXII.\r\nSherburn.\u2014Attending the Circus.\u2014Intoxication in the Ring.\u2014The Thrilling Tragedy.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXIII.\r\nSold.\u2014Royal Comparisons.\u2014Jim Gets Home-sick.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXIV.\r\nJim in Royal Robes.\u2014They Take a Passenger.\u2014Getting Information.\u2014Family Grief.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXV.\r\nIs It Them?\u2014Singing the \u201cDoxologer.\u201d\u2014Awful Square\u2014Funeral Orgies.\u2014A Bad Investment .\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXVI.\r\nA Pious King.\u2014The King\u2019s Clergy.\u2014She Asked His Pardon.\u2014Hiding in the Room.\u2014Huck Takes the Money.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXVII.\r\nThe Funeral.\u2014Satisfying Curiosity.\u2014Suspicious of Huck,\u2014Quick Sales and Small.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXVIII.\r\nThe Trip to England.\u2014\u201cThe Brute!\u201d\u2014Mary Jane Decides to Leave.\u2014Huck Parting with Mary Jane.\u2014Mumps.\u2014The Opposition Line.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXIX.\r\nContested Relationship.\u2014The King Explains the Loss.\u2014A Question of Handwriting.\u2014Digging up the Corpse.\u2014Huck Escapes.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXX.\r\nThe King Went for Him.\u2014A Royal Row.\u2014Powerful Mellow.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXXI.\r\nOminous Plans.\u2014News from Jim.\u2014Old Recollections.\u2014A Sheep Story.\u2014Valuable Information.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXXII.\r\nStill and Sunday\u2014like.\u2014Mistaken Identity.\u2014Up a Stump.\u2014In a Dilemma.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXXIII.\r\nA Nigger Stealer.\u2014Southern Hospitality.\u2014A Pretty Long Blessing.\u2014Tar and Feathers.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXXIV.\r\nThe Hut by the Ash Hopper.\u2014Outrageous.\u2014Climbing the Lightning Rod.\u2014Troubled with Witches.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXXV.\r\nEscaping Properly.\u2014Dark Schemes.\u2014Discrimination in Stealing.\u2014A Deep Hole.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXXVI.\r\nThe Lightning Rod.\u2014His Level Best.\u2014A Bequest to Posterity.\u2014A High Figure.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXXVII.\r\nThe Last Shirt.\u2014Mooning Around.\u2014Sailing Orders.\u2014The Witch Pie.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXXVIII.\r\nThe Coat of Arms.\u2014A Skilled Superintendent.\u2014Unpleasant Glory.\u2014A Tearful Subject.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XXXIX.\r\nRats.\u2014Lively Bed\u2014fellows.\u2014The Straw Dummy.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XL.\r\nFishing.\u2014The Vigilance Committee.\u2014A Lively Run.\u2014Jim Advises a Doctor.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XLI.\r\nThe Doctor.\u2014Uncle Silas.\u2014Sister Hotchkiss.\u2014Aunt Sally in Trouble.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER XLII.\r\nTom Sawyer Wounded.\u2014The Doctor\u2019s Story.\u2014Tom Confesses.\u2014Aunt Polly Arrives.\u2014Hand Out Them Letters.\r\n\r\nCHAPTER THE LAST.\r\nOut of Bondage.\u2014Paying the Captive.\u2014Yours Truly, Huck Finn.\r\n\r\nILLUSTRATIONS.\r\nThe Widows\r\nMoses and the \u201cBulrushers\u201d\r\nMiss Watson\r\nHuck Stealing Away\r\nThey Tip-toed Along\r\nJim\r\nTom Sawyer\u2019s Band of Robbers\r\nHuck Creeps into his Window\r\nMiss Watson\u2019s Lecture\r\nThe Robbers Dispersed\r\nRubbing the Lamp\r\n! ! ! !\r\nJudge Thatcher surprised\r\nJim Listening\r\n\u201cPap\u201d\r\nHuck and his Father\r\nReforming the Drunkard\r\nFalling from Grace\r\nGetting out of the Way\r\nSolid Comfort\r\nThinking it Over\r\nRaising a Howl\r\n\u201cGit Up\u201d\r\nThe Shanty\r\nShooting the Pig\r\nTaking a Rest\r\nIn the Woods\r\nWatching the Boat\r\nDiscovering the Camp Fire\r\nJim and the Ghost\r\nMisto Bradish\u2019s Nigger\r\nExploring the Cave\r\nIn the Cave\r\nJim sees a Dead Man\r\nThey Found Eight Dollars\r\nJim and the Snake\r\nOld Hank Bunker\r\n\u201cA Fair Fit\u201d\r\n\u201cCome In\u201d\r\n\u201cHim and another Man\u201d\r\nShe puts up a Snack\r\n\u201cHump Yourself\u201d\r\nOn the Raft\r\nHe sometimes Lifted a Chicken\r\n\u201cPlease don\u2019t, Bill\u201d\r\n\u201cIt ain\u2019t Good Morals\u201d\r\n\u201cOh! Lordy, Lordy!\u201d\r\nIn a Fix\r\n\u201cHello, What\u2019s Up?\u201d\r\nThe Wreck\r\nWe turned in and Slept\r\nTurning over the Truck\r\nSolomon and his Million Wives\r\nThe story of \u201cSollermun\u201d\r\n\u201cWe Would Sell the Raft\u201d\r\nAmong the Snags\r\nAsleep on the Raft\r\n\u201cSomething being Raftsman\u201d\r\n\u201cBoy, that\u2019s a Lie\u201d\r\n\u201cHere I is, Huck\u201d\r\nClimbing up the Bank\r\n\u201cWho\u2019s There?\u201d\r\n\u201cBuck\u201d\r\n\u201cIt made Her look Spidery\u201d\r\n\u201cThey got him out and emptied Him\u201d\r\nThe House\r\nCol. Grangerford\r\nYoung Harney Shepherdson\r\nMiss Charlotte\r\n\u201cAnd asked me if I Liked Her\u201d\r\n\u201cBehind the Wood-pile\u201d\r\nHiding Day-times\r\n\u201cAnd Dogs a-Coming\u201d\r\n\u201cBy rights I am a Duke!\u201d\r\n\u201cI am the Late Dauphin\u201d\r\nTail Piece\r\nOn the Raft\r\nThe King as Juliet\r\n\u201cCourting on the Sly\u201d\r\n\u201cA Pirate for Thirty Years\u201d\r\nAnother little Job\r\nPractizing\r\nHamlet\u2019s Soliloquy\r\n\u201cGimme a Chaw\u201d\r\nA Little Monthly Drunk\r\nThe Death of Boggs\r\nSherburn steps out\r\nA Dead Head\r\nHe shed Seventeen Suits\r\nTragedy\r\nTheir Pockets Bulged\r\nHenry the Eighth in Boston Harbor\r\nHarmless\r\nAdolphus\r\nHe fairly emptied that Young Fellow\r\n\u201cAlas, our Poor Brother\u201d\r\n\u201cYou Bet it is\u201d\r\nLeaking\r\nMaking up the \u201cDeffisit\u201d\r\nGoing for him\r\nThe Doctor\r\nThe Bag of Money\r\nThe Cubby\r\nSupper with the Hare-Lip\r\nHonest Injun\r\nThe Duke looks under the Bed\r\nHuck takes the Money\r\nA Crack in the Dining-room Door\r\nThe Undertaker\r\n\u201cHe had a Rat!\u201d\r\n\u201cWas you in my Room?\u201d\r\nJawing\r\nIn Trouble\r\nIndignation\r\nHow to Find Them\r\nHe Wrote\r\nHannah with the Mumps\r\nThe Auction\r\nThe True Brothers\r\nThe Doctor leads Huck\r\nThe Duke Wrote\r\n\u201cGentlemen, Gentlemen!\u201d\r\n\u201cJim Lit Out\u201d\r\nThe King shakes Huck\r\nThe Duke went for Him\r\nSpanish Moss\r\n\u201cWho Nailed Him?\u201d\r\nThinking\r\nHe gave him Ten Cents\r\nStriking for the Back Country\r\nStill and Sunday-like\r\nShe hugged him tight\r\n\u201cWho do you reckon it is?\u201d\r\n\u201cIt was Tom Sawyer\u201d\r\n\u201cMr. Archibald Nichols, I presume?\u201d\r\nA pretty long Blessing\r\nTraveling By Rail\r\nVittles\r\nA Simple Job\r\nWitches\r\nGetting Wood\r\nOne of the Best Authorities\r\nThe Breakfast-Horn\r\nSmouching the Knives\r\nGoing down the Lightning-Rod\r\nStealing spoons\r\nTom advises a Witch Pie\r\nThe Rubbage-Pile\r\n\u201cMissus, dey\u2019s a Sheet Gone\u201d\r\nIn a Tearing Way\r\nOne of his Ancestors\r\nJim\u2019s Coat of Arms\r\nA Tough Job\r\nButtons on their Tails\r\nIrrigation\r\nKeeping off Dull Times\r\nSawdust Diet\r\nTrouble is Brewing\r\nFishing\r\nEvery one had a Gun\r\nTom caught on a Splinter\r\nJim advises a Doctor\r\nThe Doctor\r\nUncle Silas in Danger\r\nOld Mrs. Hotchkiss\r\nAunt Sally talks to Huck\r\nTom Sawyer wounded\r\nThe Doctor speaks for Jim\r\nTom rose square up in Bed\r\n\u201cHand out them Letters\u201d\r\nOut of Bondage\r\nTom\u2019s Liberality\r\nYours Truly\r\n\r\nNOTICE.\r\n\r\nPersons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.\r\n\r\nBY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR                \r\nPER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.\r\n\r\nEXPLANATORY\r\n\r\nIn this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary \u201cPike County\u201d dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.\r\n\r\nI make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.\r\n\r\nTHE AUTHOR.\r\nHUCKLEBERRY FINN\r\n\r\nScene: The Mississippi Valley Time: Forty to fifty years ago\r\nCHAPTER I.\r\n\r\nYou don\u2019t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain\u2019t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly\u2014Tom\u2019s Aunt Polly, she is\u2014and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.\r\n\r\nNow the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece\u2014all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round\u2014more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn\u2019t stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.\r\n\r\nThe widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it. She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn\u2019t do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up. Well, then, the old thing commenced again. The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time. When you got to the table you couldn\u2019t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn\u2019t really anything the matter with them,\u2014that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.\r\n\r\nAfter supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by-and-by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn\u2019t care no more about him, because I don\u2019t take no stock in dead people.\r\n\r\nPretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn\u2019t. She said it was a mean practice and wasn\u2019t clean, and I must try to not do it any more. That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don\u2019t know nothing about it. Here she was a-bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it. And she took snuff, too; of course that was all right, because she done it herself.\r\n\r\nHer sister, Miss Watson, a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on, had just come to live with her, and took a set at me now with a spelling-book. She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow made her ease up. I couldn\u2019t stood it much longer. Then for an hour it was deadly dull, and I was fidgety. Miss Watson would say, \u201cDon\u2019t put your feet up there, Huckleberry;\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t scrunch up like that, Huckleberry\u2014set up straight;\u201d and pretty soon she would say, \u201cDon\u2019t gap and stretch like that, Huckleberry\u2014why don\u2019t you try to behave?\u201d Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there. She got mad then, but I didn\u2019t mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warn\u2019t particular. She said it was wicked to say what I said; said she wouldn\u2019t say it for the whole world; she was going to live so as to go to the good place. Well, I couldn\u2019t see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn\u2019t try for it. But I never said so, because it would only make trouble, and wouldn\u2019t do no good.\r\n\r\nNow she had got a start, and she went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn\u2019t think much of it. But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she said not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.\r\n\r\nMiss Watson she kept pecking at me, and it got tiresome and lonesome. By-and-by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed. I went up to my room with a piece of candle, and put it on the table. Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn\u2019t no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn\u2019t make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that\u2019s on its mind and can\u2019t make itself understood, and so can\u2019t rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving. I got so down-hearted and scared I did wish I had some company. Pretty soon a spider went crawling up my shoulder, and I flipped it off and it lit in the candle; and before I could budge it was all shriveled up. I didn\u2019t need anybody to tell me that that was an awful bad sign and would fetch me some bad luck, so I was scared and most shook the clothes off of me. I got up and turned around in my tracks three times and crossed my breast every time; and then I tied up a little lock of my hair with a thread to keep witches away. But I hadn\u2019t no confidence. You do that when you\u2019ve lost a horseshoe that you\u2019ve found, instead of nailing it up over the door, but I hadn\u2019t ever heard anybody say it was any way to keep off bad luck when you\u2019d killed a spider.\r\n\r\nI set down again, a-shaking all over, and got out my pipe for a smoke; for the house was all as still as death now, and so the widow wouldn\u2019t know. Well, after a long time I heard the clock away off in the town go boom\u2014boom\u2014boom\u2014twelve licks; and all still again\u2014stiller than ever. Pretty soon I heard a twig snap down in the dark amongst the trees\u2014something was a stirring. I set still and listened. Directly I could just barely hear a \u201cme-yow! me-yow!\u201d down there. That was good! Says I, \u201cme-yow! me-yow!\u201d as soft as I could, and then I put out the light and scrambled out of the window on to the shed. Then I slipped down to the ground and crawled in among the trees, and, sure enough, there was Tom Sawyer waiting for me.\r\nCHAPTER II.\r\n\r\nWe went tiptoeing along a path amongst the trees back towards the end of the widow\u2019s garden, stooping down so as the branches wouldn\u2019t scrape our heads. When we was passing by the kitchen I fell over a root and made a noise. We scrouched down and laid still. Miss Watson\u2019s big nigger, named Jim, was setting in the kitchen door; we could see him pretty clear, because there was a light behind him. He got up and stretched his neck out about a minute, listening. Then he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWho dah?\u201d\r\n\r\nHe listened some more; then he come tiptoeing down and stood right between us; we could a touched him, nearly. Well, likely it was minutes and minutes that there warn\u2019t a sound, and we all there so close together. There was a place on my ankle that got to itching, but I dasn\u2019t scratch it; and then my ear begun to itch; and next my back, right between my shoulders. Seemed like I\u2019d die if I couldn\u2019t scratch. Well, I\u2019ve noticed that thing plenty times since. If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain\u2019t sleepy\u2014if you are anywheres where it won\u2019t do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places. Pretty soon Jim says:\r\n\r\n\u201cSay, who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn\u2019 hear sumf\u2019n. Well, I know what I\u2019s gwyne to do: I\u2019s gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo he set down on the ground betwixt me and Tom. He leaned his back up against a tree, and stretched his legs out till one of them most touched one of mine. My nose begun to itch. It itched till the tears come into my eyes. But I dasn\u2019t scratch. Then it begun to itch on the inside. Next I got to itching underneath. I didn\u2019t know how I was going to set still. This miserableness went on as much as six or seven minutes; but it seemed a sight longer than that. I was itching in eleven different places now. I reckoned I couldn\u2019t stand it more\u2019n a minute longer, but I set my teeth hard and got ready to try. Just then Jim begun to breathe heavy; next he begun to snore\u2014and then I was pretty soon comfortable again.\r\n\r\nTom he made a sign to me\u2014kind of a little noise with his mouth\u2014and we went creeping away on our hands and knees. When we was ten foot off Tom whispered to me, and wanted to tie Jim to the tree for fun. But I said no; he might wake and make a disturbance, and then they\u2019d find out I warn\u2019t in. Then Tom said he hadn\u2019t got candles enough, and he would slip in the kitchen and get some more. I didn\u2019t want him to try. I said Jim might wake up and come. But Tom wanted to resk it; so we slid in there and got three candles, and Tom laid five cents on the table for pay. Then we got out, and I was in a sweat to get away; but nothing would do Tom but he must crawl to where Jim was, on his hands and knees, and play something on him. I waited, and it seemed a good while, everything was so still and lonesome.\r\n\r\nAs soon as Tom was back we cut along the path, around the garden fence, and by-and-by fetched up on the steep top of the hill the other side of the house. Tom said he slipped Jim\u2019s hat off of his head and hung it on a limb right over him, and Jim stirred a little, but he didn\u2019t wake. Afterwards Jim said the witches bewitched him and put him in a trance, and rode him all over the State, and then set him under the trees again, and hung his hat on a limb to show who done it. And next time Jim told it he said they rode him down to New Orleans; and, after that, every time he told it he spread it more and more, till by-and-by he said they rode him all over the world, and tired him most to death, and his back was all over saddle-boils. Jim was monstrous proud about it, and he got so he wouldn\u2019t hardly notice the other niggers. Niggers would come miles to hear Jim tell about it, and he was more looked up to than any nigger in that country. Strange niggers would stand with their mouths open and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder. Niggers is always talking about witches in the dark by the kitchen fire; but whenever one was talking and letting on to know all about such things, Jim would happen in and say, \u201cHm! What you know \u2019bout witches?\u201d and that nigger was corked up and had to take a back seat. Jim always kept that five-center piece round his neck with a string, and said it was a charm the devil give to him with his own hands, and told him he could cure anybody with it and fetch witches whenever he wanted to just by saying something to it; but he never told what it was he said to it. Niggers would come from all around there and give Jim anything they had, just for a sight of that five-center piece; but they wouldn\u2019t touch it, because the devil had had his hands on it. Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.\r\n\r\nWell, when Tom and me got to the edge of the hilltop we looked away down into the village and could see three or four lights twinkling, where there was sick folks, maybe; and the stars over us was sparkling ever so fine; and down by the village was the river, a whole mile broad, and awful still and grand. We went down the hill and found Jo Harper and Ben Rogers, and two or three more of the boys, hid in the old tanyard. So we unhitched a skiff and pulled down the river two mile and a half, to the big scar on the hillside, and went ashore.\r\n\r\nWe went to a clump of bushes, and Tom made everybody swear to keep the secret, and then showed them a hole in the hill, right in the thickest part of the bushes. Then we lit the candles, and crawled in on our hands and knees. We went about two hundred yards, and then the cave opened up. Tom poked about amongst the passages, and pretty soon ducked under a wall where you wouldn\u2019t a noticed that there was a hole. We went along a narrow place and got into a kind of room, all damp and sweaty and cold, and there we stopped. Tom says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, we\u2019ll start this band of robbers and call it Tom Sawyer\u2019s Gang. Everybody that wants to join has got to take an oath, and write his name in blood.\u201d\r\n\r\nEverybody was willing. So Tom got out a sheet of paper that he had wrote the oath on, and read it. It swore every boy to stick to the band, and never tell any of the secrets; and if anybody done anything to any boy in the band, whichever boy was ordered to kill that person and his family must do it, and he mustn\u2019t eat and he mustn\u2019t sleep till he had killed them and hacked a cross in their breasts, which was the sign of the band. And nobody that didn\u2019t belong to the band could use that mark, and if he did he must be sued; and if he done it again he must be killed. And if anybody that belonged to the band told the secrets, he must have his throat cut, and then have his carcass burnt up and the ashes scattered all around, and his name blotted off of the list with blood and never mentioned again by the gang, but have a curse put on it and be forgot forever.\r\n\r\nEverybody said it was a real beautiful oath, and asked Tom if he got it out of his own head. He said, some of it, but the rest was out of pirate-books and robber-books, and every gang that was high-toned had it.\r\n\r\nSome thought it would be good to kill the families of boys that told the secrets. Tom said it was a good idea, so he took a pencil and wrote it in. Then Ben Rogers says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s Huck Finn, he hain\u2019t got no family; what you going to do \u2019bout him?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, hain\u2019t he got a father?\u201d says Tom Sawyer.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, he\u2019s got a father, but you can\u2019t never find him these days. He used to lay drunk with the hogs in the tanyard, but he hain\u2019t been seen in these parts for a year or more.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey talked it over, and they was going to rule me out, because they said every boy must have a family or somebody to kill, or else it wouldn\u2019t be fair and square for the others. Well, nobody could think of anything to do\u2014everybody was stumped, and set still. I was most ready to cry; but all at once I thought of a way, and so I offered them Miss Watson\u2014they could kill her. Everybody said:\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, she\u2019ll do. That\u2019s all right. Huck can come in.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen they all stuck a pin in their fingers to get blood to sign with, and I made my mark on the paper.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow,\u201d says Ben Rogers, \u201cwhat\u2019s the line of business of this Gang?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNothing only robbery and murder,\u201d Tom said.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut who are we going to rob?\u2014houses, or cattle, or\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStuff! stealing cattle and such things ain\u2019t robbery; it\u2019s burglary,\u201d says Tom Sawyer. \u201cWe ain\u2019t burglars. That ain\u2019t no sort of style. We are highwaymen. We stop stages and carriages on the road, with masks on, and kill the people and take their watches and money.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMust we always kill the people?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, certainly. It\u2019s best. Some authorities think different, but mostly it\u2019s considered best to kill them\u2014except some that you bring to the cave here, and keep them till they\u2019re ransomed.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cRansomed? What\u2019s that?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know. But that\u2019s what they do. I\u2019ve seen it in books; and so of course that\u2019s what we\u2019ve got to do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut how can we do it if we don\u2019t know what it is?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, blame it all, we\u2019ve got to do it. Don\u2019t I tell you it\u2019s in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what\u2019s in the books, and get things all muddled up?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, that\u2019s all very fine to say, Tom Sawyer, but how in the nation are these fellows going to be ransomed if we don\u2019t know how to do it to them?\u2014that\u2019s the thing I want to get at. Now, what do you reckon it is?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I don\u2019t know. But per\u2019aps if we keep them till they\u2019re ransomed, it means that we keep them till they\u2019re dead.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, that\u2019s something like. That\u2019ll answer. Why couldn\u2019t you said that before? We\u2019ll keep them till they\u2019re ransomed to death; and a bothersome lot they\u2019ll be, too\u2014eating up everything, and always trying to get loose.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow you talk, Ben Rogers. How can they get loose when there\u2019s a guard over them, ready to shoot them down if they move a peg?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA guard! Well, that is good. So somebody\u2019s got to set up all night and never get any sleep, just so as to watch them. I think that\u2019s foolishness. Why can\u2019t a body take a club and ransom them as soon as they get here?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause it ain\u2019t in the books so\u2014that\u2019s why. Now, Ben Rogers, do you want to do things regular, or don\u2019t you?\u2014that\u2019s the idea. Don\u2019t you reckon that the people that made the books knows what\u2019s the correct thing to do? Do you reckon you can learn \u2019em anything? Not by a good deal. No, sir, we\u2019ll just go on and ransom them in the regular way.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right. I don\u2019t mind; but I say it\u2019s a fool way, anyhow. Say, do we kill the women, too?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn\u2019t let on. Kill the women? No; nobody ever saw anything in the books like that. You fetch them to the cave, and you\u2019re always as polite as pie to them; and by-and-by they fall in love with you, and never want to go home any more.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, if that\u2019s the way I\u2019m agreed, but I don\u2019t take no stock in it. Mighty soon we\u2019ll have the cave so cluttered up with women, and fellows waiting to be ransomed, that there won\u2019t be no place for the robbers. But go ahead, I ain\u2019t got nothing to say.\u201d\r\n\r\nLittle Tommy Barnes was asleep now, and when they waked him up he was scared, and cried, and said he wanted to go home to his ma, and didn\u2019t want to be a robber any more.\r\n\r\nSo they all made fun of him, and called him cry-baby, and that made him mad, and he said he would go straight and tell all the secrets. But Tom give him five cents to keep quiet, and said we would all go home and meet next week, and rob somebody and kill some people.\r\n\r\nBen Rogers said he couldn\u2019t get out much, only Sundays, and so he wanted to begin next Sunday; but all the boys said it would be wicked to do it on Sunday, and that settled the thing. They agreed to get together and fix a day as soon as they could, and then we elected Tom Sawyer first captain and Jo Harper second captain of the Gang, and so started home.\r\n\r\nI clumb up the shed and crept into my window just before day was breaking. My new clothes was all greased up and clayey, and I was dog-tired.\r\nCHAPTER III.\r\n\r\nWell, I got a good going-over in the morning from old Miss Watson on account of my clothes; but the widow she didn\u2019t scold, but only cleaned off the grease and clay, and looked so sorry that I thought I would behave a while if I could. Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn\u2019t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn\u2019t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn\u2019t make it work. By-and-by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn\u2019t make it out no way.\r\n\r\nI set down one time back in the woods, and had a long think about it. I says to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don\u2019t Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can\u2019t the widow get back her silver snuffbox that was stole? Why can\u2019t Miss Watson fat up? No, says I to myself, there ain\u2019t nothing in it. I went and told the widow about it, and she said the thing a body could get by praying for it was \u201cspiritual gifts.\u201d This was too many for me, but she told me what she meant\u2014I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself. This was including Miss Watson, as I took it. I went out in the woods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I couldn\u2019t see no advantage about it\u2014except for the other people; so at last I reckoned I wouldn\u2019t worry about it any more, but just let it go. Sometimes the widow would take me one side and talk about Providence in a way to make a body\u2019s mouth water; but maybe next day Miss Watson would take hold and knock it all down again. I judged I could see that there was two Providences, and a poor chap would stand considerable show with the widow\u2019s Providence, but if Miss Watson\u2019s got him there warn\u2019t no help for him any more. I thought it all out, and reckoned I would belong to the widow\u2019s if he wanted me, though I couldn\u2019t make out how he was a-going to be any better off then than what he was before, seeing I was so ignorant, and so kind of low-down and ornery.\r\n\r\nPap he hadn\u2019t been seen for more than a year, and that was comfortable for me; I didn\u2019t want to see him no more. He used to always whale me when he was sober and could get his hands on me; though I used to take to the woods most of the time when he was around. Well, about this time he was found in the river drownded, about twelve mile above town, so people said. They judged it was him, anyway; said this drownded man was just his size, and was ragged, and had uncommon long hair, which was all like pap; but they couldn\u2019t make nothing out of the face, because it had been in the water so long it warn\u2019t much like a face at all. They said he was floating on his back in the water. They took him and buried him on the bank. But I warn\u2019t comfortable long, because I happened to think of something. I knowed mighty well that a drownded man don\u2019t float on his back, but on his face. So I knowed, then, that this warn\u2019t pap, but a woman dressed up in a man\u2019s clothes. So I was uncomfortable again. I judged the old man would turn up again by-and-by, though I wished he wouldn\u2019t.\r\n\r\nWe played robber now and then about a month, and then I resigned. All the boys did. We hadn\u2019t robbed nobody, hadn\u2019t killed any people, but only just pretended. We used to hop out of the woods and go charging down on hog-drivers and women in carts taking garden stuff to market, but we never hived any of them. Tom Sawyer called the hogs \u201cingots,\u201d and he called the turnips and stuff \u201cjulery,\u201d and we would go to the cave and powwow over what we had done, and how many people we had killed and marked. But I couldn\u2019t see no profit in it. One time Tom sent a boy to run about town with a blazing stick, which he called a slogan (which was the sign for the Gang to get together), and then he said he had got secret news by his spies that next day a whole parcel of Spanish merchants and rich A-rabs was going to camp in Cave Hollow with two hundred elephants, and six hundred camels, and over a thousand \u201csumter\u201d mules, all loaded down with di\u2019monds, and they didn\u2019t have only a guard of four hundred soldiers, and so we would lay in ambuscade, as he called it, and kill the lot and scoop the things. He said we must slick up our swords and guns, and get ready. He never could go after even a turnip-cart but he must have the swords and guns all scoured up for it, though they was only lath and broomsticks, and you might scour at them till you rotted, and then they warn\u2019t worth a mouthful of ashes more than what they was before. I didn\u2019t believe we could lick such a crowd of Spaniards and A-rabs, but I wanted to see the camels and elephants, so I was on hand next day, Saturday, in the ambuscade; and when we got the word we rushed out of the woods and down the hill. But there warn\u2019t no Spaniards and A-rabs, and there warn\u2019t no camels nor no elephants. It warn\u2019t anything but a Sunday-school picnic, and only a primer-class at that. We busted it up, and chased the children up the hollow; but we never got anything but some doughnuts and jam, though Ben Rogers got a rag doll, and Jo Harper got a hymn-book and a tract; and then the teacher charged in, and made us drop everything and cut.\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t see no di\u2019monds, and I told Tom Sawyer so. He said there was loads of them there, anyway; and he said there was A-rabs there, too, and elephants and things. I said, why couldn\u2019t we see them, then? He said if I warn\u2019t so ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking. He said it was all done by enchantment. He said there was hundreds of soldiers there, and elephants and treasure, and so on, but we had enemies which he called magicians; and they had turned the whole thing into an infant Sunday-school, just out of spite. I said, all right; then the thing for us to do was to go for the magicians. Tom Sawyer said I was a numskull.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy,\u201d said he, \u201ca magician could call up a lot of genies, and they would hash you up like nothing before you could say Jack Robinson. They are as tall as a tree and as big around as a church.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d I says, \u201cs\u2019pose we got some genies to help us\u2014can\u2019t we lick the other crowd then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow you going to get them?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know. How do they get them?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, they rub an old tin lamp or an iron ring, and then the genies come tearing in, with the thunder and lightning a-ripping around and the smoke a-rolling, and everything they\u2019re told to do they up and do it. They don\u2019t think nothing of pulling a shot-tower up by the roots, and belting a Sunday-school superintendent over the head with it\u2014or any other man.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho makes them tear around so?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, whoever rubs the lamp or the ring. They belong to whoever rubs the lamp or the ring, and they\u2019ve got to do whatever he says. If he tells them to build a palace forty miles long out of di\u2019monds, and fill it full of chewing-gum, or whatever you want, and fetch an emperor\u2019s daughter from China for you to marry, they\u2019ve got to do it\u2014and they\u2019ve got to do it before sun-up next morning, too. And more: they\u2019ve got to waltz that palace around over the country wherever you want it, you understand.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d says I, \u201cI think they are a pack of flat-heads for not keeping the palace themselves \u2019stead of fooling them away like that. And what\u2019s more\u2014if I was one of them I would see a man in Jericho before I would drop my business and come to him for the rubbing of an old tin lamp.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow you talk, Huck Finn. Why, you\u2019d have to come when he rubbed it, whether you wanted to or not.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat! and I as high as a tree and as big as a church? All right, then; I would come; but I lay I\u2019d make that man climb the highest tree there was in the country.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShucks, it ain\u2019t no use to talk to you, Huck Finn. You don\u2019t seem to know anything, somehow\u2014perfect saphead.\u201d\r\n\r\nI thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I would see if there was anything in it. I got an old tin lamp and an iron ring, and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it; but it warn\u2019t no use, none of the genies come. So then I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer\u2019s lies. I reckoned he believed in the A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday-school.\r\nCHAPTER IV.\r\n\r\nWell, three or four months run along, and it was well into the winter now. I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don\u2019t reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don\u2019t take no stock in mathematics, anyway.\r\n\r\nAt first I hated the school, but by-and-by I got so I could stand it. Whenever I got uncommon tired I played hookey, and the hiding I got next day done me good and cheered me up. So the longer I went to school the easier it got to be. I was getting sort of used to the widow\u2019s ways, too, and they warn\u2019t so raspy on me. Living in a house and sleeping in a bed pulled on me pretty tight mostly, but before the cold weather I used to slide out and sleep in the woods sometimes, and so that was a rest to me. I liked the old ways best, but I was getting so I liked the new ones, too, a little bit. The widow said I was coming along slow but sure, and doing very satisfactory. She said she warn\u2019t ashamed of me.\r\n\r\nOne morning I happened to turn over the salt-cellar at breakfast. I reached for some of it as quick as I could to throw over my left shoulder and keep off the bad luck, but Miss Watson was in ahead of me, and crossed me off. She says, \u201cTake your hands away, Huckleberry; what a mess you are always making!\u201d The widow put in a good word for me, but that warn\u2019t going to keep off the bad luck, I knowed that well enough. I started out, after breakfast, feeling worried and shaky, and wondering where it was going to fall on me, and what it was going to be. There is ways to keep off some kinds of bad luck, but this wasn\u2019t one of them kind; so I never tried to do anything, but just poked along low-spirited and on the watch-out.\r\n\r\nI went down to the front garden and clumb over the stile where you go through the high board fence. There was an inch of new snow on the ground, and I seen somebody\u2019s tracks. They had come up from the quarry and stood around the stile a while, and then went on around the garden fence. It was funny they hadn\u2019t come in, after standing around so. I couldn\u2019t make it out. It was very curious, somehow. I was going to follow around, but I stooped down to look at the tracks first. I didn\u2019t notice anything at first, but next I did. There was a cross in the left boot-heel made with big nails, to keep off the devil.\r\n\r\nI was up in a second and shinning down the hill. I looked over my shoulder every now and then, but I didn\u2019t see nobody. I was at Judge Thatcher\u2019s as quick as I could get there. He said:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, my boy, you are all out of breath. Did you come for your interest?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, sir,\u201d I says; \u201cis there some for me?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes, a half-yearly is in, last night\u2014over a hundred and fifty dollars. Quite a fortune for you. You had better let me invest it along with your six thousand, because if you take it you\u2019ll spend it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, sir,\u201d I says, \u201cI don\u2019t want to spend it. I don\u2019t want it at all\u2014nor the six thousand, nuther. I want you to take it; I want to give it to you\u2014the six thousand and all.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe looked surprised. He couldn\u2019t seem to make it out. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, what can you mean, my boy?\u201d\r\n\r\nI says, \u201cDon\u2019t you ask me no questions about it, please. You\u2019ll take it\u2014won\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\nHe says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I\u2019m puzzled. Is something the matter?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease take it,\u201d says I, \u201cand don\u2019t ask me nothing\u2014then I won\u2019t have to tell no lies.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe studied a while, and then he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cOho-o! I think I see. You want to sell all your property to me\u2014not give it. That\u2019s the correct idea.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen he wrote something on a paper and read it over, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cThere; you see it says \u2018for a consideration.\u2019 That means I have bought it of you and paid you for it. Here\u2019s a dollar for you. Now you sign it.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo I signed it, and left.\r\n\r\nMiss Watson\u2019s nigger, Jim, had a hair-ball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox, and he used to do magic with it. He said there was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed everything. So I went to him that night and told him pap was here again, for I found his tracks in the snow. What I wanted to know was, what he was going to do, and was he going to stay? Jim got out his hair-ball and said something over it, and then he held it up and dropped it on the floor. It fell pretty solid, and only rolled about an inch. Jim tried it again, and then another time, and it acted just the same. Jim got down on his knees, and put his ear against it and listened. But it warn\u2019t no use; he said it wouldn\u2019t talk. He said sometimes it wouldn\u2019t talk without money. I told him I had an old slick counterfeit quarter that warn\u2019t no good because the brass showed through the silver a little, and it wouldn\u2019t pass nohow, even if the brass didn\u2019t show, because it was so slick it felt greasy, and so that would tell on it every time. (I reckoned I wouldn\u2019t say nothing about the dollar I got from the judge.) I said it was pretty bad money, but maybe the hair-ball would take it, because maybe it wouldn\u2019t know the difference. Jim smelt it and bit it and rubbed it, and said he would manage so the hair-ball would think it was good. He said he would split open a raw Irish potato and stick the quarter in between and keep it there all night, and next morning you couldn\u2019t see no brass, and it wouldn\u2019t feel greasy no more, and so anybody in town would take it in a minute, let alone a hair-ball. Well, I knowed a potato would do that before, but I had forgot it.\r\n\r\nJim put the quarter under the hair-ball, and got down and listened again. This time he said the hair-ball was all right. He said it would tell my whole fortune if I wanted it to. I says, go on. So the hair-ball talked to Jim, and Jim told it to me. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYo\u2019 ole father doan\u2019 know yit what he\u2019s a-gwyne to do. Sometimes he spec he\u2019ll go \u2019way, en den agin he spec he\u2019ll stay. De bes\u2019 way is to res\u2019 easy en let de ole man take his own way. Dey\u2019s two angels hoverin\u2019 roun\u2019 \u2019bout him. One uv \u2019em is white en shiny, en t\u2019other one is black. De white one gits him to go right a little while, den de black one sail in en bust it all up. A body can\u2019t tell yit which one gwyne to fetch him at de las\u2019. But you is all right. You gwyne to have considable trouble in yo\u2019 life, en considable joy. Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but every time you\u2019s gwyne to git well agin. Dey\u2019s two gals flyin\u2019 \u2019bout you in yo\u2019 life. One uv \u2019em\u2019s light en t\u2019other one is dark. One is rich en t\u2019other is po\u2019. You\u2019s gwyne to marry de po\u2019 one fust en de rich one by en by. You wants to keep \u2019way fum de water as much as you kin, en don\u2019t run no resk, \u2019kase it\u2019s down in de bills dat you\u2019s gwyne to git hung.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen I lit my candle and went up to my room that night there sat pap his own self!\r\nCHAPTER V.\r\n\r\nI had shut the door to. Then I turned around and there he was. I used to be scared of him all the time, he tanned me so much. I reckoned I was scared now, too; but in a minute I see I was mistaken\u2014that is, after the first jolt, as you may say, when my breath sort of hitched, he being so unexpected; but right away after I see I warn\u2019t scared of him worth bothring about.\r\n\r\nHe was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn\u2019t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man\u2019s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body\u2019s flesh crawl\u2014a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes\u2014just rags, that was all. He had one ankle resting on t\u2019other knee; the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then. His hat was laying on the floor\u2014an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid.\r\n\r\nI stood a-looking at him; he set there a-looking at me, with his chair tilted back a little. I set the candle down. I noticed the window was up; so he had clumb in by the shed. He kept a-looking me all over. By-and-by he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cStarchy clothes\u2014very. You think you\u2019re a good deal of a big-bug, don\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMaybe I am, maybe I ain\u2019t,\u201d I says.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you give me none o\u2019 your lip,\u201d says he. \u201cYou\u2019ve put on considerable many frills since I been away. I\u2019ll take you down a peg before I get done with you. You\u2019re educated, too, they say\u2014can read and write. You think you\u2019re better\u2019n your father, now, don\u2019t you, because he can\u2019t? I\u2019ll take it out of you. Who told you you might meddle with such hifalut\u2019n foolishness, hey?\u2014who told you you could?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe widow. She told me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe widow, hey?\u2014and who told the widow she could put in her shovel about a thing that ain\u2019t none of her business?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNobody never told her.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I\u2019ll learn her how to meddle. And looky here\u2014you drop that school, you hear? I\u2019ll learn people to bring up a boy to put on airs over his own father and let on to be better\u2019n what he is. You lemme catch you fooling around that school again, you hear? Your mother couldn\u2019t read, and she couldn\u2019t write, nuther, before she died. None of the family couldn\u2019t before they died. I can\u2019t; and here you\u2019re a-swelling yourself up like this. I ain\u2019t the man to stand it\u2014you hear? Say, lemme hear you read.\u201d\r\n\r\nI took up a book and begun something about General Washington and the wars. When I\u2019d read about a half a minute, he fetched the book a whack with his hand and knocked it across the house. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s so. You can do it. I had my doubts when you told me. Now looky here; you stop that putting on frills. I won\u2019t have it. I\u2019ll lay for you, my smarty; and if I catch you about that school I\u2019ll tan you good. First you know you\u2019ll get religion, too. I never see such a son.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe took up a little blue and yaller picture of some cows and a boy, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s this?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s something they give me for learning my lessons good.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe tore it up, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll give you something better\u2014I\u2019ll give you a cowhide.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe set there a-mumbling and a-growling a minute, and then he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cAin\u2019t you a sweet-scented dandy, though? A bed; and bedclothes; and a look\u2019n\u2019-glass; and a piece of carpet on the floor\u2014and your own father got to sleep with the hogs in the tanyard. I never see such a son. I bet I\u2019ll take some o\u2019 these frills out o\u2019 you before I\u2019m done with you. Why, there ain\u2019t no end to your airs\u2014they say you\u2019re rich. Hey?\u2014how\u2019s that?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey lie\u2014that\u2019s how.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLooky here\u2014mind how you talk to me; I\u2019m a-standing about all I can stand now\u2014so don\u2019t gimme no sass. I\u2019ve been in town two days, and I hain\u2019t heard nothing but about you bein\u2019 rich. I heard about it away down the river, too. That\u2019s why I come. You git me that money to-morrow\u2014I want it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hain\u2019t got no money.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a lie. Judge Thatcher\u2019s got it. You git it. I want it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hain\u2019t got no money, I tell you. You ask Judge Thatcher; he\u2019ll tell you the same.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right. I\u2019ll ask him; and I\u2019ll make him pungle, too, or I\u2019ll know the reason why. Say, how much you got in your pocket? I want it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hain\u2019t got only a dollar, and I want that to\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt don\u2019t make no difference what you want it for\u2014you just shell it out.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe took it and bit it to see if it was good, and then he said he was going down town to get some whisky; said he hadn\u2019t had a drink all day. When he had got out on the shed he put his head in again, and cussed me for putting on frills and trying to be better than him; and when I reckoned he was gone he come back and put his head in again, and told me to mind about that school, because he was going to lay for me and lick me if I didn\u2019t drop that.\r\n\r\nNext day he was drunk, and he went to Judge Thatcher\u2019s and bullyragged him, and tried to make him give up the money; but he couldn\u2019t, and then he swore he\u2019d make the law force him.\r\n\r\nThe judge and the widow went to law to get the court to take me away from him and let one of them be my guardian; but it was a new judge that had just come, and he didn\u2019t know the old man; so he said courts mustn\u2019t interfere and separate families if they could help it; said he\u2019d druther not take a child away from its father. So Judge Thatcher and the widow had to quit on the business.\r\n\r\nThat pleased the old man till he couldn\u2019t rest. He said he\u2019d cowhide me till I was black and blue if I didn\u2019t raise some money for him. I borrowed three dollars from Judge Thatcher, and pap took it and got drunk, and went a-blowing around and cussing and whooping and carrying on; and he kept it up all over town, with a tin pan, till most midnight; then they jailed him, and next day they had him before court, and jailed him again for a week. But he said he was satisfied; said he was boss of his son, and he\u2019d make it warm for him.\r\n\r\nWhen he got out the new judge said he was a-going to make a man of him. So he took him to his own house, and dressed him up clean and nice, and had him to breakfast and dinner and supper with the family, and was just old pie to him, so to speak. And after supper he talked to him about temperance and such things till the old man cried, and said he\u2019d been a fool, and fooled away his life; but now he was a-going to turn over a new leaf and be a man nobody wouldn\u2019t be ashamed of, and he hoped the judge would help him and not look down on him. The judge said he could hug him for them words; so he cried, and his wife she cried again; pap said he\u2019d been a man that had always been misunderstood before, and the judge said he believed it. The old man said that what a man wanted that was down was sympathy, and the judge said it was so; so they cried again. And when it was bedtime the old man rose up and held out his hand, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cLook at it, gentlemen and ladies all; take a-hold of it; shake it. There\u2019s a hand that was the hand of a hog; but it ain\u2019t so no more; it\u2019s the hand of a man that\u2019s started in on a new life, and\u2019ll die before he\u2019ll go back. You mark them words\u2014don\u2019t forget I said them. It\u2019s a clean hand now; shake it\u2014don\u2019t be afeard.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo they shook it, one after the other, all around, and cried. The judge\u2019s wife she kissed it. Then the old man he signed a pledge\u2014made his mark. The judge said it was the holiest time on record, or something like that. Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was the spare room, and in the night some time he got powerful thirsty and clumb out on to the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb back again and had a good old time; and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places, and was most froze to death when somebody found him after sun-up. And when they come to look at that spare room they had to take soundings before they could navigate it.\r\n\r\nThe judge he felt kind of sore. He said he reckoned a body could reform the old man with a shotgun, maybe, but he didn\u2019t know no other way.\r\nCHAPTER VI.\r\n\r\nWell, pretty soon the old man was up and around again, and then he went for Judge Thatcher in the courts to make him give up that money, and he went for me, too, for not stopping school. He catched me a couple of times and thrashed me, but I went to school just the same, and dodged him or outrun him most of the time. I didn\u2019t want to go to school much before, but I reckoned I\u2019d go now to spite pap. That law trial was a slow business\u2014appeared like they warn\u2019t ever going to get started on it; so every now and then I\u2019d borrow two or three dollars off of the judge for him, to keep from getting a cowhiding. Every time he got money he got drunk; and every time he got drunk he raised Cain around town; and every time he raised Cain he got jailed. He was just suited\u2014this kind of thing was right in his line.\r\n\r\nHe got to hanging around the widow\u2019s too much and so she told him at last that if he didn\u2019t quit using around there she would make trouble for him. Well, wasn\u2019t he mad? He said he would show who was Huck Finn\u2019s boss. So he watched out for me one day in the spring, and catched me, and took me up the river about three mile in a skiff, and crossed over to the Illinois shore where it was woody and there warn\u2019t no houses but an old log hut in a place where the timber was so thick you couldn\u2019t find it if you didn\u2019t know where it was.\r\n\r\nHe kept me with him all the time, and I never got a chance to run off. We lived in that old cabin, and he always locked the door and put the key under his head nights. He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon, and we fished and hunted, and that was what we lived on. Every little while he locked me in and went down to the store, three miles, to the ferry, and traded fish and game for whisky, and fetched it home and got drunk and had a good time, and licked me. The widow she found out where I was by-and-by, and she sent a man over to try to get hold of me; but pap drove him off with the gun, and it warn\u2019t long after that till I was used to being where I was, and liked it\u2014all but the cowhide part.\r\n\r\nIt was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn\u2019t see how I\u2019d ever got to like it so well at the widow\u2019s, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book, and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the time. I didn\u2019t want to go back no more. I had stopped cussing, because the widow didn\u2019t like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn\u2019t no objections. It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around.\r\n\r\nBut by-and-by pap got too handy with his hick\u2019ry, and I couldn\u2019t stand it. I was all over welts. He got to going away so much, too, and locking me in. Once he locked me in and was gone three days. It was dreadful lonesome. I judged he had got drownded, and I wasn\u2019t ever going to get out any more. I was scared. I made up my mind I would fix up some way to leave there. I had tried to get out of that cabin many a time, but I couldn\u2019t find no way. There warn\u2019t a window to it big enough for a dog to get through. I couldn\u2019t get up the chimbly; it was too narrow. The door was thick, solid oak slabs. Pap was pretty careful not to leave a knife or anything in the cabin when he was away; I reckon I had hunted the place over as much as a hundred times; well, I was most all the time at it, because it was about the only way to put in the time. But this time I found something at last; I found an old rusty wood-saw without any handle; it was laid in between a rafter and the clapboards of the roof. I greased it up and went to work. There was an old horse-blanket nailed against the logs at the far end of the cabin behind the table, to keep the wind from blowing through the chinks and putting the candle out. I got under the table and raised the blanket, and went to work to saw a section of the big bottom log out\u2014big enough to let me through. Well, it was a good long job, but I was getting towards the end of it when I heard pap\u2019s gun in the woods. I got rid of the signs of my work, and dropped the blanket and hid my saw, and pretty soon pap come in.\r\n\r\nPap warn\u2019t in a good humor\u2014so he was his natural self. He said he was down town, and everything was going wrong. His lawyer said he reckoned he would win his lawsuit and get the money if they ever got started on the trial; but then there was ways to put it off a long time, and Judge Thatcher knowed how to do it. And he said people allowed there\u2019d be another trial to get me away from him and give me to the widow for my guardian, and they guessed it would win this time. This shook me up considerable, because I didn\u2019t want to go back to the widow\u2019s any more and be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it. Then the old man got to cussing, and cussed everything and everybody he could think of, and then cussed them all over again to make sure he hadn\u2019t skipped any, and after that he polished off with a kind of a general cuss all round, including a considerable parcel of people which he didn\u2019t know the names of, and so called them what\u2019s-his-name when he got to them, and went right along with his cussing.\r\n\r\nHe said he would like to see the widow get me. He said he would watch out, and if they tried to come any such game on him he knowed of a place six or seven mile off to stow me in, where they might hunt till they dropped and they couldn\u2019t find me. That made me pretty uneasy again, but only for a minute; I reckoned I wouldn\u2019t stay on hand till he got that chance.\r\n\r\nThe old man made me go to the skiff and fetch the things he had got. There was a fifty-pound sack of corn meal, and a side of bacon, ammunition, and a four-gallon jug of whisky, and an old book and two newspapers for wadding, besides some tow. I toted up a load, and went back and set down on the bow of the skiff to rest. I thought it all over, and I reckoned I would walk off with the gun and some lines, and take to the woods when I run away. I guessed I wouldn\u2019t stay in one place, but just tramp right across the country, mostly night times, and hunt and fish to keep alive, and so get so far away that the old man nor the widow couldn\u2019t ever find me any more. I judged I would saw out and leave that night if pap got drunk enough, and I reckoned he would. I got so full of it I didn\u2019t notice how long I was staying till the old man hollered and asked me whether I was asleep or drownded.\r\n\r\nI got the things all up to the cabin, and then it was about dark. While I was cooking supper the old man took a swig or two and got sort of warmed up, and went to ripping again. He had been drunk over in town, and laid in the gutter all night, and he was a sight to look at. A body would a thought he was Adam\u2014he was just all mud. Whenever his liquor begun to work he most always went for the govment, this time he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cCall this a govment! why, just look at it and see what it\u2019s like. Here\u2019s the law a-standing ready to take a man\u2019s son away from him\u2014a man\u2019s own son, which he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety and all the expense of raising. Yes, just as that man has got that son raised at last, and ready to go to work and begin to do suthin\u2019 for him and give him a rest, the law up and goes for him. And they call that govment! That ain\u2019t all, nuther. The law backs that old Judge Thatcher up and helps him to keep me out o\u2019 my property. Here\u2019s what the law does: The law takes a man worth six thousand dollars and up\u2019ards, and jams him into an old trap of a cabin like this, and lets him go round in clothes that ain\u2019t fitten for a hog. They call that govment! A man can\u2019t get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I\u2019ve a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all. Yes, and I told \u2019em so; I told old Thatcher so to his face. Lots of \u2019em heard me, and can tell what I said. Says I, for two cents I\u2019d leave the blamed country and never come a-near it agin. Them\u2019s the very words. I says look at my hat\u2014if you call it a hat\u2014but the lid raises up and the rest of it goes down till it\u2019s below my chin, and then it ain\u2019t rightly a hat at all, but more like my head was shoved up through a jint o\u2019 stove-pipe. Look at it, says I\u2014such a hat for me to wear\u2014one of the wealthiest men in this town if I could git my rights.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio\u2014a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain\u2019t a man in that town that\u2019s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane\u2014the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p\u2019fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain\u2019t the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was \u2019lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn\u2019t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they\u2019d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I\u2019ll never vote agin. Them\u2019s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me\u2014I\u2019ll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger\u2014why, he wouldn\u2019t a give me the road if I hadn\u2019t shoved him out o\u2019 the way. I says to the people, why ain\u2019t this nigger put up at auction and sold?\u2014that\u2019s what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn\u2019t be sold till he\u2019d been in the State six months, and he hadn\u2019t been there that long yet. There, now\u2014that\u2019s a specimen. They call that a govment that can\u2019t sell a free nigger till he\u2019s been in the State six months. Here\u2019s a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet\u2019s got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger, and\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\nPap was agoing on so he never noticed where his old limber legs was taking him to, so he went head over heels over the tub of salt pork and barked both shins, and the rest of his speech was all the hottest kind of language\u2014mostly hove at the nigger and the govment, though he give the tub some, too, all along, here and there. He hopped around the cabin considerable, first on one leg and then on the other, holding first one shin and then the other one, and at last he let out with his left foot all of a sudden and fetched the tub a rattling kick. But it warn\u2019t good judgment, because that was the boot that had a couple of his toes leaking out of the front end of it; so now he raised a howl that fairly made a body\u2019s hair raise, and down he went in the dirt, and rolled there, and held his toes; and the cussing he done then laid over anything he had ever done previous. He said so his own self afterwards. He had heard old Sowberry Hagan in his best days, and he said it laid over him, too; but I reckon that was sort of piling it on, maybe.\r\n\r\nAfter supper pap took the jug, and said he had enough whisky there for two drunks and one delirium tremens. That was always his word. I judged he would be blind drunk in about an hour, and then I would steal the key, or saw myself out, one or t\u2019other. He drank and drank, and tumbled down on his blankets by-and-by; but luck didn\u2019t run my way. He didn\u2019t go sound asleep, but was uneasy. He groaned and moaned and thrashed around this way and that for a long time. At last I got so sleepy I couldn\u2019t keep my eyes open all I could do, and so before I knowed what I was about I was sound asleep, and the candle burning.\r\n\r\nI don\u2019t know how long I was asleep, but all of a sudden there was an awful scream and I was up. There was pap looking wild, and skipping around every which way and yelling about snakes. He said they was crawling up his legs; and then he would give a jump and scream, and say one had bit him on the cheek\u2014but I couldn\u2019t see no snakes. He started and run round and round the cabin, hollering \u201cTake him off! take him off! he\u2019s biting me on the neck!\u201d I never see a man look so wild in the eyes. Pretty soon he was all fagged out, and fell down panting; then he rolled over and over wonderful fast, kicking things every which way, and striking and grabbing at the air with his hands, and screaming and saying there was devils a-hold of him. He wore out by-and-by, and laid still a while, moaning. Then he laid stiller, and didn\u2019t make a sound. I could hear the owls and the wolves away off in the woods, and it seemed terrible still. He was laying over by the corner. By-and-by he raised up part way and listened, with his head to one side. He says, very low:\r\n\r\n\u201cTramp\u2014tramp\u2014tramp; that\u2019s the dead; tramp\u2014tramp\u2014tramp; they\u2019re coming after me; but I won\u2019t go. Oh, they\u2019re here! don\u2019t touch me\u2014don\u2019t! hands off\u2014they\u2019re cold; let go. Oh, let a poor devil alone!\u201d\r\n\r\nThen he went down on all fours and crawled off, begging them to let him alone, and he rolled himself up in his blanket and wallowed in under the old pine table, still a-begging; and then he went to crying. I could hear him through the blanket.\r\n\r\nBy-and-by he rolled out and jumped up on his feet looking wild, and he see me and went for me. He chased me round and round the place with a clasp-knife, calling me the Angel of Death, and saying he would kill me, and then I couldn\u2019t come for him no more. I begged, and told him I was only Huck; but he laughed such a screechy laugh, and roared and cussed, and kept on chasing me up. Once when I turned short and dodged under his arm he made a grab and got me by the jacket between my shoulders, and I thought I was gone; but I slid out of the jacket quick as lightning, and saved myself. Pretty soon he was all tired out, and dropped down with his back against the door, and said he would rest a minute and then kill me. He put his knife under him, and said he would sleep and get strong, and then he would see who was who.\r\n\r\nSo he dozed off pretty soon. By-and-by I got the old split-bottom chair and clumb up as easy as I could, not to make any noise, and got down the gun. I slipped the ramrod down it to make sure it was loaded, then I laid it across the turnip barrel, pointing towards pap, and set down behind it to wait for him to stir. And how slow and still the time did drag along.\r\nCHAPTER VII.\r\n\r\n\u201cGit up! What you \u2019bout?\u201d\r\n\r\nI opened my eyes and looked around, trying to make out where I was. It was after sun-up, and I had been sound asleep. Pap was standing over me looking sour and sick, too. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat you doin\u2019 with this gun?\u201d\r\n\r\nI judged he didn\u2019t know nothing about what he had been doing, so I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cSomebody tried to get in, so I was laying for him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy didn\u2019t you roust me out?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I tried to, but I couldn\u2019t; I couldn\u2019t budge you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, all right. Don\u2019t stand there palavering all day, but out with you and see if there\u2019s a fish on the lines for breakfast. I\u2019ll be along in a minute.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe unlocked the door, and I cleared out up the river-bank. I noticed some pieces of limbs and such things floating down, and a sprinkling of bark; so I knowed the river had begun to rise. I reckoned I would have great times now if I was over at the town. The June rise used to be always luck for me; because as soon as that rise begins here comes cordwood floating down, and pieces of log rafts\u2014sometimes a dozen logs together; so all you have to do is to catch them and sell them to the wood-yards and the sawmill.\r\n\r\nI went along up the bank with one eye out for pap and t\u2019other one out for what the rise might fetch along. Well, all at once here comes a canoe; just a beauty, too, about thirteen or fourteen foot long, riding high like a duck. I shot head-first off of the bank like a frog, clothes and all on, and struck out for the canoe. I just expected there\u2019d be somebody laying down in it, because people often done that to fool folks, and when a chap had pulled a skiff out most to it they\u2019d raise up and laugh at him. But it warn\u2019t so this time. It was a drift-canoe sure enough, and I clumb in and paddled her ashore. Thinks I, the old man will be glad when he sees this\u2014she\u2019s worth ten dollars. But when I got to shore pap wasn\u2019t in sight yet, and as I was running her into a little creek like a gully, all hung over with vines and willows, I struck another idea: I judged I\u2019d hide her good, and then, \u2019stead of taking to the woods when I run off, I\u2019d go down the river about fifty mile and camp in one place for good, and not have such a rough time tramping on foot.\r\n\r\nIt was pretty close to the shanty, and I thought I heard the old man coming all the time; but I got her hid; and then I out and looked around a bunch of willows, and there was the old man down the path a piece just drawing a bead on a bird with his gun. So he hadn\u2019t seen anything.\r\n\r\nWhen he got along I was hard at it taking up a \u201ctrot\u201d line. He abused me a little for being so slow; but I told him I fell in the river, and that was what made me so long. I knowed he would see I was wet, and then he would be asking questions. We got five catfish off the lines and went home.\r\n\r\nWhile we laid off after breakfast to sleep up, both of us being about wore out, I got to thinking that if I could fix up some way to keep pap and the widow from trying to follow me, it would be a certainer thing than trusting to luck to get far enough off before they missed me; you see, all kinds of things might happen. Well, I didn\u2019t see no way for a while, but by-and-by pap raised up a minute to drink another barrel of water, and he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cAnother time a man comes a-prowling round here you roust me out, you hear? That man warn\u2019t here for no good. I\u2019d a shot him. Next time you roust me out, you hear?\u201d\r\n\r\nThen he dropped down and went to sleep again; but what he had been saying give me the very idea I wanted. I says to myself, I can fix it now so nobody won\u2019t think of following me.\r\n\r\nAbout twelve o\u2019clock we turned out and went along up the bank. The river was coming up pretty fast, and lots of driftwood going by on the rise. By-and-by along comes part of a log raft\u2014nine logs fast together. We went out with the skiff and towed it ashore. Then we had dinner. Anybody but pap would a waited and seen the day through, so as to catch more stuff; but that warn\u2019t pap\u2019s style. Nine logs was enough for one time; he must shove right over to town and sell. So he locked me in and took the skiff, and started off towing the raft about half-past three. I judged he wouldn\u2019t come back that night. I waited till I reckoned he had got a good start; then I out with my saw, and went to work on that log again. Before he was t\u2019other side of the river I was out of the hole; him and his raft was just a speck on the water away off yonder.\r\n\r\nI took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoe was hid, and shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in; then I done the same with the side of bacon; then the whisky-jug. I took all the coffee and sugar there was, and all the ammunition; I took the wadding; I took the bucket and gourd; I took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old saw and two blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot. I took fish-lines and matches and other things\u2014everything that was worth a cent. I cleaned out the place. I wanted an axe, but there wasn\u2019t any, only the one out at the woodpile, and I knowed why I was going to leave that. I fetched out the gun, and now I was done.\r\n\r\nI had wore the ground a good deal crawling out of the hole and dragging out so many things. So I fixed that as good as I could from the outside by scattering dust on the place, which covered up the smoothness and the sawdust. Then I fixed the piece of log back into its place, and put two rocks under it and one against it to hold it there, for it was bent up at that place and didn\u2019t quite touch ground. If you stood four or five foot away and didn\u2019t know it was sawed, you wouldn\u2019t never notice it; and besides, this was the back of the cabin, and it warn\u2019t likely anybody would go fooling around there.\r\n\r\nIt was all grass clear to the canoe, so I hadn\u2019t left a track. I followed around to see. I stood on the bank and looked out over the river. All safe. So I took the gun and went up a piece into the woods, and was hunting around for some birds when I see a wild pig; hogs soon went wild in them bottoms after they had got away from the prairie farms. I shot this fellow and took him into camp.\r\n\r\nI took the axe and smashed in the door. I beat it and hacked it considerable a-doing it. I fetched the pig in, and took him back nearly to the table and hacked into his throat with the axe, and laid him down on the ground to bleed; I say ground because it was ground\u2014hard packed, and no boards. Well, next I took an old sack and put a lot of big rocks in it\u2014all I could drag\u2014and I started it from the pig, and dragged it to the door and through the woods down to the river and dumped it in, and down it sunk, out of sight. You could easy see that something had been dragged over the ground. I did wish Tom Sawyer was there; I knowed he would take an interest in this kind of business, and throw in the fancy touches. Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as that.\r\n\r\nWell, last I pulled out some of my hair, and blooded the axe good, and stuck it on the back side, and slung the axe in the corner. Then I took up the pig and held him to my breast with my jacket (so he couldn\u2019t drip) till I got a good piece below the house and then dumped him into the river. Now I thought of something else. So I went and got the bag of meal and my old saw out of the canoe, and fetched them to the house. I took the bag to where it used to stand, and ripped a hole in the bottom of it with the saw, for there warn\u2019t no knives and forks on the place\u2014pap done everything with his clasp-knife about the cooking. Then I carried the sack about a hundred yards across the grass and through the willows east of the house, to a shallow lake that was five mile wide and full of rushes\u2014and ducks too, you might say, in the season. There was a slough or a creek leading out of it on the other side that went miles away, I don\u2019t know where, but it didn\u2019t go to the river. The meal sifted out and made a little track all the way to the lake. I dropped pap\u2019s whetstone there too, so as to look like it had been done by accident. Then I tied up the rip in the meal sack with a string, so it wouldn\u2019t leak no more, and took it and my saw to the canoe again.\r\n\r\nIt was about dark now; so I dropped the canoe down the river under some willows that hung over the bank, and waited for the moon to rise. I made fast to a willow; then I took a bite to eat, and by-and-by laid down in the canoe to smoke a pipe and lay out a plan. I says to myself, they\u2019ll follow the track of that sackful of rocks to the shore and then drag the river for me. And they\u2019ll follow that meal track to the lake and go browsing down the creek that leads out of it to find the robbers that killed me and took the things. They won\u2019t ever hunt the river for anything but my dead carcass. They\u2019ll soon get tired of that, and won\u2019t bother no more about me. All right; I can stop anywhere I want to. Jackson\u2019s Island is good enough for me; I know that island pretty well, and nobody ever comes there. And then I can paddle over to town nights, and slink around and pick up things I want. Jackson\u2019s Island\u2019s the place.\r\n\r\nI was pretty tired, and the first thing I knowed I was asleep. When I woke up I didn\u2019t know where I was for a minute. I set up and looked around, a little scared. Then I remembered. The river looked miles and miles across. The moon was so bright I could a counted the drift logs that went a-slipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from shore. Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and smelt late. You know what I mean\u2014I don\u2019t know the words to put it in.\r\n\r\nI took a good gap and a stretch, and was just going to unhitch and start when I heard a sound away over the water. I listened. Pretty soon I made it out. It was that dull kind of a regular sound that comes from oars working in rowlocks when it\u2019s a still night. I peeped out through the willow branches, and there it was\u2014a skiff, away across the water. I couldn\u2019t tell how many was in it. It kept a-coming, and when it was abreast of me I see there warn\u2019t but one man in it. Think\u2019s I, maybe it\u2019s pap, though I warn\u2019t expecting him. He dropped below me with the current, and by-and-by he came a-swinging up shore in the easy water, and he went by so close I could a reached out the gun and touched him. Well, it was pap, sure enough\u2014and sober, too, by the way he laid his oars.\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t lose no time. The next minute I was a-spinning down stream soft but quick in the shade of the bank. I made two mile and a half, and then struck out a quarter of a mile or more towards the middle of the river, because pretty soon I would be passing the ferry landing, and people might see me and hail me. I got out amongst the driftwood, and then laid down in the bottom of the canoe and let her float.\r\n\r\nI laid there, and had a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking away into the sky; not a cloud in it. The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine; I never knowed it before. And how far a body can hear on the water such nights! I heard people talking at the ferry landing. I heard what they said, too\u2014every word of it. One man said it was getting towards the long days and the short nights now. T\u2019other one said this warn\u2019t one of the short ones, he reckoned\u2014and then they laughed, and he said it over again, and they laughed again; then they waked up another fellow and told him, and laughed, but he didn\u2019t laugh; he ripped out something brisk, and said let him alone. The first fellow said he \u2019lowed to tell it to his old woman\u2014she would think it was pretty good; but he said that warn\u2019t nothing to some things he had said in his time. I heard one man say it was nearly three o\u2019clock, and he hoped daylight wouldn\u2019t wait more than about a week longer. After that the talk got further and further away, and I couldn\u2019t make out the words any more; but I could hear the mumble, and now and then a laugh, too, but it seemed a long ways off.\r\n\r\nI was away below the ferry now. I rose up, and there was Jackson\u2019s Island, about two mile and a half down stream, heavy timbered and standing up out of the middle of the river, big and dark and solid, like a steamboat without any lights. There warn\u2019t any signs of the bar at the head\u2014it was all under water now.\r\n\r\nIt didn\u2019t take me long to get there. I shot past the head at a ripping rate, the current was so swift, and then I got into the dead water and landed on the side towards the Illinois shore. I run the canoe into a deep dent in the bank that I knowed about; I had to part the willow branches to get in; and when I made fast nobody could a seen the canoe from the outside.\r\n\r\nI went up and set down on a log at the head of the island, and looked out on the big river and the black driftwood and away over to the town, three mile away, where there was three or four lights twinkling. A monstrous big lumber-raft was about a mile up stream, coming along down, with a lantern in the middle of it. I watched it come creeping down, and when it was most abreast of where I stood I heard a man say, \u201cStern oars, there! heave her head to stabboard!\u201d I heard that just as plain as if the man was by my side.\r\n\r\nThere was a little gray in the sky now; so I stepped into the woods, and laid down for a nap before breakfast.\r\nCHAPTER VIII.\r\n\r\nThe sun was up so high when I waked that I judged it was after eight o\u2019clock. I laid there in the grass and the cool shade thinking about things, and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied. I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in there amongst them. There was freckled places on the ground where the light sifted down through the leaves, and the freckled places swapped about a little, showing there was a little breeze up there. A couple of squirrels set on a limb and jabbered at me very friendly.\r\n\r\nI was powerful lazy and comfortable\u2014didn\u2019t want to get up and cook breakfast. Well, I was dozing off again when I thinks I hears a deep sound of \u201cboom!\u201d away up the river. I rouses up, and rests on my elbow and listens; pretty soon I hears it again. I hopped up, and went and looked out at a hole in the leaves, and I see a bunch of smoke laying on the water a long ways up\u2014about abreast the ferry. And there was the ferry-boat full of people floating along down. I knowed what was the matter now. \u201cBoom!\u201d I see the white smoke squirt out of the ferry-boat\u2019s side. You see, they was firing cannon over the water, trying to make my carcass come to the top.\r\n\r\nI was pretty hungry, but it warn\u2019t going to do for me to start a fire, because they might see the smoke. So I set there and watched the cannon-smoke and listened to the boom. The river was a mile wide there, and it always looks pretty on a summer morning\u2014so I was having a good enough time seeing them hunt for my remainders if I only had a bite to eat. Well, then I happened to think how they always put quicksilver in loaves of bread and float them off, because they always go right to the drownded carcass and stop there. So, says I, I\u2019ll keep a lookout, and if any of them\u2019s floating around after me I\u2019ll give them a show. I changed to the Illinois edge of the island to see what luck I could have, and I warn\u2019t disappointed. A big double loaf come along, and I most got it with a long stick, but my foot slipped and she floated out further. Of course I was where the current set in the closest to the shore\u2014I knowed enough for that. But by-and-by along comes another one, and this time I won. I took out the plug and shook out the little dab of quicksilver, and set my teeth in. It was \u201cbaker\u2019s bread\u201d\u2014what the quality eat; none of your low-down corn-pone.\r\n\r\nI got a good place amongst the leaves, and set there on a log, munching the bread and watching the ferry-boat, and very well satisfied. And then something struck me. I says, now I reckon the widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it has gone and done it. So there ain\u2019t no doubt but there is something in that thing\u2014that is, there\u2019s something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don\u2019t work for me, and I reckon it don\u2019t work for only just the right kind.\r\n\r\nI lit a pipe and had a good long smoke, and went on watching. The ferry-boat was floating with the current, and I allowed I\u2019d have a chance to see who was aboard when she come along, because she would come in close, where the bread did. When she\u2019d got pretty well along down towards me, I put out my pipe and went to where I fished out the bread, and laid down behind a log on the bank in a little open place. Where the log forked I could peep through.\r\n\r\nBy-and-by she come along, and she drifted in so close that they could a run out a plank and walked ashore. Most everybody was on the boat. Pap, and Judge Thatcher, and Bessie Thatcher, and Jo Harper, and Tom Sawyer, and his old Aunt Polly, and Sid and Mary, and plenty more. Everybody was talking about the murder, but the captain broke in and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cLook sharp, now; the current sets in the closest here, and maybe he\u2019s washed ashore and got tangled amongst the brush at the water\u2019s edge. I hope so, anyway.\u201d\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t hope so. They all crowded up and leaned over the rails, nearly in my face, and kept still, watching with all their might. I could see them first-rate, but they couldn\u2019t see me. Then the captain sung out:\r\n\r\n\u201cStand away!\u201d and the cannon let off such a blast right before me that it made me deef with the noise and pretty near blind with the smoke, and I judged I was gone. If they\u2019d a had some bullets in, I reckon they\u2019d a got the corpse they was after. Well, I see I warn\u2019t hurt, thanks to goodness. The boat floated on and went out of sight around the shoulder of the island. I could hear the booming now and then, further and further off, and by-and-by, after an hour, I didn\u2019t hear it no more. The island was three mile long. I judged they had got to the foot, and was giving it up. But they didn\u2019t yet a while. They turned around the foot of the island and started up the channel on the Missouri side, under steam, and booming once in a while as they went. I crossed over to that side and watched them. When they got abreast the head of the island they quit shooting and dropped over to the Missouri shore and went home to the town.\r\n\r\nI knowed I was all right now. Nobody else would come a-hunting after me. I got my traps out of the canoe and made me a nice camp in the thick woods. I made a kind of a tent out of my blankets to put my things under so the rain couldn\u2019t get at them. I catched a catfish and haggled him open with my saw, and towards sundown I started my camp fire and had supper. Then I set out a line to catch some fish for breakfast.\r\n\r\nWhen it was dark I set by my camp fire smoking, and feeling pretty well satisfied; but by-and-by it got sort of lonesome, and so I went and set on the bank and listened to the current swashing along, and counted the stars and drift logs and rafts that come down, and then went to bed; there ain\u2019t no better way to put in time when you are lonesome; you can\u2019t stay so, you soon get over it.\r\n\r\nAnd so for three days and nights. No difference\u2014just the same thing. But the next day I went exploring around down through the island. I was boss of it; it all belonged to me, so to say, and I wanted to know all about it; but mainly I wanted to put in the time. I found plenty strawberries, ripe and prime; and green summer grapes, and green razberries; and the green blackberries was just beginning to show. They would all come handy by-and-by, I judged.\r\n\r\nWell, I went fooling along in the deep woods till I judged I warn\u2019t far from the foot of the island. I had my gun along, but I hadn\u2019t shot nothing; it was for protection; thought I would kill some game nigh home. About this time I mighty near stepped on a good-sized snake, and it went sliding off through the grass and flowers, and I after it, trying to get a shot at it. I clipped along, and all of a sudden I bounded right on to the ashes of a camp fire that was still smoking.\r\n\r\nMy heart jumped up amongst my lungs. I never waited for to look further, but uncocked my gun and went sneaking back on my tiptoes as fast as ever I could. Every now and then I stopped a second amongst the thick leaves and listened, but my breath come so hard I couldn\u2019t hear nothing else. I slunk along another piece further, then listened again; and so on, and so on. If I see a stump, I took it for a man; if I trod on a stick and broke it, it made me feel like a person had cut one of my breaths in two and I only got half, and the short half, too.\r\n\r\nWhen I got to camp I warn\u2019t feeling very brash, there warn\u2019t much sand in my craw; but I says, this ain\u2019t no time to be fooling around. So I got all my traps into my canoe again so as to have them out of sight, and I put out the fire and scattered the ashes around to look like an old last year\u2019s camp, and then clumb a tree.\r\n\r\nI reckon I was up in the tree two hours; but I didn\u2019t see nothing, I didn\u2019t hear nothing\u2014I only thought I heard and seen as much as a thousand things. Well, I couldn\u2019t stay up there forever; so at last I got down, but I kept in the thick woods and on the lookout all the time. All I could get to eat was berries and what was left over from breakfast.\r\n\r\nBy the time it was night I was pretty hungry. So when it was good and dark I slid out from shore before moonrise and paddled over to the Illinois bank\u2014about a quarter of a mile. I went out in the woods and cooked a supper, and I had about made up my mind I would stay there all night when I hear a plunkety-plunk, plunkety-plunk, and says to myself, horses coming; and next I hear people\u2019s voices. I got everything into the canoe as quick as I could, and then went creeping through the woods to see what I could find out. I hadn\u2019t got far when I hear a man say:\r\n\r\n\u201cWe better camp here if we can find a good place; the horses is about beat out. Let\u2019s look around.\u201d\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t wait, but shoved out and paddled away easy. I tied up in the old place, and reckoned I would sleep in the canoe.\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t sleep much. I couldn\u2019t, somehow, for thinking. And every time I waked up I thought somebody had me by the neck. So the sleep didn\u2019t do me no good. By-and-by I says to myself, I can\u2019t live this way; I\u2019m a-going to find out who it is that\u2019s here on the island with me; I\u2019ll find it out or bust. Well, I felt better right off.\r\n\r\nSo I took my paddle and slid out from shore just a step or two, and then let the canoe drop along down amongst the shadows. The moon was shining, and outside of the shadows it made it most as light as day. I poked along well on to an hour, everything still as rocks and sound asleep. Well, by this time I was most down to the foot of the island. A little ripply, cool breeze begun to blow, and that was as good as saying the night was about done. I give her a turn with the paddle and brung her nose to shore; then I got my gun and slipped out and into the edge of the woods. I sat down there on a log, and looked out through the leaves. I see the moon go off watch, and the darkness begin to blanket the river. But in a little while I see a pale streak over the treetops, and knowed the day was coming. So I took my gun and slipped off towards where I had run across that camp fire, stopping every minute or two to listen. But I hadn\u2019t no luck somehow; I couldn\u2019t seem to find the place. But by-and-by, sure enough, I catched a glimpse of fire away through the trees. I went for it, cautious and slow. By-and-by I was close enough to have a look, and there laid a man on the ground. It most give me the fan-tods. He had a blanket around his head, and his head was nearly in the fire. I set there behind a clump of bushes, in about six foot of him, and kept my eyes on him steady. It was getting gray daylight now. Pretty soon he gapped and stretched himself and hove off the blanket, and it was Miss Watson\u2019s Jim! I bet I was glad to see him. I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHello, Jim!\u201d and skipped out.\r\n\r\nHe bounced up and stared at me wild. Then he drops down on his knees, and puts his hands together and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDoan\u2019 hurt me\u2014don\u2019t! I hain\u2019t ever done no harm to a ghos\u2019. I alwuz liked dead people, en done all I could for \u2019em. You go en git in de river agin, whah you b\u2019longs, en doan\u2019 do nuffn to Ole Jim, \u2019at \u2019uz awluz yo\u2019 fren\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, I warn\u2019t long making him understand I warn\u2019t dead. I was ever so glad to see Jim. I warn\u2019t lonesome now. I told him I warn\u2019t afraid of him telling the people where I was. I talked along, but he only set there and looked at me; never said nothing. Then I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s good daylight. Le\u2019s get breakfast. Make up your camp fire good.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s de use er makin\u2019 up de camp fire to cook strawbries en sich truck? But you got a gun, hain\u2019t you? Den we kin git sumfn better den strawbries.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStrawberries and such truck,\u201d I says. \u201cIs that what you live on?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI couldn\u2019 git nuffn else,\u201d he says.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, how long you been on the island, Jim?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI come heah de night arter you\u2019s killed.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat, all that time?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes\u2014indeedy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd ain\u2019t you had nothing but that kind of rubbage to eat?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, sah\u2014nuffn else.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, you must be most starved, ain\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI reck\u2019n I could eat a hoss. I think I could. How long you ben on de islan\u2019?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSince the night I got killed.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo! W\u2019y, what has you lived on? But you got a gun. Oh, yes, you got a gun. Dat\u2019s good. Now you kill sumfn en I\u2019ll make up de fire.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo we went over to where the canoe was, and while he built a fire in a grassy open place amongst the trees, I fetched meal and bacon and coffee, and coffee-pot and frying-pan, and sugar and tin cups, and the nigger was set back considerable, because he reckoned it was all done with witchcraft. I catched a good big catfish, too, and Jim cleaned him with his knife, and fried him.\r\n\r\nWhen breakfast was ready we lolled on the grass and eat it smoking hot. Jim laid it in with all his might, for he was most about starved. Then when we had got pretty well stuffed, we laid off and lazied. By-and-by Jim says:\r\n\r\n\u201cBut looky here, Huck, who wuz it dat \u2019uz killed in dat shanty ef it warn\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\nThen I told him the whole thing, and he said it was smart. He said Tom Sawyer couldn\u2019t get up no better plan than what I had. Then I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHow do you come to be here, Jim, and how\u2019d you get here?\u201d\r\n\r\nHe looked pretty uneasy, and didn\u2019t say nothing for a minute. Then he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMaybe I better not tell.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Jim?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, dey\u2019s reasons. But you wouldn\u2019 tell on me ef I uz to tell you, would you, Huck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBlamed if I would, Jim.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I b\u2019lieve you, Huck. I\u2014I run off.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJim!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut mind, you said you wouldn\u2019 tell\u2014you know you said you wouldn\u2019 tell, Huck.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I did. I said I wouldn\u2019t, and I\u2019ll stick to it. Honest injun, I will. People would call me a low-down Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum\u2014but that don\u2019t make no difference. I ain\u2019t a-going to tell, and I ain\u2019t a-going back there, anyways. So, now, le\u2019s know all about it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, you see, it \u2019uz dis way. Ole missus\u2014dat\u2019s Miss Watson\u2014she pecks on me all de time, en treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said she wouldn\u2019 sell me down to Orleans. But I noticed dey wuz a nigger trader roun\u2019 de place considable lately, en I begin to git oneasy. Well, one night I creeps to de do\u2019 pooty late, en de do\u2019 warn\u2019t quite shet, en I hear old missus tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but she didn\u2019 want to, but she could git eight hund\u2019d dollars for me, en it \u2019uz sich a big stack o\u2019 money she couldn\u2019 resis\u2019. De widder she try to git her to say she wouldn\u2019 do it, but I never waited to hear de res\u2019. I lit out mighty quick, I tell you.\r\n\r\n\u201cI tuck out en shin down de hill, en \u2019spec to steal a skift \u2019long de sho\u2019 som\u2019ers \u2019bove de town, but dey wuz people a-stirring yit, so I hid in de ole tumble-down cooper-shop on de bank to wait for everybody to go \u2019way. Well, I wuz dah all night. Dey wuz somebody roun\u2019 all de time. \u2019Long \u2019bout six in de mawnin\u2019 skifts begin to go by, en \u2019bout eight er nine every skift dat went \u2019long wuz talkin\u2019 \u2019bout how yo\u2019 pap come over to de town en say you\u2019s killed. Dese las\u2019 skifts wuz full o\u2019 ladies en genlmen a-goin\u2019 over for to see de place. Sometimes dey\u2019d pull up at de sho\u2019 en take a res\u2019 b\u2019fo\u2019 dey started acrost, so by de talk I got to know all \u2019bout de killin\u2019. I \u2019uz powerful sorry you\u2019s killed, Huck, but I ain\u2019t no mo\u2019 now.\r\n\r\n\u201cI laid dah under de shavin\u2019s all day. I \u2019uz hungry, but I warn\u2019t afeard; bekase I knowed ole missus en de widder wuz goin\u2019 to start to de camp-meet\u2019n\u2019 right arter breakfas\u2019 en be gone all day, en dey knows I goes off wid de cattle \u2019bout daylight, so dey wouldn\u2019 \u2019spec to see me roun\u2019 de place, en so dey wouldn\u2019 miss me tell arter dark in de evenin\u2019. De yuther servants wouldn\u2019 miss me, kase dey\u2019d shin out en take holiday soon as de ole folks \u2019uz out\u2019n de way.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, when it come dark I tuck out up de river road, en went \u2019bout two mile er more to whah dey warn\u2019t no houses. I\u2019d made up my mine \u2019bout what I\u2019s agwyne to do. You see, ef I kep\u2019 on tryin\u2019 to git away afoot, de dogs \u2019ud track me; ef I stole a skift to cross over, dey\u2019d miss dat skift, you see, en dey\u2019d know \u2019bout whah I\u2019d lan\u2019 on de yuther side, en whah to pick up my track. So I says, a raff is what I\u2019s arter; it doan\u2019 make no track.\r\n\r\n\u201cI see a light a-comin\u2019 roun\u2019 de p\u2019int bymeby, so I wade\u2019 in en shove\u2019 a log ahead o\u2019 me en swum more\u2019n half way acrost de river, en got in \u2019mongst de drift-wood, en kep\u2019 my head down low, en kinder swum agin de current tell de raff come along. Den I swum to de stern uv it en tuck a-holt. It clouded up en \u2019uz pooty dark for a little while. So I clumb up en laid down on de planks. De men \u2019uz all \u2019way yonder in de middle, whah de lantern wuz. De river wuz a-risin\u2019, en dey wuz a good current; so I reck\u2019n\u2019d \u2019at by fo\u2019 in de mawnin\u2019 I\u2019d be twenty-five mile down de river, en den I\u2019d slip in jis b\u2019fo\u2019 daylight en swim asho\u2019, en take to de woods on de Illinois side.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I didn\u2019 have no luck. When we \u2019uz mos\u2019 down to de head er de islan\u2019 a man begin to come aft wid de lantern, I see it warn\u2019t no use fer to wait, so I slid overboard en struck out fer de islan\u2019. Well, I had a notion I could lan\u2019 mos\u2019 anywhers, but I couldn\u2019t\u2014bank too bluff. I \u2019uz mos\u2019 to de foot er de islan\u2019 b\u2019fo\u2019 I found\u2019 a good place. I went into de woods en jedged I wouldn\u2019 fool wid raffs no mo\u2019, long as dey move de lantern roun\u2019 so. I had my pipe en a plug er dog-leg, en some matches in my cap, en dey warn\u2019t wet, so I \u2019uz all right.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd so you ain\u2019t had no meat nor bread to eat all this time? Why didn\u2019t you get mud-turkles?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow you gwyne to git \u2019m? You can\u2019t slip up on um en grab um; en how\u2019s a body gwyne to hit um wid a rock? How could a body do it in de night? En I warn\u2019t gwyne to show mysef on de bank in de daytime.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, that\u2019s so. You\u2019ve had to keep in the woods all the time, of course. Did you hear \u2019em shooting the cannon?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes. I knowed dey was arter you. I see um go by heah\u2014watched um thoo de bushes.\u201d\r\n\r\nSome young birds come along, flying a yard or two at a time and lighting. Jim said it was a sign it was going to rain. He said it was a sign when young chickens flew that way, and so he reckoned it was the same way when young birds done it. I was going to catch some of them, but Jim wouldn\u2019t let me. He said it was death. He said his father laid mighty sick once, and some of them catched a bird, and his old granny said his father would die, and he did.\r\n\r\nAnd Jim said you mustn\u2019t count the things you are going to cook for dinner, because that would bring bad luck. The same if you shook the table-cloth after sundown. And he said if a man owned a beehive and that man died, the bees must be told about it before sun-up next morning, or else the bees would all weaken down and quit work and die. Jim said bees wouldn\u2019t sting idiots; but I didn\u2019t believe that, because I had tried them lots of times myself, and they wouldn\u2019t sting me.\r\n\r\nI had heard about some of these things before, but not all of them. Jim knowed all kinds of signs. He said he knowed most everything. I said it looked to me like all the signs was about bad luck, and so I asked him if there warn\u2019t any good-luck signs. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMighty few\u2014an\u2019 dey ain\u2019t no use to a body. What you want to know when good luck\u2019s a-comin\u2019 for? Want to keep it off?\u201d And he said: \u201cEf you\u2019s got hairy arms en a hairy breas\u2019, it\u2019s a sign dat you\u2019s agwyne to be rich. Well, dey\u2019s some use in a sign like dat, \u2019kase it\u2019s so fur ahead. You see, maybe you\u2019s got to be po\u2019 a long time fust, en so you might git discourage\u2019 en kill yo\u2019sef \u2019f you didn\u2019 know by de sign dat you gwyne to be rich bymeby.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHave you got hairy arms and a hairy breast, Jim?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s de use to ax dat question? Don\u2019t you see I has?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, are you rich?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, but I ben rich wunst, and gwyne to be rich agin. Wunst I had foteen dollars, but I tuck to specalat\u2019n\u2019, en got busted out.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat did you speculate in, Jim?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, fust I tackled stock.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat kind of stock?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, live stock\u2014cattle, you know. I put ten dollars in a cow. But I ain\u2019 gwyne to resk no mo\u2019 money in stock. De cow up \u2019n\u2019 died on my han\u2019s.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo you lost the ten dollars.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I didn\u2019t lose it all. I on\u2019y los\u2019 \u2019bout nine of it. I sole de hide en taller for a dollar en ten cents.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou had five dollars and ten cents left. Did you speculate any more?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes. You know that one-laigged nigger dat b\u2019longs to old Misto Bradish? Well, he sot up a bank, en say anybody dat put in a dollar would git fo\u2019 dollars mo\u2019 at de en\u2019 er de year. Well, all de niggers went in, but dey didn\u2019t have much. I wuz de on\u2019y one dat had much. So I stuck out for mo\u2019 dan fo\u2019 dollars, en I said \u2019f I didn\u2019 git it I\u2019d start a bank mysef. Well, o\u2019 course dat nigger want\u2019 to keep me out er de business, bekase he says dey warn\u2019t business \u2019nough for two banks, so he say I could put in my five dollars en he pay me thirty-five at de en\u2019 er de year.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo I done it. Den I reck\u2019n\u2019d I\u2019d inves\u2019 de thirty-five dollars right off en keep things a-movin\u2019. Dey wuz a nigger name\u2019 Bob, dat had ketched a wood-flat, en his marster didn\u2019 know it; en I bought it off\u2019n him en told him to take de thirty-five dollars when de en\u2019 er de year come; but somebody stole de wood-flat dat night, en nex day de one-laigged nigger say de bank\u2019s busted. So dey didn\u2019 none uv us git no money.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat did you do with the ten cents, Jim?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I \u2019uz gwyne to spen\u2019 it, but I had a dream, en de dream tole me to give it to a nigger name\u2019 Balum\u2014Balum\u2019s Ass dey call him for short; he\u2019s one er dem chuckleheads, you know. But he\u2019s lucky, dey say, en I see I warn\u2019t lucky. De dream say let Balum inves\u2019 de ten cents en he\u2019d make a raise for me. Well, Balum he tuck de money, en when he wuz in church he hear de preacher say dat whoever give to de po\u2019 len\u2019 to de Lord, en boun\u2019 to git his money back a hund\u2019d times. So Balum he tuck en give de ten cents to de po\u2019, en laid low to see what wuz gwyne to come of it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, what did come of it, Jim?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNuffn never come of it. I couldn\u2019 manage to k\u2019leck dat money no way; en Balum he couldn\u2019. I ain\u2019 gwyne to len\u2019 no mo\u2019 money \u2019dout I see de security. Boun\u2019 to git yo\u2019 money back a hund\u2019d times, de preacher says! Ef I could git de ten cents back, I\u2019d call it squah, en be glad er de chanst.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it\u2019s all right anyway, Jim, long as you\u2019re going to be rich again some time or other.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes; en I\u2019s rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I\u2019s wuth eight hund\u2019d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn\u2019 want no mo\u2019.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER IX.\r\n\r\nI wanted to go and look at a place right about the middle of the island that I\u2019d found when I was exploring; so we started and soon got to it, because the island was only three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide.\r\n\r\nThis place was a tolerable long, steep hill or ridge about forty foot high. We had a rough time getting to the top, the sides was so steep and the bushes so thick. We tramped and clumb around all over it, and by-and-by found a good big cavern in the rock, most up to the top on the side towards Illinois. The cavern was as big as two or three rooms bunched together, and Jim could stand up straight in it. It was cool in there. Jim was for putting our traps in there right away, but I said we didn\u2019t want to be climbing up and down there all the time.\r\n\r\nJim said if we had the canoe hid in a good place, and had all the traps in the cavern, we could rush there if anybody was to come to the island, and they would never find us without dogs. And, besides, he said them little birds had said it was going to rain, and did I want the things to get wet?\r\n\r\nSo we went back and got the canoe, and paddled up abreast the cavern, and lugged all the traps up there. Then we hunted up a place close by to hide the canoe in, amongst the thick willows. We took some fish off of the lines and set them again, and begun to get ready for dinner.\r\n\r\nThe door of the cavern was big enough to roll a hogshead in, and on one side of the door the floor stuck out a little bit, and was flat and a good place to build a fire on. So we built it there and cooked dinner.\r\n\r\nWe spread the blankets inside for a carpet, and eat our dinner in there. We put all the other things handy at the back of the cavern. Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it. Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest\u2014fst! it was as bright as glory, and you\u2019d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you\u2019d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs\u2014where it\u2019s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.\r\n\r\n\u201cJim, this is nice,\u201d I says. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t want to be nowhere else but here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot corn-bread.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, you wouldn\u2019t a ben here \u2019f it hadn\u2019t a ben for Jim. You\u2019d a ben down dah in de woods widout any dinner, en gittn\u2019 mos\u2019 drownded, too; dat you would, honey. Chickens knows when it\u2019s gwyne to rain, en so do de birds, chile.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe river went on raising and raising for ten or twelve days, till at last it was over the banks. The water was three or four foot deep on the island in the low places and on the Illinois bottom. On that side it was a good many miles wide, but on the Missouri side it was the same old distance across\u2014a half a mile\u2014because the Missouri shore was just a wall of high bluffs.\r\n\r\nDaytimes we paddled all over the island in the canoe, It was mighty cool and shady in the deep woods, even if the sun was blazing outside. We went winding in and out amongst the trees, and sometimes the vines hung so thick we had to back away and go some other way. Well, on every old broken-down tree you could see rabbits and snakes and such things; and when the island had been overflowed a day or two they got so tame, on account of being hungry, that you could paddle right up and put your hand on them if you wanted to; but not the snakes and turtles\u2014they would slide off in the water. The ridge our cavern was in was full of them. We could a had pets enough if we\u2019d wanted them.\r\n\r\nOne night we catched a little section of a lumber raft\u2014nice pine planks. It was twelve foot wide and about fifteen or sixteen foot long, and the top stood above water six or seven inches\u2014a solid, level floor. We could see saw-logs go by in the daylight sometimes, but we let them go; we didn\u2019t show ourselves in daylight.\r\n\r\nAnother night when we was up at the head of the island, just before daylight, here comes a frame-house down, on the west side. She was a two-story, and tilted over considerable. We paddled out and got aboard\u2014clumb in at an upstairs window. But it was too dark to see yet, so we made the canoe fast and set in her to wait for daylight.\r\n\r\nThe light begun to come before we got to the foot of the island. Then we looked in at the window. We could make out a bed, and a table, and two old chairs, and lots of things around about on the floor, and there was clothes hanging against the wall. There was something laying on the floor in the far corner that looked like a man. So Jim says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHello, you!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut it didn\u2019t budge. So I hollered again, and then Jim says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDe man ain\u2019t asleep\u2014he\u2019s dead. You hold still\u2014I\u2019ll go en see.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe went, and bent down and looked, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a dead man. Yes, indeedy; naked, too. He\u2019s ben shot in de back. I reck\u2019n he\u2019s ben dead two er three days. Come in, Huck, but doan\u2019 look at his face\u2014it\u2019s too gashly.\u201d\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t look at him at all. Jim throwed some old rags over him, but he needn\u2019t done it; I didn\u2019t want to see him. There was heaps of old greasy cards scattered around over the floor, and old whisky bottles, and a couple of masks made out of black cloth; and all over the walls was the ignorantest kind of words and pictures made with charcoal. There was two old dirty calico dresses, and a sun-bonnet, and some women\u2019s underclothes hanging against the wall, and some men\u2019s clothing, too. We put the lot into the canoe\u2014it might come good. There was a boy\u2019s old speckled straw hat on the floor; I took that, too. And there was a bottle that had had milk in it, and it had a rag stopper for a baby to suck. We would a took the bottle, but it was broke. There was a seedy old chest, and an old hair trunk with the hinges broke. They stood open, but there warn\u2019t nothing left in them that was any account. The way things was scattered about we reckoned the people left in a hurry, and warn\u2019t fixed so as to carry off most of their stuff.\r\n\r\nWe got an old tin lantern, and a butcher-knife without any handle, and a bran-new Barlow knife worth two bits in any store, and a lot of tallow candles, and a tin candlestick, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty old bedquilt off the bed, and a reticule with needles and pins and beeswax and buttons and thread and all such truck in it, and a hatchet and some nails, and a fishline as thick as my little finger with some monstrous hooks on it, and a roll of buckskin, and a leather dog-collar, and a horseshoe, and some vials of medicine that didn\u2019t have no label on them; and just as we was leaving I found a tolerable good curry-comb, and Jim he found a ratty old fiddle-bow, and a wooden leg. The straps was broke off of it, but, barring that, it was a good enough leg, though it was too long for me and not long enough for Jim, and we couldn\u2019t find the other one, though we hunted all around.\r\n\r\nAnd so, take it all around, we made a good haul. When we was ready to shove off we was a quarter of a mile below the island, and it was pretty broad day; so I made Jim lay down in the canoe and cover up with the quilt, because if he set up people could tell he was a nigger a good ways off. I paddled over to the Illinois shore, and drifted down most a half a mile doing it. I crept up the dead water under the bank, and hadn\u2019t no accidents and didn\u2019t see nobody. We got home all safe.\r\nCHAPTER X.\r\n\r\nAfter breakfast I wanted to talk about the dead man and guess out how he come to be killed, but Jim didn\u2019t want to. He said it would fetch bad luck; and besides, he said, he might come and ha\u2019nt us; he said a man that warn\u2019t buried was more likely to go a-ha\u2019nting around than one that was planted and comfortable. That sounded pretty reasonable, so I didn\u2019t say no more; but I couldn\u2019t keep from studying over it and wishing I knowed who shot the man, and what they done it for.\r\n\r\nWe rummaged the clothes we\u2019d got, and found eight dollars in silver sewed up in the lining of an old blanket overcoat. Jim said he reckoned the people in that house stole the coat, because if they\u2019d a knowed the money was there they wouldn\u2019t a left it. I said I reckoned they killed him, too; but Jim didn\u2019t want to talk about that. I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNow you think it\u2019s bad luck; but what did you say when I fetched in the snake-skin that I found on the top of the ridge day before yesterday? You said it was the worst bad luck in the world to touch a snake-skin with my hands. Well, here\u2019s your bad luck! We\u2019ve raked in all this truck and eight dollars besides. I wish we could have some bad luck like this every day, Jim.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNever you mind, honey, never you mind. Don\u2019t you git too peart. It\u2019s a-comin\u2019. Mind I tell you, it\u2019s a-comin\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt did come, too. It was a Tuesday that we had that talk. Well, after dinner Friday we was laying around in the grass at the upper end of the ridge, and got out of tobacco. I went to the cavern to get some, and found a rattlesnake in there. I killed him, and curled him up on the foot of Jim\u2019s blanket, ever so natural, thinking there\u2019d be some fun when Jim found him there. Well, by night I forgot all about the snake, and when Jim flung himself down on the blanket while I struck a light the snake\u2019s mate was there, and bit him.\r\n\r\nHe jumped up yelling, and the first thing the light showed was the varmint curled up and ready for another spring. I laid him out in a second with a stick, and Jim grabbed pap\u2019s whisky-jug and begun to pour it down.\r\n\r\nHe was barefooted, and the snake bit him right on the heel. That all comes of my being such a fool as to not remember that wherever you leave a dead snake its mate always comes there and curls around it. Jim told me to chop off the snake\u2019s head and throw it away, and then skin the body and roast a piece of it. I done it, and he eat it and said it would help cure him. He made me take off the rattles and tie them around his wrist, too. He said that that would help. Then I slid out quiet and throwed the snakes clear away amongst the bushes; for I warn\u2019t going to let Jim find out it was all my fault, not if I could help it.\r\n\r\nJim sucked and sucked at the jug, and now and then he got out of his head and pitched around and yelled; but every time he come to himself he went to sucking at the jug again. His foot swelled up pretty big, and so did his leg; but by-and-by the drunk begun to come, and so I judged he was all right; but I\u2019d druther been bit with a snake than pap\u2019s whisky.\r\n\r\nJim was laid up for four days and nights. Then the swelling was all gone and he was around again. I made up my mind I wouldn\u2019t ever take a-holt of a snake-skin again with my hands, now that I see what had come of it. Jim said he reckoned I would believe him next time. And he said that handling a snake-skin was such awful bad luck that maybe we hadn\u2019t got to the end of it yet. He said he druther see the new moon over his left shoulder as much as a thousand times than take up a snake-skin in his hand. Well, I was getting to feel that way myself, though I\u2019ve always reckoned that looking at the new moon over your left shoulder is one of the carelessest and foolishest things a body can do. Old Hank Bunker done it once, and bragged about it; and in less than two years he got drunk and fell off of the shot-tower, and spread himself out so that he was just a kind of a layer, as you may say; and they slid him edgeways between two barn doors for a coffin, and buried him so, so they say, but I didn\u2019t see it. Pap told me. But anyway it all come of looking at the moon that way, like a fool.\r\n\r\nWell, the days went along, and the river went down between its banks again; and about the first thing we done was to bait one of the big hooks with a skinned rabbit and set it and catch a catfish that was as big as a man, being six foot two inches long, and weighed over two hundred pounds. We couldn\u2019t handle him, of course; he would a flung us into Illinois. We just set there and watched him rip and tear around till he drownded. We found a brass button in his stomach and a round ball, and lots of rubbage. We split the ball open with the hatchet, and there was a spool in it. Jim said he\u2019d had it there a long time, to coat it over so and make a ball of it. It was as big a fish as was ever catched in the Mississippi, I reckon. Jim said he hadn\u2019t ever seen a bigger one. He would a been worth a good deal over at the village. They peddle out such a fish as that by the pound in the market-house there; everybody buys some of him; his meat\u2019s as white as snow and makes a good fry.\r\n\r\nNext morning I said it was getting slow and dull, and I wanted to get a stirring up some way. I said I reckoned I would slip over the river and find out what was going on. Jim liked that notion; but he said I must go in the dark and look sharp. Then he studied it over and said, couldn\u2019t I put on some of them old things and dress up like a girl? That was a good notion, too. So we shortened up one of the calico gowns, and I turned up my trouser-legs to my knees and got into it. Jim hitched it behind with the hooks, and it was a fair fit. I put on the sun-bonnet and tied it under my chin, and then for a body to look in and see my face was like looking down a joint of stove-pipe. Jim said nobody would know me, even in the daytime, hardly. I practiced around all day to get the hang of the things, and by-and-by I could do pretty well in them, only Jim said I didn\u2019t walk like a girl; and he said I must quit pulling up my gown to get at my britches-pocket. I took notice, and done better.\r\n\r\nI started up the Illinois shore in the canoe just after dark.\r\n\r\nI started across to the town from a little below the ferry-landing, and the drift of the current fetched me in at the bottom of the town. I tied up and started along the bank. There was a light burning in a little shanty that hadn\u2019t been lived in for a long time, and I wondered who had took up quarters there. I slipped up and peeped in at the window. There was a woman about forty year old in there knitting by a candle that was on a pine table. I didn\u2019t know her face; she was a stranger, for you couldn\u2019t start a face in that town that I didn\u2019t know. Now this was lucky, because I was weakening; I was getting afraid I had come; people might know my voice and find me out. But if this woman had been in such a little town two days she could tell me all I wanted to know; so I knocked at the door, and made up my mind I wouldn\u2019t forget I was a girl.\r\nCHAPTER XI.\r\n\r\n\u201cCome in,\u201d says the woman, and I did. She says: \u201cTake a cheer.\u201d\r\n\r\nI done it. She looked me all over with her little shiny eyes, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat might your name be?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSarah Williams.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere \u2019bouts do you live? In this neighborhood?\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cNo\u2019m. In Hookerville, seven mile below. I\u2019ve walked all the way and I\u2019m all tired out.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHungry, too, I reckon. I\u2019ll find you something.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo\u2019m, I ain\u2019t hungry. I was so hungry I had to stop two miles below here at a farm; so I ain\u2019t hungry no more. It\u2019s what makes me so late. My mother\u2019s down sick, and out of money and everything, and I come to tell my uncle Abner Moore. He lives at the upper end of the town, she says. I hain\u2019t ever been here before. Do you know him?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo; but I don\u2019t know everybody yet. I haven\u2019t lived here quite two weeks. It\u2019s a considerable ways to the upper end of the town. You better stay here all night. Take off your bonnet.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo,\u201d I says; \u201cI\u2019ll rest a while, I reckon, and go on. I ain\u2019t afeared of the dark.\u201d\r\n\r\nShe said she wouldn\u2019t let me go by myself, but her husband would be in by-and-by, maybe in a hour and a half, and she\u2019d send him along with me. Then she got to talking about her husband, and about her relations up the river, and her relations down the river, and about how much better off they used to was, and how they didn\u2019t know but they\u2019d made a mistake coming to our town, instead of letting well alone\u2014and so on and so on, till I was afeard I had made a mistake coming to her to find out what was going on in the town; but by-and-by she dropped on to pap and the murder, and then I was pretty willing to let her clatter right along. She told about me and Tom Sawyer finding the six thousand dollars (only she got it ten) and all about pap and what a hard lot he was, and what a hard lot I was, and at last she got down to where I was murdered. I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWho done it? We\u2019ve heard considerable about these goings on down in Hookerville, but we don\u2019t know who \u2019twas that killed Huck Finn.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I reckon there\u2019s a right smart chance of people here that\u2019d like to know who killed him. Some think old Finn done it himself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo\u2014is that so?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMost everybody thought it at first. He\u2019ll never know how nigh he come to getting lynched. But before night they changed around and judged it was done by a runaway nigger named Jim.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy he\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\nI stopped. I reckoned I better keep still. She run on, and never noticed I had put in at all:\r\n\r\n\u201cThe nigger run off the very night Huck Finn was killed. So there\u2019s a reward out for him\u2014three hundred dollars. And there\u2019s a reward out for old Finn, too\u2014two hundred dollars. You see, he come to town the morning after the murder, and told about it, and was out with \u2019em on the ferry-boat hunt, and right away after he up and left. Before night they wanted to lynch him, but he was gone, you see. Well, next day they found out the nigger was gone; they found out he hadn\u2019t ben seen sence ten o\u2019clock the night the murder was done. So then they put it on him, you see; and while they was full of it, next day, back comes old Finn, and went boo-hooing to Judge Thatcher to get money to hunt for the nigger all over Illinois with. The judge gave him some, and that evening he got drunk, and was around till after midnight with a couple of mighty hard-looking strangers, and then went off with them. Well, he hain\u2019t come back sence, and they ain\u2019t looking for him back till this thing blows over a little, for people thinks now that he killed his boy and fixed things so folks would think robbers done it, and then he\u2019d get Huck\u2019s money without having to bother a long time with a lawsuit. People do say he warn\u2019t any too good to do it. Oh, he\u2019s sly, I reckon. If he don\u2019t come back for a year he\u2019ll be all right. You can\u2019t prove anything on him, you know; everything will be quieted down then, and he\u2019ll walk in Huck\u2019s money as easy as nothing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I reckon so, \u2019m. I don\u2019t see nothing in the way of it. Has everybody quit thinking the nigger done it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, no, not everybody. A good many thinks he done it. But they\u2019ll get the nigger pretty soon now, and maybe they can scare it out of him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, are they after him yet?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, you\u2019re innocent, ain\u2019t you! Does three hundred dollars lay around every day for people to pick up? Some folks think the nigger ain\u2019t far from here. I\u2019m one of them\u2014but I hain\u2019t talked it around. A few days ago I was talking with an old couple that lives next door in the log shanty, and they happened to say hardly anybody ever goes to that island over yonder that they call Jackson\u2019s Island. Don\u2019t anybody live there? says I. No, nobody, says they. I didn\u2019t say any more, but I done some thinking. I was pretty near certain I\u2019d seen smoke over there, about the head of the island, a day or two before that, so I says to myself, like as not that nigger\u2019s hiding over there; anyway, says I, it\u2019s worth the trouble to give the place a hunt. I hain\u2019t seen any smoke sence, so I reckon maybe he\u2019s gone, if it was him; but husband\u2019s going over to see\u2014him and another man. He was gone up the river; but he got back to-day, and I told him as soon as he got here two hours ago.\u201d\r\n\r\nI had got so uneasy I couldn\u2019t set still. I had to do something with my hands; so I took up a needle off of the table and went to threading it. My hands shook, and I was making a bad job of it. When the woman stopped talking I looked up, and she was looking at me pretty curious and smiling a little. I put down the needle and thread, and let on to be interested\u2014and I was, too\u2014and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cThree hundred dollars is a power of money. I wish my mother could get it. Is your husband going over there to-night?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes. He went up-town with the man I was telling you of, to get a boat and see if they could borrow another gun. They\u2019ll go over after midnight.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCouldn\u2019t they see better if they was to wait till daytime?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes. And couldn\u2019t the nigger see better, too? After midnight he\u2019ll likely be asleep, and they can slip around through the woods and hunt up his camp fire all the better for the dark, if he\u2019s got one.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t think of that.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe woman kept looking at me pretty curious, and I didn\u2019t feel a bit comfortable. Pretty soon she says,\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat did you say your name was, honey?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cM\u2014Mary Williams.\u201d\r\n\r\nSomehow it didn\u2019t seem to me that I said it was Mary before, so I didn\u2019t look up\u2014seemed to me I said it was Sarah; so I felt sort of cornered, and was afeared maybe I was looking it, too. I wished the woman would say something more; the longer she set still the uneasier I was. But now she says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHoney, I thought you said it was Sarah when you first come in?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes\u2019m, I did. Sarah Mary Williams. Sarah\u2019s my first name. Some calls me Sarah, some calls me Mary.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, that\u2019s the way of it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes\u2019m.\u201d\r\n\r\nI was feeling better then, but I wished I was out of there, anyway. I couldn\u2019t look up yet.\r\n\r\nWell, the woman fell to talking about how hard times was, and how poor they had to live, and how the rats was as free as if they owned the place, and so forth and so on, and then I got easy again. She was right about the rats. You\u2019d see one stick his nose out of a hole in the corner every little while. She said she had to have things handy to throw at them when she was alone, or they wouldn\u2019t give her no peace. She showed me a bar of lead twisted up into a knot, and said she was a good shot with it generly, but she\u2019d wrenched her arm a day or two ago, and didn\u2019t know whether she could throw true now. But she watched for a chance, and directly banged away at a rat; but she missed him wide, and said \u201cOuch!\u201d it hurt her arm so. Then she told me to try for the next one. I wanted to be getting away before the old man got back, but of course I didn\u2019t let on. I got the thing, and the first rat that showed his nose I let drive, and if he\u2019d a stayed where he was he\u2019d a been a tolerable sick rat. She said that was first-rate, and she reckoned I would hive the next one. She went and got the lump of lead and fetched it back, and brought along a hank of yarn which she wanted me to help her with. I held up my two hands and she put the hank over them, and went on talking about her and her husband\u2019s matters. But she broke off to say:\r\n\r\n\u201cKeep your eye on the rats. You better have the lead in your lap, handy.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo she dropped the lump into my lap just at that moment, and I clapped my legs together on it and she went on talking. But only about a minute. Then she took off the hank and looked me straight in the face, and very pleasant, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cCome, now, what\u2019s your real name?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWh\u2014what, mum?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s your real name? Is it Bill, or Tom, or Bob?\u2014or what is it?\u201d\r\n\r\nI reckon I shook like a leaf, and I didn\u2019t know hardly what to do. But I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease to don\u2019t poke fun at a poor girl like me, mum. If I\u2019m in the way here, I\u2019ll\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, you won\u2019t. Set down and stay where you are. I ain\u2019t going to hurt you, and I ain\u2019t going to tell on you, nuther. You just tell me your secret, and trust me. I\u2019ll keep it; and, what\u2019s more, I\u2019ll help you. So\u2019ll my old man if you want him to. You see, you\u2019re a runaway \u2019prentice, that\u2019s all. It ain\u2019t anything. There ain\u2019t no harm in it. You\u2019ve been treated bad, and you made up your mind to cut. Bless you, child, I wouldn\u2019t tell on you. Tell me all about it now, that\u2019s a good boy.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo I said it wouldn\u2019t be no use to try to play it any longer, and I would just make a clean breast and tell her everything, but she musn\u2019t go back on her promise. Then I told her my father and mother was dead, and the law had bound me out to a mean old farmer in the country thirty mile back from the river, and he treated me so bad I couldn\u2019t stand it no longer; he went away to be gone a couple of days, and so I took my chance and stole some of his daughter\u2019s old clothes and cleared out, and I had been three nights coming the thirty miles. I traveled nights, and hid daytimes and slept, and the bag of bread and meat I carried from home lasted me all the way, and I had a-plenty. I said I believed my uncle Abner Moore would take care of me, and so that was why I struck out for this town of Goshen.\r\n\r\n\u201cGoshen, child? This ain\u2019t Goshen. This is St. Petersburg. Goshen\u2019s ten mile further up the river. Who told you this was Goshen?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, a man I met at daybreak this morning, just as I was going to turn into the woods for my regular sleep. He told me when the roads forked I must take the right hand, and five mile would fetch me to Goshen.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe was drunk, I reckon. He told you just exactly wrong.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, he did act like he was drunk, but it ain\u2019t no matter now. I got to be moving along. I\u2019ll fetch Goshen before daylight.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHold on a minute. I\u2019ll put you up a snack to eat. You might want it.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo she put me up a snack, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cSay, when a cow\u2019s laying down, which end of her gets up first? Answer up prompt now\u2014don\u2019t stop to study over it. Which end gets up first?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe hind end, mum.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, a horse?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe for\u2019rard end, mum.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhich side of a tree does the moss grow on?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNorth side.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf fifteen cows is browsing on a hillside, how many of them eats with their heads pointed the same direction?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe whole fifteen, mum.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I reckon you have lived in the country. I thought maybe you was trying to hocus me again. What\u2019s your real name, now?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGeorge Peters, mum.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, try to remember it, George. Don\u2019t forget and tell me it\u2019s Elexander before you go, and then get out by saying it\u2019s George Elexander when I catch you. And don\u2019t go about women in that old calico. You do a girl tolerable poor, but you might fool men, maybe. Bless you, child, when you set out to thread a needle don\u2019t hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it; that\u2019s the way a woman most always does, but a man always does t\u2019other way. And when you throw at a rat or anything, hitch yourself up a tiptoe and fetch your hand up over your head as awkward as you can, and miss your rat about six or seven foot. Throw stiff-armed from the shoulder, like there was a pivot there for it to turn on, like a girl; not from the wrist and elbow, with your arm out to one side, like a boy. And, mind you, when a girl tries to catch anything in her lap she throws her knees apart; she don\u2019t clap them together, the way you did when you catched the lump of lead. Why, I spotted you for a boy when you was threading the needle; and I contrived the other things just to make certain. Now trot along to your uncle, Sarah Mary Williams George Elexander Peters, and if you get into trouble you send word to Mrs. Judith Loftus, which is me, and I\u2019ll do what I can to get you out of it. Keep the river road all the way, and next time you tramp take shoes and socks with you. The river road\u2019s a rocky one, and your feet\u2019ll be in a condition when you get to Goshen, I reckon.\u201d\r\n\r\nI went up the bank about fifty yards, and then I doubled on my tracks and slipped back to where my canoe was, a good piece below the house. I jumped in, and was off in a hurry. I went up-stream far enough to make the head of the island, and then started across. I took off the sun-bonnet, for I didn\u2019t want no blinders on then. When I was about the middle I heard the clock begin to strike, so I stops and listens; the sound come faint over the water but clear\u2014eleven. When I struck the head of the island I never waited to blow, though I was most winded, but I shoved right into the timber where my old camp used to be, and started a good fire there on a high and dry spot.\r\n\r\nThen I jumped in the canoe and dug out for our place, a mile and a half below, as hard as I could go. I landed, and slopped through the timber and up the ridge and into the cavern. There Jim laid, sound asleep on the ground. I roused him out and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cGit up and hump yourself, Jim! There ain\u2019t a minute to lose. They\u2019re after us!\u201d\r\n\r\nJim never asked no questions, he never said a word; but the way he worked for the next half an hour showed about how he was scared. By that time everything we had in the world was on our raft, and she was ready to be shoved out from the willow cove where she was hid. We put out the camp fire at the cavern the first thing, and didn\u2019t show a candle outside after that.\r\n\r\nI took the canoe out from the shore a little piece, and took a look; but if there was a boat around I couldn\u2019t see it, for stars and shadows ain\u2019t good to see by. Then we got out the raft and slipped along down in the shade, past the foot of the island dead still\u2014never saying a word.\r\nCHAPTER XII.\r\n\r\nIt must a been close on to one o\u2019clock when we got below the island at last, and the raft did seem to go mighty slow. If a boat was to come along we was going to take to the canoe and break for the Illinois shore; and it was well a boat didn\u2019t come, for we hadn\u2019t ever thought to put the gun in the canoe, or a fishing-line, or anything to eat. We was in ruther too much of a sweat to think of so many things. It warn\u2019t good judgment to put everything on the raft.\r\n\r\nIf the men went to the island I just expect they found the camp fire I built, and watched it all night for Jim to come. Anyways, they stayed away from us, and if my building the fire never fooled them it warn\u2019t no fault of mine. I played it as low down on them as I could.\r\n\r\nWhen the first streak of day began to show we tied up to a tow-head in a big bend on the Illinois side, and hacked off cottonwood branches with the hatchet, and covered up the raft with them so she looked like there had been a cave-in in the bank there. A tow-head is a sandbar that has cottonwoods on it as thick as harrow-teeth.\r\n\r\nWe had mountains on the Missouri shore and heavy timber on the Illinois side, and the channel was down the Missouri shore at that place, so we warn\u2019t afraid of anybody running across us. We laid there all day, and watched the rafts and steamboats spin down the Missouri shore, and up-bound steamboats fight the big river in the middle. I told Jim all about the time I had jabbering with that woman; and Jim said she was a smart one, and if she was to start after us herself she wouldn\u2019t set down and watch a camp fire\u2014no, sir, she\u2019d fetch a dog. Well, then, I said, why couldn\u2019t she tell her husband to fetch a dog? Jim said he bet she did think of it by the time the men was ready to start, and he believed they must a gone up-town to get a dog and so they lost all that time, or else we wouldn\u2019t be here on a tow-head sixteen or seventeen mile below the village\u2014no, indeedy, we would be in that same old town again. So I said I didn\u2019t care what was the reason they didn\u2019t get us as long as they didn\u2019t.\r\n\r\nWhen it was beginning to come on dark we poked our heads out of the cottonwood thicket, and looked up and down and across; nothing in sight; so Jim took up some of the top planks of the raft and built a snug wigwam to get under in blazing weather and rainy, and to keep the things dry. Jim made a floor for the wigwam, and raised it a foot or more above the level of the raft, so now the blankets and all the traps was out of reach of steamboat waves. Right in the middle of the wigwam we made a layer of dirt about five or six inches deep with a frame around it for to hold it to its place; this was to build a fire on in sloppy weather or chilly; the wigwam would keep it from being seen. We made an extra steering-oar, too, because one of the others might get broke on a snag or something. We fixed up a short forked stick to hang the old lantern on, because we must always light the lantern whenever we see a steamboat coming down-stream, to keep from getting run over; but we wouldn\u2019t have to light it for up-stream boats unless we see we was in what they call a \u201ccrossing\u201d; for the river was pretty high yet, very low banks being still a little under water; so up-bound boats didn\u2019t always run the channel, but hunted easy water.\r\n\r\nThis second night we run between seven and eight hours, with a current that was making over four mile an hour. We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn\u2019t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn\u2019t often that we laughed\u2014only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all\u2014that night, nor the next, nor the next.\r\n\r\nEvery night we passed towns, some of them away up on black hillsides, nothing but just a shiny bed of lights; not a house could you see. The fifth night we passed St. Louis, and it was like the whole world lit up. In St. Petersburg they used to say there was twenty or thirty thousand people in St. Louis, but I never believed it till I see that wonderful spread of lights at two o\u2019clock that still night. There warn\u2019t a sound there; everybody was asleep.\r\n\r\nEvery night now I used to slip ashore towards ten o\u2019clock at some little village, and buy ten or fifteen cents\u2019 worth of meal or bacon or other stuff to eat; and sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn\u2019t roosting comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don\u2019t want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain\u2019t ever forgot. I never see pap when he didn\u2019t want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway.\r\n\r\nMornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn\u2019t no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn\u2019t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right; so the best way would be for us to pick out two or three things from the list and say we wouldn\u2019t borrow them any more\u2014then he reckoned it wouldn\u2019t be no harm to borrow the others. So we talked it over all one night, drifting along down the river, trying to make up our minds whether to drop the watermelons, or the cantelopes, or the mushmelons, or what. But towards daylight we got it all settled satisfactory, and concluded to drop crabapples and p\u2019simmons. We warn\u2019t feeling just right before that, but it was all comfortable now. I was glad the way it come out, too, because crabapples ain\u2019t ever good, and the p\u2019simmons wouldn\u2019t be ripe for two or three months yet.\r\n\r\nWe shot a water-fowl, now and then, that got up too early in the morning or didn\u2019t go to bed early enough in the evening. Take it all round, we lived pretty high.\r\n\r\nThe fifth night below St. Louis we had a big storm after midnight, with a power of thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in a solid sheet. We stayed in the wigwam and let the raft take care of itself. When the lightning glared out we could see a big straight river ahead, and high, rocky bluffs on both sides. By-and-by says I, \u201cHel-lo, Jim, looky yonder!\u201d It was a steamboat that had killed herself on a rock. We was drifting straight down for her. The lightning showed her very distinct. She was leaning over, with part of her upper deck above water, and you could see every little chimbly-guy clean and clear, and a chair by the big bell, with an old slouch hat hanging on the back of it, when the flashes come.\r\n\r\nWell, it being away in the night and stormy, and all so mysterious-like, I felt just the way any other boy would a felt when I see that wreck laying there so mournful and lonesome in the middle of the river. I wanted to get aboard of her and slink around a little, and see what there was there. So I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cLe\u2019s land on her, Jim.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut Jim was dead against it at first. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI doan\u2019 want to go fool\u2019n \u2019long er no wrack. We\u2019s doin\u2019 blame\u2019 well, en we better let blame\u2019 well alone, as de good book says. Like as not dey\u2019s a watchman on dat wrack.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWatchman your grandmother,\u201d I says; \u201cthere ain\u2019t nothing to watch but the texas and the pilot-house; and do you reckon anybody\u2019s going to resk his life for a texas and a pilot-house such a night as this, when it\u2019s likely to break up and wash off down the river any minute?\u201d Jim couldn\u2019t say nothing to that, so he didn\u2019t try. \u201cAnd besides,\u201d I says, \u201cwe might borrow something worth having out of the captain\u2019s stateroom. Seegars, I bet you\u2014and cost five cents apiece, solid cash. Steamboat captains is always rich, and get sixty dollars a month, and they don\u2019t care a cent what a thing costs, you know, long as they want it. Stick a candle in your pocket; I can\u2019t rest, Jim, till we give her a rummaging. Do you reckon Tom Sawyer would ever go by this thing? Not for pie, he wouldn\u2019t. He\u2019d call it an adventure\u2014that\u2019s what he\u2019d call it; and he\u2019d land on that wreck if it was his last act. And wouldn\u2019t he throw style into it?\u2014wouldn\u2019t he spread himself, nor nothing? Why, you\u2019d think it was Christopher C\u2019lumbus discovering Kingdom-Come. I wish Tom Sawyer was here.\u201d\r\n\r\nJim he grumbled a little, but give in. He said we mustn\u2019t talk any more than we could help, and then talk mighty low. The lightning showed us the wreck again just in time, and we fetched the stabboard derrick, and made fast there.\r\n\r\nThe deck was high out here. We went sneaking down the slope of it to labboard, in the dark, towards the texas, feeling our way slow with our feet, and spreading our hands out to fend off the guys, for it was so dark we couldn\u2019t see no sign of them. Pretty soon we struck the forward end of the skylight, and clumb on to it; and the next step fetched us in front of the captain\u2019s door, which was open, and by Jimminy, away down through the texas-hall we see a light! and all in the same second we seem to hear low voices in yonder!\r\n\r\nJim whispered and said he was feeling powerful sick, and told me to come along. I says, all right, and was going to start for the raft; but just then I heard a voice wail out and say:\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, please don\u2019t, boys; I swear I won\u2019t ever tell!\u201d\r\n\r\nAnother voice said, pretty loud:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a lie, Jim Turner. You\u2019ve acted this way before. You always want more\u2019n your share of the truck, and you\u2019ve always got it, too, because you\u2019ve swore \u2019t if you didn\u2019t you\u2019d tell. But this time you\u2019ve said it jest one time too many. You\u2019re the meanest, treacherousest hound in this country.\u201d\r\n\r\nBy this time Jim was gone for the raft. I was just a-biling with curiosity; and I says to myself, Tom Sawyer wouldn\u2019t back out now, and so I won\u2019t either; I\u2019m a-going to see what\u2019s going on here. So I dropped on my hands and knees in the little passage, and crept aft in the dark till there warn\u2019t but one stateroom betwixt me and the cross-hall of the texas. Then in there I see a man stretched on the floor and tied hand and foot, and two men standing over him, and one of them had a dim lantern in his hand, and the other one had a pistol. This one kept pointing the pistol at the man\u2019s head on the floor, and saying:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019d like to! And I orter, too\u2014a mean skunk!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe man on the floor would shrivel up and say, \u201cOh, please don\u2019t, Bill; I hain\u2019t ever goin\u2019 to tell.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd every time he said that the man with the lantern would laugh and say:\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2019Deed you ain\u2019t! You never said no truer thing \u2019n that, you bet you.\u201d And once he said: \u201cHear him beg! and yit if we hadn\u2019t got the best of him and tied him he\u2019d a killed us both. And what for? Jist for noth\u2019n. Jist because we stood on our rights\u2014that\u2019s what for. But I lay you ain\u2019t a-goin\u2019 to threaten nobody any more, Jim Turner. Put up that pistol, Bill.\u201d\r\n\r\nBill says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t want to, Jake Packard. I\u2019m for killin\u2019 him\u2014and didn\u2019t he kill old Hatfield jist the same way\u2014and don\u2019t he deserve it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I don\u2019t want him killed, and I\u2019ve got my reasons for it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBless yo\u2019 heart for them words, Jake Packard! I\u2019ll never forgit you long\u2019s I live!\u201d says the man on the floor, sort of blubbering.\r\n\r\nPackard didn\u2019t take no notice of that, but hung up his lantern on a nail and started towards where I was there in the dark, and motioned Bill to come. I crawfished as fast as I could about two yards, but the boat slanted so that I couldn\u2019t make very good time; so to keep from getting run over and catched I crawled into a stateroom on the upper side. The man came a-pawing along in the dark, and when Packard got to my stateroom, he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2014come in here.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd in he come, and Bill after him. But before they got in I was up in the upper berth, cornered, and sorry I come. Then they stood there, with their hands on the ledge of the berth, and talked. I couldn\u2019t see them, but I could tell where they was by the whisky they\u2019d been having. I was glad I didn\u2019t drink whisky; but it wouldn\u2019t made much difference anyway, because most of the time they couldn\u2019t a treed me because I didn\u2019t breathe. I was too scared. And, besides, a body couldn\u2019t breathe and hear such talk. They talked low and earnest. Bill wanted to kill Turner. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s said he\u2019ll tell, and he will. If we was to give both our shares to him now it wouldn\u2019t make no difference after the row and the way we\u2019ve served him. Shore\u2019s you\u2019re born, he\u2019ll turn State\u2019s evidence; now you hear me. I\u2019m for putting him out of his troubles.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo\u2019m I,\u201d says Packard, very quiet.\r\n\r\n\u201cBlame it, I\u2019d sorter begun to think you wasn\u2019t. Well, then, that\u2019s all right. Le\u2019s go and do it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHold on a minute; I hain\u2019t had my say yit. You listen to me. Shooting\u2019s good, but there\u2019s quieter ways if the thing\u2019s got to be done. But what I say is this: it ain\u2019t good sense to go court\u2019n around after a halter if you can git at what you\u2019re up to in some way that\u2019s jist as good and at the same time don\u2019t bring you into no resks. Ain\u2019t that so?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou bet it is. But how you goin\u2019 to manage it this time?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, my idea is this: we\u2019ll rustle around and gather up whatever pickins we\u2019ve overlooked in the staterooms, and shove for shore and hide the truck. Then we\u2019ll wait. Now I say it ain\u2019t a-goin\u2019 to be more\u2019n two hours befo\u2019 this wrack breaks up and washes off down the river. See? He\u2019ll be drownded, and won\u2019t have nobody to blame for it but his own self. I reckon that\u2019s a considerble sight better \u2019n killin\u2019 of him. I\u2019m unfavorable to killin\u2019 a man as long as you can git aroun\u2019 it; it ain\u2019t good sense, it ain\u2019t good morals. Ain\u2019t I right?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I reck\u2019n you are. But s\u2019pose she don\u2019t break up and wash off?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, we can wait the two hours anyway and see, can\u2019t we?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right, then; come along.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo they started, and I lit out, all in a cold sweat, and scrambled forward. It was dark as pitch there; but I said, in a kind of a coarse whisper, \u201cJim!\u201d and he answered up, right at my elbow, with a sort of a moan, and I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cQuick, Jim, it ain\u2019t no time for fooling around and moaning; there\u2019s a gang of murderers in yonder, and if we don\u2019t hunt up their boat and set her drifting down the river so these fellows can\u2019t get away from the wreck there\u2019s one of \u2019em going to be in a bad fix. But if we find their boat we can put all of \u2019em in a bad fix\u2014for the Sheriff \u2019ll get \u2019em. Quick\u2014hurry! I\u2019ll hunt the labboard side, you hunt the stabboard. You start at the raft, and\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, my lordy, lordy! Raf\u2019? Dey ain\u2019 no raf\u2019 no mo\u2019; she done broke loose en gone I\u2014en here we is!\u201d\r\nCHAPTER XIII.\r\n\r\nWell, I catched my breath and most fainted. Shut up on a wreck with such a gang as that! But it warn\u2019t no time to be sentimentering. We\u2019d got to find that boat now\u2014had to have it for ourselves. So we went a-quaking and shaking down the stabboard side, and slow work it was, too\u2014seemed a week before we got to the stern. No sign of a boat. Jim said he didn\u2019t believe he could go any further\u2014so scared he hadn\u2019t hardly any strength left, he said. But I said, come on, if we get left on this wreck we are in a fix, sure. So on we prowled again. We struck for the stern of the texas, and found it, and then scrabbled along forwards on the skylight, hanging on from shutter to shutter, for the edge of the skylight was in the water. When we got pretty close to the cross-hall door, there was the skiff, sure enough! I could just barely see her. I felt ever so thankful. In another second I would a been aboard of her, but just then the door opened. One of the men stuck his head out only about a couple of foot from me, and I thought I was gone; but he jerked it in again, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHeave that blame lantern out o\u2019 sight, Bill!\u201d\r\n\r\nHe flung a bag of something into the boat, and then got in himself and set down. It was Packard. Then Bill he come out and got in. Packard says, in a low voice:\r\n\r\n\u201cAll ready\u2014shove off!\u201d\r\n\r\nI couldn\u2019t hardly hang on to the shutters, I was so weak. But Bill says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHold on\u2014\u2019d you go through him?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo. Didn\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo. So he\u2019s got his share o\u2019 the cash yet.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, come along; no use to take truck and leave money.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSay, won\u2019t he suspicion what we\u2019re up to?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMaybe he won\u2019t. But we got to have it anyway. Come along.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo they got out and went in.\r\n\r\nThe door slammed to because it was on the careened side; and in a half second I was in the boat, and Jim come tumbling after me. I out with my knife and cut the rope, and away we went!\r\n\r\nWe didn\u2019t touch an oar, and we didn\u2019t speak nor whisper, nor hardly even breathe. We went gliding swift along, dead silent, past the tip of the paddle-box, and past the stern; then in a second or two more we was a hundred yards below the wreck, and the darkness soaked her up, every last sign of her, and we was safe, and knowed it.\r\n\r\nWhen we was three or four hundred yards down-stream we see the lantern show like a little spark at the texas door for a second, and we knowed by that that the rascals had missed their boat, and was beginning to understand that they was in just as much trouble now as Jim Turner was.\r\n\r\nThen Jim manned the oars, and we took out after our raft. Now was the first time that I begun to worry about the men\u2014I reckon I hadn\u2019t had time to before. I begun to think how dreadful it was, even for murderers, to be in such a fix. I says to myself, there ain\u2019t no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself yet, and then how would I like it? So says I to Jim:\r\n\r\n\u201cThe first light we see we\u2019ll land a hundred yards below it or above it, in a place where it\u2019s a good hiding-place for you and the skiff, and then I\u2019ll go and fix up some kind of a yarn, and get somebody to go for that gang and get them out of their scrape, so they can be hung when their time comes.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut that idea was a failure; for pretty soon it begun to storm again, and this time worse than ever. The rain poured down, and never a light showed; everybody in bed, I reckon. We boomed along down the river, watching for lights and watching for our raft. After a long time the rain let up, but the clouds stayed, and the lightning kept whimpering, and by-and-by a flash showed us a black thing ahead, floating, and we made for it.\r\n\r\nIt was the raft, and mighty glad was we to get aboard of it again. We seen a light now away down to the right, on shore. So I said I would go for it. The skiff was half full of plunder which that gang had stole there on the wreck. We hustled it on to the raft in a pile, and I told Jim to float along down, and show a light when he judged he had gone about two mile, and keep it burning till I come; then I manned my oars and shoved for the light. As I got down towards it, three or four more showed\u2014up on a hillside. It was a village. I closed in above the shore light, and laid on my oars and floated. As I went by, I see it was a lantern hanging on the jackstaff of a double-hull ferry-boat. I skimmed around for the watchman, a-wondering whereabouts he slept; and by-and-by I found him roosting on the bitts, forward, with his head down between his knees. I gave his shoulder two or three little shoves, and begun to cry.\r\n\r\nHe stirred up, in a kind of a startlish way; but when he see it was only me, he took a good gap and stretch, and then he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHello, what\u2019s up? Don\u2019t cry, bub. What\u2019s the trouble?\u201d\r\n\r\nI says:\r\n\r\n\u201cPap, and mam, and sis, and\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\nThen I broke down. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, dang it now, don\u2019t take on so; we all has to have our troubles, and this\u2019n \u2019ll come out all right. What\u2019s the matter with \u2019em?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey\u2019re\u2014they\u2019re\u2014are you the watchman of the boat?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d he says, kind of pretty-well-satisfied like. \u201cI\u2019m the captain and the owner and the mate and the pilot and watchman and head deck-hand; and sometimes I\u2019m the freight and passengers. I ain\u2019t as rich as old Jim Hornback, and I can\u2019t be so blame\u2019 generous and good to Tom, Dick and Harry as what he is, and slam around money the way he does; but I\u2019ve told him a many a time \u2019t I wouldn\u2019t trade places with him; for, says I, a sailor\u2019s life\u2019s the life for me, and I\u2019m derned if I\u2019d live two mile out o\u2019 town, where there ain\u2019t nothing ever goin\u2019 on, not for all his spondulicks and as much more on top of it. Says I\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\nI broke in and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cThey\u2019re in an awful peck of trouble, and\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho is?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, pap and mam and sis and Miss Hooker; and if you\u2019d take your ferry-boat and go up there\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cUp where? Where are they?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOn the wreck.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat wreck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, there ain\u2019t but one.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat, you don\u2019t mean the Walter Scott?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood land! what are they doin\u2019 there, for gracious sakes?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, they didn\u2019t go there a-purpose.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI bet they didn\u2019t! Why, great goodness, there ain\u2019t no chance for \u2019em if they don\u2019t git off mighty quick! Why, how in the nation did they ever git into such a scrape?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cEasy enough. Miss Hooker was a-visiting up there to the town\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Booth\u2019s Landing\u2014go on.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShe was a-visiting there at Booth\u2019s Landing, and just in the edge of the evening she started over with her nigger woman in the horse-ferry to stay all night at her friend\u2019s house, Miss What-you-may-call-her I disremember her name\u2014and they lost their steering-oar, and swung around and went a-floating down, stern first, about two mile, and saddle-baggsed on the wreck, and the ferryman and the nigger woman and the horses was all lost, but Miss Hooker she made a grab and got aboard the wreck. Well, about an hour after dark we come along down in our trading-scow, and it was so dark we didn\u2019t notice the wreck till we was right on it; and so we saddle-baggsed; but all of us was saved but Bill Whipple\u2014and oh, he was the best cretur!\u2014I most wish\u2019t it had been me, I do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy George! It\u2019s the beatenest thing I ever struck. And then what did you all do?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, we hollered and took on, but it\u2019s so wide there we couldn\u2019t make nobody hear. So pap said somebody got to get ashore and get help somehow. I was the only one that could swim, so I made a dash for it, and Miss Hooker she said if I didn\u2019t strike help sooner, come here and hunt up her uncle, and he\u2019d fix the thing. I made the land about a mile below, and been fooling along ever since, trying to get people to do something, but they said, \u2018What, in such a night and such a current? There ain\u2019t no sense in it; go for the steam ferry.\u2019 Now if you\u2019ll go and\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBy Jackson, I\u2019d like to, and, blame it, I don\u2019t know but I will; but who in the dingnation\u2019s a-going\u2019 to pay for it? Do you reckon your pap\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy that\u2019s all right. Miss Hooker she tole me, particular, that her uncle Hornback\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGreat guns! is he her uncle? Looky here, you break for that light over yonder-way, and turn out west when you git there, and about a quarter of a mile out you\u2019ll come to the tavern; tell \u2019em to dart you out to Jim Hornback\u2019s, and he\u2019ll foot the bill. And don\u2019t you fool around any, because he\u2019ll want to know the news. Tell him I\u2019ll have his niece all safe before he can get to town. Hump yourself, now; I\u2019m a-going up around the corner here to roust out my engineer.\u201d\r\n\r\nI struck for the light, but as soon as he turned the corner I went back and got into my skiff and bailed her out, and then pulled up shore in the easy water about six hundred yards, and tucked myself in among some woodboats; for I couldn\u2019t rest easy till I could see the ferry-boat start. But take it all around, I was feeling ruther comfortable on accounts of taking all this trouble for that gang, for not many would a done it. I wished the widow knowed about it. I judged she would be proud of me for helping these rapscallions, because rapscallions and dead beats is the kind the widow and good people takes the most interest in.\r\n\r\nWell, before long, here comes the wreck, dim and dusky, sliding along down! A kind of cold shiver went through me, and then I struck out for her. She was very deep, and I see in a minute there warn\u2019t much chance for anybody being alive in her. I pulled all around her and hollered a little, but there wasn\u2019t any answer; all dead still. I felt a little bit heavy-hearted about the gang, but not much, for I reckoned if they could stand it, I could.\r\n\r\nThen here comes the ferry-boat; so I shoved for the middle of the river on a long down-stream slant; and when I judged I was out of eye-reach, I laid on my oars, and looked back and see her go and smell around the wreck for Miss Hooker\u2019s remainders, because the captain would know her uncle Hornback would want them; and then pretty soon the ferry-boat give it up and went for the shore, and I laid into my work and went a-booming down the river.\r\n\r\nIt did seem a powerful long time before Jim\u2019s light showed up; and when it did show, it looked like it was a thousand mile off. By the time I got there the sky was beginning to get a little gray in the east; so we struck for an island, and hid the raft, and sunk the skiff, and turned in and slept like dead people.\r\nCHAPTER XIV.\r\n\r\nBy-and-by, when we got up, we turned over the truck the gang had stole off of the wreck, and found boots, and blankets, and clothes, and all sorts of other things, and a lot of books, and a spyglass, and three boxes of seegars. We hadn\u2019t ever been this rich before in neither of our lives. The seegars was prime. We laid off all the afternoon in the woods talking, and me reading the books, and having a general good time. I told Jim all about what happened inside the wreck and at the ferry-boat, and I said these kinds of things was adventures; but he said he didn\u2019t want no more adventures. He said that when I went in the texas and he crawled back to get on the raft and found her gone, he nearly died; because he judged it was all up with him, anyway it could be fixed; for if he didn\u2019t get saved he would get drownded; and if he did get saved, whoever saved him would send him back home so as to get the reward, and then Miss Watson would sell him South, sure. Well, he was right; he was most always right; he had an uncommon level head, for a nigger.\r\n\r\nI read considerable to Jim about kings and dukes and earls and such, and how gaudy they dressed, and how much style they put on, and called each other your majesty, and your grace, and your lordship, and so on, \u2019stead of mister; and Jim\u2019s eyes bugged out, and he was interested. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019 know dey was so many un um. I hain\u2019t hearn \u2019bout none un um, skasely, but ole King Sollermun, onless you counts dem kings dat\u2019s in a pack er k\u2019yards. How much do a king git?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGet?\u201d I says; \u201cwhy, they get a thousand dollars a month if they want it; they can have just as much as they want; everything belongs to them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAin\u2019 dat gay? En what dey got to do, Huck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey don\u2019t do nothing! Why, how you talk! They just set around.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo; is dat so?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course it is. They just set around\u2014except, maybe, when there\u2019s a war; then they go to the war. But other times they just lazy around; or go hawking\u2014just hawking and sp\u2014 Sh!\u2014d\u2019 you hear a noise?\u201d\r\n\r\nWe skipped out and looked; but it warn\u2019t nothing but the flutter of a steamboat\u2019s wheel away down, coming around the point; so we come back.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d says I, \u201cand other times, when things is dull, they fuss with the parlyment; and if everybody don\u2019t go just so he whacks their heads off. But mostly they hang round the harem.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cRoun\u2019 de which?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHarem.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s de harem?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe place where he keeps his wives. Don\u2019t you know about the harem? Solomon had one; he had about a million wives.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, yes, dat\u2019s so; I\u2014I\u2019d done forgot it. A harem\u2019s a bo\u2019d\u2019n-house, I reck\u2019n. Mos\u2019 likely dey has rackety times in de nussery. En I reck\u2019n de wives quarrels considable; en dat \u2019crease de racket. Yit dey say Sollermun de wises\u2019 man dat ever live\u2019. I doan\u2019 take no stock in dat. Bekase why: would a wise man want to live in de mids\u2019 er sich a blim-blammin\u2019 all de time? No\u2014\u2019deed he wouldn\u2019t. A wise man \u2019ud take en buil\u2019 a biler-factry; en den he could shet down de biler-factry when he want to res\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, but he was the wisest man, anyway; because the widow she told me so, her own self.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI doan k\u2019yer what de widder say, he warn\u2019t no wise man nuther. He had some er de dad-fetchedes\u2019 ways I ever see. Does you know \u2019bout dat chile dat he \u2019uz gwyne to chop in two?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, the widow told me all about it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, den! Warn\u2019 dat de beatenes\u2019 notion in de worl\u2019? You jes\u2019 take en look at it a minute. Dah\u2019s de stump, dah\u2014dat\u2019s one er de women; heah\u2019s you\u2014dat\u2019s de yuther one; I\u2019s Sollermun; en dish yer dollar bill\u2019s de chile. Bofe un you claims it. What does I do? Does I shin aroun\u2019 mongs\u2019 de neighbors en fine out which un you de bill do b\u2019long to, en han\u2019 it over to de right one, all safe en soun\u2019, de way dat anybody dat had any gumption would? No; I take en whack de bill in two, en give half un it to you, en de yuther half to de yuther woman. Dat\u2019s de way Sollermun was gwyne to do wid de chile. Now I want to ast you: what\u2019s de use er dat half a bill?\u2014can\u2019t buy noth\u2019n wid it. En what use is a half a chile? I wouldn\u2019 give a dern for a million un um.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut hang it, Jim, you\u2019ve clean missed the point\u2014blame it, you\u2019ve missed it a thousand mile.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho? Me? Go \u2019long. Doan\u2019 talk to me \u2019bout yo\u2019 pints. I reck\u2019n I knows sense when I sees it; en dey ain\u2019 no sense in sich doin\u2019s as dat. De \u2019spute warn\u2019t \u2019bout a half a chile, de \u2019spute was \u2019bout a whole chile; en de man dat think he kin settle a \u2019spute \u2019bout a whole chile wid a half a chile doan\u2019 know enough to come in out\u2019n de rain. Doan\u2019 talk to me \u2019bout Sollermun, Huck, I knows him by de back.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I tell you you don\u2019t get the point.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBlame de point! I reck\u2019n I knows what I knows. En mine you, de real pint is down furder\u2014it\u2019s down deeper. It lays in de way Sollermun was raised. You take a man dat\u2019s got on\u2019y one or two chillen; is dat man gwyne to be waseful o\u2019 chillen? No, he ain\u2019t; he can\u2019t \u2019ford it. He know how to value \u2019em. But you take a man dat\u2019s got \u2019bout five million chillen runnin\u2019 roun\u2019 de house, en it\u2019s diffunt. He as soon chop a chile in two as a cat. Dey\u2019s plenty mo\u2019. A chile er two, mo\u2019 er less, warn\u2019t no consekens to Sollermun, dad fatch him!\u201d\r\n\r\nI never see such a nigger. If he got a notion in his head once, there warn\u2019t no getting it out again. He was the most down on Solomon of any nigger I ever see. So I went to talking about other kings, and let Solomon slide. I told about Louis Sixteenth that got his head cut off in France long time ago; and about his little boy the dolphin, that would a been a king, but they took and shut him up in jail, and some say he died there.\r\n\r\n\u201cPo\u2019 little chap.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut some says he got out and got away, and come to America.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDat\u2019s good! But he\u2019ll be pooty lonesome\u2014dey ain\u2019 no kings here, is dey, Huck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDen he cain\u2019t git no situation. What he gwyne to do?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I don\u2019t know. Some of them gets on the police, and some of them learns people how to talk French.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Huck, doan\u2019 de French people talk de same way we does?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, Jim; you couldn\u2019t understand a word they said\u2014not a single word.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, now, I be ding-busted! How do dat come?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know; but it\u2019s so. I got some of their jabber out of a book. S\u2019pose a man was to come to you and say Polly-voo-franzy\u2014what would you think?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wouldn\u2019 think nuff\u2019n; I\u2019d take en bust him over de head\u2014dat is, if he warn\u2019t white. I wouldn\u2019t \u2019low no nigger to call me dat.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShucks, it ain\u2019t calling you anything. It\u2019s only saying, do you know how to talk French?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, den, why couldn\u2019t he say it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, he is a-saying it. That\u2019s a Frenchman\u2019s way of saying it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it\u2019s a blame ridicklous way, en I doan\u2019 want to hear no mo\u2019 \u2019bout it. Dey ain\u2019 no sense in it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLooky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, a cat don\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, does a cow?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, a cow don\u2019t, nuther.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDoes a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, dey don\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s natural and right for \u2019em to talk different from each other, ain\u2019t it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2019Course.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd ain\u2019t it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, mos\u2019 sholy it is.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, why ain\u2019t it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different from us? You answer me that.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIs a cat a man, Huck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, den, dey ain\u2019t no sense in a cat talkin\u2019 like a man. Is a cow a man?\u2014er is a cow a cat?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, she ain\u2019t either of them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, den, she ain\u2019t got no business to talk like either one er the yuther of \u2019em. Is a Frenchman a man?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, den! Dad blame it, why doan\u2019 he talk like a man? You answer me dat!\u201d\r\n\r\nI see it warn\u2019t no use wasting words\u2014you can\u2019t learn a nigger to argue. So I quit.\r\nCHAPTER XV.\r\n\r\nWe judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble.\r\n\r\nWell, the second night a fog begun to come on, and we made for a tow-head to tie to, for it wouldn\u2019t do to try to run in a fog; but when I paddled ahead in the canoe, with the line to make fast, there warn\u2019t anything but little saplings to tie to. I passed the line around one of them right on the edge of the cut bank, but there was a stiff current, and the raft come booming down so lively she tore it out by the roots and away she went. I see the fog closing down, and it made me so sick and scared I couldn\u2019t budge for most a half a minute it seemed to me\u2014and then there warn\u2019t no raft in sight; you couldn\u2019t see twenty yards. I jumped into the canoe and run back to the stern, and grabbed the paddle and set her back a stroke. But she didn\u2019t come. I was in such a hurry I hadn\u2019t untied her. I got up and tried to untie her, but I was so excited my hands shook so I couldn\u2019t hardly do anything with them.\r\n\r\nAs soon as I got started I took out after the raft, hot and heavy, right down the tow-head. That was all right as far as it went, but the tow-head warn\u2019t sixty yards long, and the minute I flew by the foot of it I shot out into the solid white fog, and hadn\u2019t no more idea which way I was going than a dead man.\r\n\r\nThinks I, it won\u2019t do to paddle; first I know I\u2019ll run into the bank or a tow-head or something; I got to set still and float, and yet it\u2019s mighty fidgety business to have to hold your hands still at such a time. I whooped and listened. Away down there somewheres I hears a small whoop, and up comes my spirits. I went tearing after it, listening sharp to hear it again. The next time it come, I see I warn\u2019t heading for it, but heading away to the right of it. And the next time I was heading away to the left of it\u2014and not gaining on it much either, for I was flying around, this way and that and t\u2019other, but it was going straight ahead all the time.\r\n\r\nI did wish the fool would think to beat a tin pan, and beat it all the time, but he never did, and it was the still places between the whoops that was making the trouble for me. Well, I fought along, and directly I hears the whoop behind me. I was tangled good now. That was somebody else\u2019s whoop, or else I was turned around.\r\n\r\nI throwed the paddle down. I heard the whoop again; it was behind me yet, but in a different place; it kept coming, and kept changing its place, and I kept answering, till by-and-by it was in front of me again, and I knowed the current had swung the canoe\u2019s head down-stream, and I was all right if that was Jim and not some other raftsman hollering. I couldn\u2019t tell nothing about voices in a fog, for nothing don\u2019t look natural nor sound natural in a fog.\r\n\r\nThe whooping went on, and in about a minute I come a-booming down on a cut bank with smoky ghosts of big trees on it, and the current throwed me off to the left and shot by, amongst a lot of snags that fairly roared, the currrent was tearing by them so swift.\r\n\r\nIn another second or two it was solid white and still again. I set perfectly still then, listening to my heart thump, and I reckon I didn\u2019t draw a breath while it thumped a hundred.\r\n\r\nI just give up then. I knowed what the matter was. That cut bank was an island, and Jim had gone down t\u2019other side of it. It warn\u2019t no tow-head that you could float by in ten minutes. It had the big timber of a regular island; it might be five or six miles long and more than half a mile wide.\r\n\r\nI kept quiet, with my ears cocked, about fifteen minutes, I reckon. I was floating along, of course, four or five miles an hour; but you don\u2019t ever think of that. No, you feel like you are laying dead still on the water; and if a little glimpse of a snag slips by you don\u2019t think to yourself how fast you\u2019re going, but you catch your breath and think, my! how that snag\u2019s tearing along. If you think it ain\u2019t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way by yourself in the night, you try it once\u2014you\u2019ll see.\r\n\r\nNext, for about a half an hour, I whoops now and then; at last I hears the answer a long ways off, and tries to follow it, but I couldn\u2019t do it, and directly I judged I\u2019d got into a nest of tow-heads, for I had little dim glimpses of them on both sides of me\u2014sometimes just a narrow channel between, and some that I couldn\u2019t see I knowed was there because I\u2019d hear the wash of the current against the old dead brush and trash that hung over the banks. Well, I warn\u2019t long loosing the whoops down amongst the tow-heads; and I only tried to chase them a little while, anyway, because it was worse than chasing a Jack-o\u2019-lantern. You never knowed a sound dodge around so, and swap places so quick and so much.\r\n\r\nI had to claw away from the bank pretty lively four or five times, to keep from knocking the islands out of the river; and so I judged the raft must be butting into the bank every now and then, or else it would get further ahead and clear out of hearing\u2014it was floating a little faster than what I was.\r\n\r\nWell, I seemed to be in the open river again by-and-by, but I couldn\u2019t hear no sign of a whoop nowheres. I reckoned Jim had fetched up on a snag, maybe, and it was all up with him. I was good and tired, so I laid down in the canoe and said I wouldn\u2019t bother no more. I didn\u2019t want to go to sleep, of course; but I was so sleepy I couldn\u2019t help it; so I thought I would take jest one little cat-nap.\r\n\r\nBut I reckon it was more than a cat-nap, for when I waked up the stars was shining bright, the fog was all gone, and I was spinning down a big bend stern first. First I didn\u2019t know where I was; I thought I was dreaming; and when things began to come back to me they seemed to come up dim out of last week.\r\n\r\nIt was a monstrous big river here, with the tallest and the thickest kind of timber on both banks; just a solid wall, as well as I could see by the stars. I looked away down-stream, and seen a black speck on the water. I took after it; but when I got to it it warn\u2019t nothing but a couple of sawlogs made fast together. Then I see another speck, and chased that; then another, and this time I was right. It was the raft.\r\n\r\nWhen I got to it Jim was setting there with his head down between his knees, asleep, with his right arm hanging over the steering-oar. The other oar was smashed off, and the raft was littered up with leaves and branches and dirt. So she\u2019d had a rough time.\r\n\r\nI made fast and laid down under Jim\u2019s nose on the raft, and began to gap, and stretch my fists out against Jim, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHello, Jim, have I been asleep? Why didn\u2019t you stir me up?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGoodness gracious, is dat you, Huck? En you ain\u2019 dead\u2014you ain\u2019 drownded\u2014you\u2019s back agin? It\u2019s too good for true, honey, it\u2019s too good for true. Lemme look at you chile, lemme feel o\u2019 you. No, you ain\u2019 dead! you\u2019s back agin, \u2019live en soun\u2019, jis de same ole Huck\u2014de same ole Huck, thanks to goodness!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the matter with you, Jim? You been a-drinking?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDrinkin\u2019? Has I ben a-drinkin\u2019? Has I had a chance to be a-drinkin\u2019?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, what makes you talk so wild?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow does I talk wild?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow? Why, hain\u2019t you been talking about my coming back, and all that stuff, as if I\u2019d been gone away?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHuck\u2014Huck Finn, you look me in de eye; look me in de eye. Hain\u2019t you ben gone away?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGone away? Why, what in the nation do you mean? I hain\u2019t been gone anywheres. Where would I go to?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, looky here, boss, dey\u2019s sumf\u2019n wrong, dey is. Is I me, or who is I? Is I heah, or whah is I? Now dat\u2019s what I wants to know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I think you\u2019re here, plain enough, but I think you\u2019re a tangle-headed old fool, Jim.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI is, is I? Well, you answer me dis: Didn\u2019t you tote out de line in de canoe fer to make fas\u2019 to de tow-head?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I didn\u2019t. What tow-head? I hain\u2019t see no tow-head.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou hain\u2019t seen no tow-head? Looky here, didn\u2019t de line pull loose en de raf\u2019 go a-hummin\u2019 down de river, en leave you en de canoe behine in de fog?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat fog?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, de fog!\u2014de fog dat\u2019s been aroun\u2019 all night. En didn\u2019t you whoop, en didn\u2019t I whoop, tell we got mix\u2019 up in de islands en one un us got los\u2019 en t\u2019other one was jis\u2019 as good as los\u2019, \u2019kase he didn\u2019 know whah he wuz? En didn\u2019t I bust up agin a lot er dem islands en have a turrible time en mos\u2019 git drownded? Now ain\u2019 dat so, boss\u2014ain\u2019t it so? You answer me dat.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, this is too many for me, Jim. I hain\u2019t seen no fog, nor no islands, nor no troubles, nor nothing. I been setting here talking with you all night till you went to sleep about ten minutes ago, and I reckon I done the same. You couldn\u2019t a got drunk in that time, so of course you\u2019ve been dreaming.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDad fetch it, how is I gwyne to dream all dat in ten minutes?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, hang it all, you did dream it, because there didn\u2019t any of it happen.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut, Huck, it\u2019s all jis\u2019 as plain to me as\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt don\u2019t make no difference how plain it is; there ain\u2019t nothing in it. I know, because I\u2019ve been here all the time.\u201d\r\n\r\nJim didn\u2019t say nothing for about five minutes, but set there studying over it. Then he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, den, I reck\u2019n I did dream it, Huck; but dog my cats ef it ain\u2019t de powerfullest dream I ever see. En I hain\u2019t ever had no dream b\u2019fo\u2019 dat\u2019s tired me like dis one.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, well, that\u2019s all right, because a dream does tire a body like everything sometimes. But this one was a staving dream; tell me all about it, Jim.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo Jim went to work and told me the whole thing right through, just as it happened, only he painted it up considerable. Then he said he must start in and \u201c\u2019terpret\u201d it, because it was sent for a warning. He said the first tow-head stood for a man that would try to do us some good, but the current was another man that would get us away from him. The whoops was warnings that would come to us every now and then, and if we didn\u2019t try hard to make out to understand them they\u2019d just take us into bad luck, \u2019stead of keeping us out of it. The lot of tow-heads was troubles we was going to get into with quarrelsome people and all kinds of mean folks, but if we minded our business and didn\u2019t talk back and aggravate them, we would pull through and get out of the fog and into the big clear river, which was the free States, and wouldn\u2019t have no more trouble.\r\n\r\nIt had clouded up pretty dark just after I got on to the raft, but it was clearing up again now.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, well, that\u2019s all interpreted well enough as far as it goes, Jim,\u201d I says; \u201cbut what does these things stand for?\u201d\r\n\r\nIt was the leaves and rubbish on the raft and the smashed oar. You could see them first-rate now.\r\n\r\nJim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash again. He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head that he couldn\u2019t seem to shake it loose and get the facts back into its place again right away. But when he did get the thing straightened around he looked at me steady without ever smiling, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do dey stan\u2019 for? I\u2019se gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin\u2019 for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos\u2019 broke bekase you wuz los\u2019, en I didn\u2019 k\u2019yer no\u2019 mo\u2019 what become er me en de raf\u2019. En when I wake up en fine you back agin, all safe en soun\u2019, de tears come, en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo\u2019 foot, I\u2019s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin\u2019 \u2019bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren\u2019s en makes \u2019em ashamed.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back.\r\n\r\nIt was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn\u2019t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn\u2019t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn\u2019t done that one if I\u2019d a knowed it would make him feel that way.\r\nCHAPTER XVI.\r\n\r\nWe slept most all day, and started out at night, a little ways behind a monstrous long raft that was as long going by as a procession. She had four long sweeps at each end, so we judged she carried as many as thirty men, likely. She had five big wigwams aboard, wide apart, and an open camp fire in the middle, and a tall flag-pole at each end. There was a power of style about her. It amounted to something being a raftsman on such a craft as that.\r\n\r\nWe went drifting down into a big bend, and the night clouded up and got hot. The river was very wide, and was walled with solid timber on both sides; you couldn\u2019t see a break in it hardly ever, or a light. We talked about Cairo, and wondered whether we would know it when we got to it. I said likely we wouldn\u2019t, because I had heard say there warn\u2019t but about a dozen houses there, and if they didn\u2019t happen to have them lit up, how was we going to know we was passing a town? Jim said if the two big rivers joined together there, that would show. But I said maybe we might think we was passing the foot of an island and coming into the same old river again. That disturbed Jim\u2014and me too. So the question was, what to do? I said, paddle ashore the first time a light showed, and tell them pap was behind, coming along with a trading-scow, and was a green hand at the business, and wanted to know how far it was to Cairo. Jim thought it was a good idea, so we took a smoke on it and waited.\r\n\r\nThere warn\u2019t nothing to do now but to look out sharp for the town, and not pass it without seeing it. He said he\u2019d be mighty sure to see it, because he\u2019d be a free man the minute he seen it, but if he missed it he\u2019d be in a slave country again and no more show for freedom. Every little while he jumps up and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDah she is?\u201d\r\n\r\nBut it warn\u2019t. It was Jack-o\u2019-lanterns, or lightning bugs; so he set down again, and went to watching, same as before. Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free\u2014and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn\u2019t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn\u2019t rest; I couldn\u2019t stay still in one place. It hadn\u2019t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn\u2019t to blame, because I didn\u2019t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn\u2019t no use, conscience up and says, every time, \u201cBut you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.\u201d That was so\u2014I couldn\u2019t get around that noway. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me, \u201cWhat had poor Miss Watson done to you that you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did that poor old woman do to you that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how. That\u2019s what she done.\u201d\r\n\r\nI got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead. I fidgeted up and down the raft, abusing myself to myself, and Jim was fidgeting up and down past me. We neither of us could keep still. Every time he danced around and says, \u201cDah\u2019s Cairo!\u201d it went through me like a shot, and I thought if it was Cairo I reckoned I would die of miserableness.\r\n\r\nJim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn\u2019t sell them, they\u2019d get an Ab\u2019litionist to go and steal them.\r\n\r\nIt most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn\u2019t ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, \u201cGive a nigger an inch and he\u2019ll take an ell.\u201d Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children\u2014children that belonged to a man I didn\u2019t even know; a man that hadn\u2019t ever done me no harm.\r\n\r\nI was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him. My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever, until at last I says to it, \u201cLet up on me\u2014it ain\u2019t too late yet\u2014I\u2019ll paddle ashore at the first light and tell.\u201d I felt easy and happy and light as a feather right off. All my troubles was gone. I went to looking out sharp for a light, and sort of singing to myself. By-and-by one showed. Jim sings out:\r\n\r\n\u201cWe\u2019s safe, Huck, we\u2019s safe! Jump up and crack yo\u2019 heels! Dat\u2019s de good ole Cairo at las\u2019, I jis knows it!\u201d\r\n\r\nI says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll take the canoe and go and see, Jim. It mightn\u2019t be, you know.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe jumped and got the canoe ready, and put his old coat in the bottom for me to set on, and give me the paddle; and as I shoved off, he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cPooty soon I\u2019ll be a-shout\u2019n\u2019 for joy, en I\u2019ll say, it\u2019s all on accounts o\u2019 Huck; I\u2019s a free man, en I couldn\u2019t ever ben free ef it hadn\u2019 ben for Huck; Huck done it. Jim won\u2019t ever forgit you, Huck; you\u2019s de bes\u2019 fren\u2019 Jim\u2019s ever had; en you\u2019s de only fren\u2019 ole Jim\u2019s got now.\u201d\r\n\r\nI was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him; but when he says this, it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me. I went along slow then, and I warn\u2019t right down certain whether I was glad I started or whether I warn\u2019t. When I was fifty yards off, Jim says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDah you goes, de ole true Huck; de on\u2019y white genlman dat ever kep\u2019 his promise to ole Jim.\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, I just felt sick. But I says, I got to do it\u2014I can\u2019t get out of it. Right then along comes a skiff with two men in it with guns, and they stopped and I stopped. One of them says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s that yonder?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA piece of a raft,\u201d I says.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you belong on it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAny men on it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOnly one, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, there\u2019s five niggers run off to-night up yonder, above the head of the bend. Is your man white or black?\u201d\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t answer up prompt. I tried to, but the words wouldn\u2019t come. I tried for a second or two to brace up and out with it, but I warn\u2019t man enough\u2014hadn\u2019t the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s white.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI reckon we\u2019ll go and see for ourselves.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish you would,\u201d says I, \u201cbecause it\u2019s pap that\u2019s there, and maybe you\u2019d help me tow the raft ashore where the light is. He\u2019s sick\u2014and so is mam and Mary Ann.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, the devil! we\u2019re in a hurry, boy. But I s\u2019pose we\u2019ve got to. Come, buckle to your paddle, and let\u2019s get along.\u201d\r\n\r\nI buckled to my paddle and they laid to their oars. When we had made a stroke or two, I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cPap\u2019ll be mighty much obleeged to you, I can tell you. Everybody goes away when I want them to help me tow the raft ashore, and I can\u2019t do it by myself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, that\u2019s infernal mean. Odd, too. Say, boy, what\u2019s the matter with your father?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s the\u2014a\u2014the\u2014well, it ain\u2019t anything much.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey stopped pulling. It warn\u2019t but a mighty little ways to the raft now. One says:\r\n\r\n\u201cBoy, that\u2019s a lie. What is the matter with your pap? Answer up square now, and it\u2019ll be the better for you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI will, sir, I will, honest\u2014but don\u2019t leave us, please. It\u2019s the\u2014the\u2014gentlemen, if you\u2019ll only pull ahead, and let me heave you the headline, you won\u2019t have to come a-near the raft\u2014please do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSet her back, John, set her back!\u201d says one. They backed water. \u201cKeep away, boy\u2014keep to looard. Confound it, I just expect the wind has blowed it to us. Your pap\u2019s got the small-pox, and you know it precious well. Why didn\u2019t you come out and say so? Do you want to spread it all over?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d says I, a-blubbering, \u201cI\u2019ve told everybody before, and they just went away and left us.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor devil, there\u2019s something in that. We are right down sorry for you, but we\u2014well, hang it, we don\u2019t want the small-pox, you see. Look here, I\u2019ll tell you what to do. Don\u2019t you try to land by yourself, or you\u2019ll smash everything to pieces. You float along down about twenty miles, and you\u2019ll come to a town on the left-hand side of the river. It will be long after sun-up then, and when you ask for help you tell them your folks are all down with chills and fever. Don\u2019t be a fool again, and let people guess what is the matter. Now we\u2019re trying to do you a kindness; so you just put twenty miles between us, that\u2019s a good boy. It wouldn\u2019t do any good to land yonder where the light is\u2014it\u2019s only a wood-yard. Say, I reckon your father\u2019s poor, and I\u2019m bound to say he\u2019s in pretty hard luck. Here, I\u2019ll put a twenty-dollar gold piece on this board, and you get it when it floats by. I feel mighty mean to leave you; but my kingdom! it won\u2019t do to fool with small-pox, don\u2019t you see?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHold on, Parker,\u201d says the other man, \u201chere\u2019s a twenty to put on the board for me. Good-bye, boy; you do as Mr. Parker told you, and you\u2019ll be all right.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s so, my boy\u2014good-bye, good-bye. If you see any runaway niggers you get help and nab them, and you can make some money by it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood-bye, sir,\u201d says I; \u201cI won\u2019t let no runaway niggers get by me if I can help it.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey went off and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn\u2019t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don\u2019t get started right when he\u2019s little ain\u2019t got no show\u2014when the pinch comes there ain\u2019t nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s\u2019pose you\u2019d a done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I\u2019d feel bad\u2014I\u2019d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what\u2019s the use you learning to do right when it\u2019s troublesome to do right and ain\u2019t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn\u2019t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn\u2019t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.\r\n\r\nI went into the wigwam; Jim warn\u2019t there. I looked all around; he warn\u2019t anywhere. I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cJim!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHere I is, Huck. Is dey out o\u2019 sight yit? Don\u2019t talk loud.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe was in the river under the stern oar, with just his nose out. I told him they were out of sight, so he come aboard. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI was a-listenin\u2019 to all de talk, en I slips into de river en was gwyne to shove for sho\u2019 if dey come aboard. Den I was gwyne to swim to de raf\u2019 agin when dey was gone. But lawsy, how you did fool \u2019em, Huck! Dat wuz de smartes\u2019 dodge! I tell you, chile, I \u2019speck it save\u2019 ole Jim\u2014ole Jim ain\u2019t going to forgit you for dat, honey.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen we talked about the money. It was a pretty good raise\u2014twenty dollars apiece. Jim said we could take deck passage on a steamboat now, and the money would last us as far as we wanted to go in the free States. He said twenty mile more warn\u2019t far for the raft to go, but he wished we was already there.\r\n\r\nTowards daybreak we tied up, and Jim was mighty particular about hiding the raft good. Then he worked all day fixing things in bundles, and getting all ready to quit rafting.\r\n\r\nThat night about ten we hove in sight of the lights of a town away down in a left-hand bend.\r\n\r\nI went off in the canoe to ask about it. Pretty soon I found a man out in the river with a skiff, setting a trot-line. I ranged up and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMister, is that town Cairo?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCairo? no. You must be a blame\u2019 fool.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat town is it, mister?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you want to know, go and find out. If you stay here botherin\u2019 around me for about a half a minute longer you\u2019ll get something you won\u2019t want.\u201d\r\n\r\nI paddled to the raft. Jim was awful disappointed, but I said never mind, Cairo would be the next place, I reckoned.\r\n\r\nWe passed another town before daylight, and I was going out again; but it was high ground, so I didn\u2019t go. No high ground about Cairo, Jim said. I had forgot it. We laid up for the day on a tow-head tolerable close to the left-hand bank. I begun to suspicion something. So did Jim. I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMaybe we went by Cairo in the fog that night.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDoan\u2019 le\u2019s talk about it, Huck. Po\u2019 niggers can\u2019t have no luck. I awluz \u2019spected dat rattlesnake-skin warn\u2019t done wid its work.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish I\u2019d never seen that snake-skin, Jim\u2014I do wish I\u2019d never laid eyes on it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt ain\u2019t yo\u2019 fault, Huck; you didn\u2019 know. Don\u2019t you blame yo\u2019self \u2019bout it.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen it was daylight, here was the clear Ohio water inshore, sure enough, and outside was the old regular Muddy! So it was all up with Cairo.\r\n\r\nWe talked it all over. It wouldn\u2019t do to take to the shore; we couldn\u2019t take the raft up the stream, of course. There warn\u2019t no way but to wait for dark, and start back in the canoe and take the chances. So we slept all day amongst the cottonwood thicket, so as to be fresh for the work, and when we went back to the raft about dark the canoe was gone!\r\n\r\nWe didn\u2019t say a word for a good while. There warn\u2019t anything to say. We both knowed well enough it was some more work of the rattlesnake-skin; so what was the use to talk about it? It would only look like we was finding fault, and that would be bound to fetch more bad luck\u2014and keep on fetching it, too, till we knowed enough to keep still.\r\n\r\nBy-and-by we talked about what we better do, and found there warn\u2019t no way but just to go along down with the raft till we got a chance to buy a canoe to go back in. We warn\u2019t going to borrow it when there warn\u2019t anybody around, the way pap would do, for that might set people after us.\r\n\r\nSo we shoved out after dark on the raft.\r\n\r\nAnybody that don\u2019t believe yet that it\u2019s foolishness to handle a snake-skin, after all that that snake-skin done for us, will believe it now if they read on and see what more it done for us.\r\n\r\nThe place to buy canoes is off of rafts laying up at shore. But we didn\u2019t see no rafts laying up; so we went along during three hours and more. Well, the night got gray and ruther thick, which is the next meanest thing to fog. You can\u2019t tell the shape of the river, and you can\u2019t see no distance. It got to be very late and still, and then along comes a steamboat up the river. We lit the lantern, and judged she would see it. Up-stream boats didn\u2019t generly come close to us; they go out and follow the bars and hunt for easy water under the reefs; but nights like this they bull right up the channel against the whole river.\r\n\r\nWe could hear her pounding along, but we didn\u2019t see her good till she was close. She aimed right for us. Often they do that and try to see how close they can come without touching; sometimes the wheel bites off a sweep, and then the pilot sticks his head out and laughs, and thinks he\u2019s mighty smart. Well, here she comes, and we said she was going to try and shave us; but she didn\u2019t seem to be sheering off a bit. She was a big one, and she was coming in a hurry, too, looking like a black cloud with rows of glow-worms around it; but all of a sudden she bulged out, big and scary, with a long row of wide-open furnace doors shining like red-hot teeth, and her monstrous bows and guards hanging right over us. There was a yell at us, and a jingling of bells to stop the engines, a powwow of cussing, and whistling of steam\u2014and as Jim went overboard on one side and I on the other, she come smashing straight through the raft.\r\n\r\nI dived\u2014and I aimed to find the bottom, too, for a thirty-foot wheel had got to go over me, and I wanted it to have plenty of room. I could always stay under water a minute; this time I reckon I stayed under a minute and a half. Then I bounced for the top in a hurry, for I was nearly busting. I popped out to my armpits and blowed the water out of my nose, and puffed a bit. Of course there was a booming current; and of course that boat started her engines again ten seconds after she stopped them, for they never cared much for raftsmen; so now she was churning along up the river, out of sight in the thick weather, though I could hear her.\r\n\r\nI sung out for Jim about a dozen times, but I didn\u2019t get any answer; so I grabbed a plank that touched me while I was \u201ctreading water,\u201d and struck out for shore, shoving it ahead of me. But I made out to see that the drift of the current was towards the left-hand shore, which meant that I was in a crossing; so I changed off and went that way.\r\n\r\nIt was one of these long, slanting, two-mile crossings; so I was a good long time in getting over. I made a safe landing, and clumb up the bank. I couldn\u2019t see but a little ways, but I went poking along over rough ground for a quarter of a mile or more, and then I run across a big old-fashioned double log-house before I noticed it. I was going to rush by and get away, but a lot of dogs jumped out and went to howling and barking at me, and I knowed better than to move another peg.\r\nCHAPTER XVII.\r\n\r\nIn about a minute somebody spoke out of a window without putting his head out, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cBe done, boys! Who\u2019s there?\u201d\r\n\r\nI says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho\u2019s me?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGeorge Jackson, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you want?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t want nothing, sir. I only want to go along by, but the dogs won\u2019t let me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat are you prowling around here this time of night for\u2014hey?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI warn\u2019t prowling around, sir, I fell overboard off of the steamboat.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, you did, did you? Strike a light there, somebody. What did you say your name was?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGeorge Jackson, sir. I\u2019m only a boy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLook here, if you\u2019re telling the truth you needn\u2019t be afraid\u2014nobody\u2019ll hurt you. But don\u2019t try to budge; stand right where you are. Rouse out Bob and Tom, some of you, and fetch the guns. George Jackson, is there anybody with you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, sir, nobody.\u201d\r\n\r\nI heard the people stirring around in the house now, and see a light. The man sung out:\r\n\r\n\u201cSnatch that light away, Betsy, you old fool\u2014ain\u2019t you got any sense? Put it on the floor behind the front door. Bob, if you and Tom are ready, take your places.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll ready.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, George Jackson, do you know the Shepherdsons?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, sir; I never heard of them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, that may be so, and it mayn\u2019t. Now, all ready. Step forward, George Jackson. And mind, don\u2019t you hurry\u2014come mighty slow. If there\u2019s anybody with you, let him keep back\u2014if he shows himself he\u2019ll be shot. Come along now. Come slow; push the door open yourself\u2014just enough to squeeze in, d\u2019 you hear?\u201d\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t hurry; I couldn\u2019t if I\u2019d a wanted to. I took one slow step at a time and there warn\u2019t a sound, only I thought I could hear my heart. The dogs were as still as the humans, but they followed a little behind me. When I got to the three log doorsteps I heard them unlocking and unbarring and unbolting. I put my hand on the door and pushed it a little and a little more till somebody said, \u201cThere, that\u2019s enough\u2014put your head in.\u201d I done it, but I judged they would take it off.\r\n\r\nThe candle was on the floor, and there they all was, looking at me, and me at them, for about a quarter of a minute: Three big men with guns pointed at me, which made me wince, I tell you; the oldest, gray and about sixty, the other two thirty or more\u2014all of them fine and handsome\u2014and the sweetest old gray-headed lady, and back of her two young women which I couldn\u2019t see right well. The old gentleman says:\r\n\r\n\u201cThere; I reckon it\u2019s all right. Come in.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs soon as I was in the old gentleman he locked the door and barred it and bolted it, and told the young men to come in with their guns, and they all went in a big parlor that had a new rag carpet on the floor, and got together in a corner that was out of the range of the front windows\u2014there warn\u2019t none on the side. They held the candle, and took a good look at me, and all said, \u201cWhy, he ain\u2019t a Shepherdson\u2014no, there ain\u2019t any Shepherdson about him.\u201d Then the old man said he hoped I wouldn\u2019t mind being searched for arms, because he didn\u2019t mean no harm by it\u2014it was only to make sure. So he didn\u2019t pry into my pockets, but only felt outside with his hands, and said it was all right. He told me to make myself easy and at home, and tell all about myself; but the old lady says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, bless you, Saul, the poor thing\u2019s as wet as he can be; and don\u2019t you reckon it may be he\u2019s hungry?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTrue for you, Rachel\u2014I forgot.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo the old lady says:\r\n\r\n\u201cBetsy\u201d (this was a nigger woman), \u201cyou fly around and get him something to eat as quick as you can, poor thing; and one of you girls go and wake up Buck and tell him\u2014oh, here he is himself. Buck, take this little stranger and get the wet clothes off from him and dress him up in some of yours that\u2019s dry.\u201d\r\n\r\nBuck looked about as old as me\u2014thirteen or fourteen or along there, though he was a little bigger than me. He hadn\u2019t on anything but a shirt, and he was very frowzy-headed. He came in gaping and digging one fist into his eyes, and he was dragging a gun along with the other one. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cAin\u2019t they no Shepherdsons around?\u201d\r\n\r\nThey said, no, \u2019twas a false alarm.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d he says, \u201cif they\u2019d a ben some, I reckon I\u2019d a got one.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey all laughed, and Bob says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Buck, they might have scalped us all, you\u2019ve been so slow in coming.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, nobody come after me, and it ain\u2019t right I\u2019m always kept down; I don\u2019t get no show.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNever mind, Buck, my boy,\u201d says the old man, \u201cyou\u2019ll have show enough, all in good time, don\u2019t you fret about that. Go \u2019long with you now, and do as your mother told you.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen we got up-stairs to his room he got me a coarse shirt and a roundabout and pants of his, and I put them on. While I was at it he asked me what my name was, but before I could tell him he started to tell me about a bluejay and a young rabbit he had catched in the woods day before yesterday, and he asked me where Moses was when the candle went out. I said I didn\u2019t know; I hadn\u2019t heard about it before, no way.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, guess,\u201d he says.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow\u2019m I going to guess,\u201d says I, \u201cwhen I never heard tell of it before?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut you can guess, can\u2019t you? It\u2019s just as easy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhich candle?\u201d I says.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, any candle,\u201d he says.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know where he was,\u201d says I; \u201cwhere was he?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, he was in the dark! That\u2019s where he was!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, if you knowed where he was, what did you ask me for?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, blame it, it\u2019s a riddle, don\u2019t you see? Say, how long are you going to stay here? You got to stay always. We can just have booming times\u2014they don\u2019t have no school now. Do you own a dog? I\u2019ve got a dog\u2014and he\u2019ll go in the river and bring out chips that you throw in. Do you like to comb up Sundays, and all that kind of foolishness? You bet I don\u2019t, but ma she makes me. Confound these ole britches! I reckon I\u2019d better put \u2019em on, but I\u2019d ruther not, it\u2019s so warm. Are you all ready? All right. Come along, old hoss.\u201d\r\n\r\nCold corn-pone, cold corn-beef, butter and buttermilk\u2014that is what they had for me down there, and there ain\u2019t nothing better that ever I\u2019ve come across yet. Buck and his ma and all of them smoked cob pipes, except the nigger woman, which was gone, and the two young women. They all smoked and talked, and I eat and talked. The young women had quilts around them, and their hair down their backs. They all asked me questions, and I told them how pap and me and all the family was living on a little farm down at the bottom of Arkansaw, and my sister Mary Ann run off and got married and never was heard of no more, and Bill went to hunt them and he warn\u2019t heard of no more, and Tom and Mort died, and then there warn\u2019t nobody but just me and pap left, and he was just trimmed down to nothing, on account of his troubles; so when he died I took what there was left, because the farm didn\u2019t belong to us, and started up the river, deck passage, and fell overboard; and that was how I come to be here. So they said I could have a home there as long as I wanted it. Then it was most daylight and everybody went to bed, and I went to bed with Buck, and when I waked up in the morning, drat it all, I had forgot what my name was. So I laid there about an hour trying to think, and when Buck waked up I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cCan you spell, Buck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d he says.\r\n\r\n\u201cI bet you can\u2019t spell my name,\u201d says I.\r\n\r\n\u201cI bet you what you dare I can,\u201d says he.\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right,\u201d says I, \u201cgo ahead.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cG-e-o-r-g-e J-a-x-o-n\u2014there now,\u201d he says.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d says I, \u201cyou done it, but I didn\u2019t think you could. It ain\u2019t no slouch of a name to spell\u2014right off without studying.\u201d\r\n\r\nI set it down, private, because somebody might want me to spell it next, and so I wanted to be handy with it and rattle it off like I was used to it.\r\n\r\nIt was a mighty nice family, and a mighty nice house, too. I hadn\u2019t seen no house out in the country before that was so nice and had so much style. It didn\u2019t have an iron latch on the front door, nor a wooden one with a buckskin string, but a brass knob to turn, the same as houses in town. There warn\u2019t no bed in the parlor, nor a sign of a bed; but heaps of parlors in towns has beds in them. There was a big fireplace that was bricked on the bottom, and the bricks was kept clean and red by pouring water on them and scrubbing them with another brick; sometimes they wash them over with red water-paint that they call Spanish-brown, same as they do in town. They had big brass dog-irons that could hold up a saw-log. There was a clock on the middle of the mantelpiece, with a picture of a town painted on the bottom half of the glass front, and a round place in the middle of it for the sun, and you could see the pendulum swinging behind it. It was beautiful to hear that clock tick; and sometimes when one of these peddlers had been along and scoured her up and got her in good shape, she would start in and strike a hundred and fifty before she got tuckered out. They wouldn\u2019t took any money for her.\r\n\r\nWell, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock, made out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy. By one of the parrots was a cat made of crockery, and a crockery dog by the other; and when you pressed down on them they squeaked, but didn\u2019t open their mouths nor look different nor interested. They squeaked through underneath. There was a couple of big wild-turkey-wing fans spread out behind those things. On the table in the middle of the room was a kind of a lovely crockery basket that had apples and oranges and peaches and grapes piled up in it, which was much redder and yellower and prettier than real ones is, but they warn\u2019t real because you could see where pieces had got chipped off and showed the white chalk, or whatever it was, underneath.\r\n\r\nThis table had a cover made out of beautiful oilcloth, with a red and blue spread-eagle painted on it, and a painted border all around. It come all the way from Philadelphia, they said. There was some books, too, piled up perfectly exact, on each corner of the table. One was a big family Bible full of pictures. One was Pilgrim\u2019s Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn\u2019t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough. Another was Friendship\u2019s Offering, full of beautiful stuff and poetry; but I didn\u2019t read the poetry. Another was Henry Clay\u2019s Speeches, and another was Dr. Gunn\u2019s Family Medicine, which told you all about what to do if a body was sick or dead. There was a hymn book, and a lot of other books. And there was nice split-bottom chairs, and perfectly sound, too\u2014not bagged down in the middle and busted, like an old basket.\r\n\r\nThey had pictures hung on the walls\u2014mainly Washingtons and Lafayettes, and battles, and Highland Marys, and one called \u201cSigning the Declaration.\u201d There was some that they called crayons, which one of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before\u2014blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said \u201cShall I Never See Thee More Alas.\u201d Another one was a young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said \u201cI Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas.\u201d There was one where a young lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing wax showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain to it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said \u201cAnd Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas.\u201d These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn\u2019t somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard. She was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when she took sick, and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to live till she got it done, but she never got the chance. It was a picture of a young woman in a long white gown, standing on the rail of a bridge all ready to jump off, with her hair all down her back, and looking up to the moon, with the tears running down her face, and she had two arms folded across her breast, and two arms stretched out in front, and two more reaching up towards the moon\u2014and the idea was to see which pair would look best, and then scratch out all the other arms; but, as I was saying, she died before she got her mind made up, and now they kept this picture over the head of the bed in her room, and every time her birthday come they hung flowers on it. Other times it was hid with a little curtain. The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face, but there was so many arms it made her look too spidery, seemed to me.\r\n\r\nThis young girl kept a scrap-book when she was alive, and used to paste obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out of the Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own head. It was very good poetry. This is what she wrote about a boy by the name of Stephen Dowling Bots that fell down a well and was drownded:\r\n\r\nODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC\u2019D\r\n\r\nAnd did young Stephen sicken,\r\n    And did young Stephen die?\r\nAnd did the sad hearts thicken,\r\n    And did the mourners cry?\r\n\r\nNo; such was not the fate of\r\n    Young Stephen Dowling Bots;\r\nThough sad hearts round him thickened,\r\n    \u2019Twas not from sickness\u2019 shots.\r\n\r\nNo whooping-cough did rack his frame,\r\n    Nor measles drear with spots;\r\nNot these impaired the sacred name\r\n    Of Stephen Dowling Bots.\r\n\r\nDespised love struck not with woe\r\n    That head of curly knots,\r\nNor stomach troubles laid him low,\r\n    Young Stephen Dowling Bots.\r\n\r\nO no. Then list with tearful eye,\r\n    Whilst I his fate do tell.\r\nHis soul did from this cold world fly\r\n    By falling down a well.\r\n\r\nThey got him out and emptied him;\r\n    Alas it was too late;\r\nHis spirit was gone for to sport aloft\r\n    In the realms of the good and great.\r\n\r\nIf Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was fourteen, there ain\u2019t no telling what she could a done by-and-by. Buck said she could rattle off poetry like nothing. She didn\u2019t ever have to stop to think. He said she would slap down a line, and if she couldn\u2019t find anything to rhyme with it would just scratch it out and slap down another one, and go ahead. She warn\u2019t particular; she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her \u201ctribute\u201d before he was cold. She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker\u2014the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person\u2019s name, which was Whistler. She warn\u2019t ever the same after that; she never complained, but she kinder pined away and did not live long. Poor thing, many\u2019s the time I made myself go up to the little room that used to be hers and get out her poor old scrap-book and read in it when her pictures had been aggravating me and I had soured on her a little. I liked all that family, dead ones and all, and warn\u2019t going to let anything come between us. Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was alive, and it didn\u2019t seem right that there warn\u2019t nobody to make some about her now she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two myself, but I couldn\u2019t seem to make it go somehow. They kept Emmeline\u2019s room trim and nice, and all the things fixed in it just the way she liked to have them when she was alive, and nobody ever slept there. The old lady took care of the room herself, though there was plenty of niggers, and she sewed there a good deal and read her Bible there mostly.\r\n\r\nWell, as I was saying about the parlor, there was beautiful curtains on the windows: white, with pictures painted on them of castles with vines all down the walls, and cattle coming down to drink. There was a little old piano, too, that had tin pans in it, I reckon, and nothing was ever so lovely as to hear the young ladies sing \u201cThe Last Link is Broken\u201d and play \u201cThe Battle of Prague\u201d on it. The walls of all the rooms was plastered, and most had carpets on the floors, and the whole house was whitewashed on the outside.\r\n\r\nIt was a double house, and the big open place betwixt them was roofed and floored, and sometimes the table was set there in the middle of the day, and it was a cool, comfortable place. Nothing couldn\u2019t be better. And warn\u2019t the cooking good, and just bushels of it too!\r\nCHAPTER XVIII.\r\n\r\nCol. Grangerford was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over; and so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that\u2019s worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the Widow Douglas said, and nobody ever denied that she was of the first aristocracy in our town; and pap he always said it, too, though he warn\u2019t no more quality than a mudcat himself. Col. Grangerford was very tall and very slim, and had a darkish-paly complexion, not a sign of red in it anywheres; he was clean shaved every morning all over his thin face, and he had the thinnest kind of lips, and the thinnest kind of nostrils, and a high nose, and heavy eyebrows, and the blackest kind of eyes, sunk so deep back that they seemed like they was looking out of caverns at you, as you may say. His forehead was high, and his hair was black and straight and hung to his shoulders. His hands was long and thin, and every day of his life he put on a clean shirt and a full suit from head to foot made out of linen so white it hurt your eyes to look at it; and on Sundays he wore a blue tail-coat with brass buttons on it. He carried a mahogany cane with a silver head to it. There warn\u2019t no frivolishness about him, not a bit, and he warn\u2019t ever loud. He was as kind as he could be\u2014you could feel that, you know, and so you had confidence. Sometimes he smiled, and it was good to see; but when he straightened himself up like a liberty-pole, and the lightning begun to flicker out from under his eyebrows, you wanted to climb a tree first, and find out what the matter was afterwards. He didn\u2019t ever have to tell anybody to mind their manners\u2014everybody was always good-mannered where he was. Everybody loved to have him around, too; he was sunshine most always\u2014I mean he made it seem like good weather. When he turned into a cloudbank it was awful dark for half a minute, and that was enough; there wouldn\u2019t nothing go wrong again for a week.\r\n\r\nWhen him and the old lady come down in the morning all the family got up out of their chairs and give them good-day, and didn\u2019t set down again till they had set down. Then Tom and Bob went to the sideboard where the decanter was, and mixed a glass of bitters and handed it to him, and he held it in his hand and waited till Tom\u2019s and Bob\u2019s was mixed, and then they bowed and said, \u201cOur duty to you, sir, and madam;\u201d and they bowed the least bit in the world and said thank you, and so they drank, all three, and Bob and Tom poured a spoonful of water on the sugar and the mite of whisky or apple brandy in the bottom of their tumblers, and give it to me and Buck, and we drank to the old people too.\r\n\r\nBob was the oldest and Tom next\u2014tall, beautiful men with very broad shoulders and brown faces, and long black hair and black eyes. They dressed in white linen from head to foot, like the old gentleman, and wore broad Panama hats.\r\n\r\nThen there was Miss Charlotte; she was twenty-five, and tall and proud and grand, but as good as she could be when she warn\u2019t stirred up; but when she was, she had a look that would make you wilt in your tracks, like her father. She was beautiful.\r\n\r\nSo was her sister, Miss Sophia, but it was a different kind. She was gentle and sweet like a dove, and she was only twenty.\r\n\r\nEach person had their own nigger to wait on them\u2014Buck too. My nigger had a monstrous easy time, because I warn\u2019t used to having anybody do anything for me, but Buck\u2019s was on the jump most of the time.\r\n\r\nThis was all there was of the family now, but there used to be more\u2014three sons; they got killed; and Emmeline that died.\r\n\r\nThe old gentleman owned a lot of farms and over a hundred niggers. Sometimes a stack of people would come there, horseback, from ten or fifteen mile around, and stay five or six days, and have such junketings round about and on the river, and dances and picnics in the woods daytimes, and balls at the house nights. These people was mostly kinfolks of the family. The men brought their guns with them. It was a handsome lot of quality, I tell you.\r\n\r\nThere was another clan of aristocracy around there\u2014five or six families\u2014mostly of the name of Shepherdson. They was as high-toned and well born and rich and grand as the tribe of Grangerfords. The Shepherdsons and Grangerfords used the same steamboat landing, which was about two mile above our house; so sometimes when I went up there with a lot of our folks I used to see a lot of the Shepherdsons there on their fine horses.\r\n\r\nOne day Buck and me was away out in the woods hunting, and heard a horse coming. We was crossing the road. Buck says:\r\n\r\n\u201cQuick! Jump for the woods!\u201d\r\n\r\nWe done it, and then peeped down the woods through the leaves. Pretty soon a splendid young man come galloping down the road, setting his horse easy and looking like a soldier. He had his gun across his pommel. I had seen him before. It was young Harney Shepherdson. I heard Buck\u2019s gun go off at my ear, and Harney\u2019s hat tumbled off from his head. He grabbed his gun and rode straight to the place where we was hid. But we didn\u2019t wait. We started through the woods on a run. The woods warn\u2019t thick, so I looked over my shoulder to dodge the bullet, and twice I seen Harney cover Buck with his gun; and then he rode away the way he come\u2014to get his hat, I reckon, but I couldn\u2019t see. We never stopped running till we got home. The old gentleman\u2019s eyes blazed a minute\u2014\u2019twas pleasure, mainly, I judged\u2014then his face sort of smoothed down, and he says, kind of gentle:\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t like that shooting from behind a bush. Why didn\u2019t you step into the road, my boy?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Shepherdsons don\u2019t, father. They always take advantage.\u201d\r\n\r\nMiss Charlotte she held her head up like a queen while Buck was telling his tale, and her nostrils spread and her eyes snapped. The two young men looked dark, but never said nothing. Miss Sophia she turned pale, but the color come back when she found the man warn\u2019t hurt.\r\n\r\nSoon as I could get Buck down by the corn-cribs under the trees by ourselves, I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDid you want to kill him, Buck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I bet I did.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat did he do to you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHim? He never done nothing to me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, what did you want to kill him for?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, nothing\u2014only it\u2019s on account of the feud.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s a feud?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, where was you raised? Don\u2019t you know what a feud is?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNever heard of it before\u2014tell me about it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d says Buck, \u201ca feud is this way. A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man\u2019s brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in\u2014and by-and-by everybody\u2019s killed off, and there ain\u2019t no more feud. But it\u2019s kind of slow, and takes a long time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHas this one been going on long, Buck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I should reckon! It started thirty year ago, or som\u2019ers along there. There was trouble \u2019bout something, and then a lawsuit to settle it; and the suit went agin one of the men, and so he up and shot the man that won the suit\u2014which he would naturally do, of course. Anybody would.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat was the trouble about, Buck?\u2014land?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI reckon maybe\u2014I don\u2019t know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, who done the shooting? Was it a Grangerford or a Shepherdson?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLaws, how do I know? It was so long ago.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t anybody know?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes, pa knows, I reckon, and some of the other old people; but they don\u2019t know now what the row was about in the first place.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHas there been many killed, Buck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes; right smart chance of funerals. But they don\u2019t always kill. Pa\u2019s got a few buckshot in him; but he don\u2019t mind it \u2019cuz he don\u2019t weigh much, anyway. Bob\u2019s been carved up some with a bowie, and Tom\u2019s been hurt once or twice.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHas anybody been killed this year, Buck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes; we got one and they got one. \u2019Bout three months ago my cousin Bud, fourteen year old, was riding through the woods on t\u2019other side of the river, and didn\u2019t have no weapon with him, which was blame\u2019 foolishness, and in a lonesome place he hears a horse a-coming behind him, and sees old Baldy Shepherdson a-linkin\u2019 after him with his gun in his hand and his white hair a-flying in the wind; and \u2019stead of jumping off and taking to the brush, Bud \u2019lowed he could out-run him; so they had it, nip and tuck, for five mile or more, the old man a-gaining all the time; so at last Bud seen it warn\u2019t any use, so he stopped and faced around so as to have the bullet holes in front, you know, and the old man he rode up and shot him down. But he didn\u2019t git much chance to enjoy his luck, for inside of a week our folks laid him out.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI reckon that old man was a coward, Buck.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI reckon he warn\u2019t a coward. Not by a blame\u2019 sight. There ain\u2019t a coward amongst them Shepherdsons\u2014not a one. And there ain\u2019t no cowards amongst the Grangerfords either. Why, that old man kep\u2019 up his end in a fight one day for half an hour against three Grangerfords, and come out winner. They was all a-horseback; he lit off of his horse and got behind a little woodpile, and kep\u2019 his horse before him to stop the bullets; but the Grangerfords stayed on their horses and capered around the old man, and peppered away at him, and he peppered away at them. Him and his horse both went home pretty leaky and crippled, but the Grangerfords had to be fetched home\u2014and one of \u2019em was dead, and another died the next day. No, sir; if a body\u2019s out hunting for cowards he don\u2019t want to fool away any time amongst them Shepherdsons, becuz they don\u2019t breed any of that kind.\u201d\r\n\r\nNext Sunday we all went to church, about three mile, everybody a-horseback. The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kept them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall. The Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching\u2014all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and preforeordestination, and I don\u2019t know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.\r\n\r\nAbout an hour after dinner everybody was dozing around, some in their chairs and some in their rooms, and it got to be pretty dull. Buck and a dog was stretched out on the grass in the sun sound asleep. I went up to our room, and judged I would take a nap myself. I found that sweet Miss Sophia standing in her door, which was next to ours, and she took me in her room and shut the door very soft, and asked me if I liked her, and I said I did; and she asked me if I would do something for her and not tell anybody, and I said I would. Then she said she\u2019d forgot her Testament, and left it in the seat at church between two other books, and would I slip out quiet and go there and fetch it to her, and not say nothing to nobody. I said I would. So I slid out and slipped off up the road, and there warn\u2019t anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn\u2019t any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it\u2019s cool. If you notice, most folks don\u2019t go to church only when they\u2019ve got to; but a hog is different.\r\n\r\nSays I to myself, something\u2019s up; it ain\u2019t natural for a girl to be in such a sweat about a Testament. So I give it a shake, and out drops a little piece of paper with \u201cHalf-past two\u201d wrote on it with a pencil. I ransacked it, but couldn\u2019t find anything else. I couldn\u2019t make anything out of that, so I put the paper in the book again, and when I got home and upstairs there was Miss Sophia in her door waiting for me. She pulled me in and shut the door; then she looked in the Testament till she found the paper, and as soon as she read it she looked glad; and before a body could think she grabbed me and give me a squeeze, and said I was the best boy in the world, and not to tell anybody. She was mighty red in the face for a minute, and her eyes lighted up, and it made her powerful pretty. I was a good deal astonished, but when I got my breath I asked her what the paper was about, and she asked me if I had read it, and I said no, and she asked me if I could read writing, and I told her \u201cno, only coarse-hand,\u201d and then she said the paper warn\u2019t anything but a book-mark to keep her place, and I might go and play now.\r\n\r\nI went off down to the river, studying over this thing, and pretty soon I noticed that my nigger was following along behind. When we was out of sight of the house he looked back and around a second, and then comes a-running, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMars Jawge, if you\u2019ll come down into de swamp I\u2019ll show you a whole stack o\u2019 water-moccasins.\u201d\r\n\r\nThinks I, that\u2019s mighty curious; he said that yesterday. He oughter know a body don\u2019t love water-moccasins enough to go around hunting for them. What is he up to, anyway? So I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right; trot ahead.\u201d\r\n\r\nI followed a half a mile; then he struck out over the swamp, and waded ankle deep as much as another half-mile. We come to a little flat piece of land which was dry and very thick with trees and bushes and vines, and he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou shove right in dah jist a few steps, Mars Jawge; dah\u2019s whah dey is. I\u2019s seed \u2019m befo\u2019; I don\u2019t k\u2019yer to see \u2019em no mo\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen he slopped right along and went away, and pretty soon the trees hid him. I poked into the place a-ways and come to a little open patch as big as a bedroom all hung around with vines, and found a man laying there asleep\u2014and, by jings, it was my old Jim!\r\n\r\nI waked him up, and I reckoned it was going to be a grand surprise to him to see me again, but it warn\u2019t. He nearly cried he was so glad, but he warn\u2019t surprised. Said he swum along behind me that night, and heard me yell every time, but dasn\u2019t answer, because he didn\u2019t want nobody to pick him up and take him into slavery again. Says he:\r\n\r\n\u201cI got hurt a little, en couldn\u2019t swim fas\u2019, so I wuz a considable ways behine you towards de las\u2019; when you landed I reck\u2019ned I could ketch up wid you on de lan\u2019 \u2019dout havin\u2019 to shout at you, but when I see dat house I begin to go slow. I \u2019uz off too fur to hear what dey say to you\u2014I wuz \u2019fraid o\u2019 de dogs; but when it \u2019uz all quiet agin, I knowed you\u2019s in de house, so I struck out for de woods to wait for day. Early in de mawnin\u2019 some er de niggers come along, gwyne to de fields, en dey tuk me en showed me dis place, whah de dogs can\u2019t track me on accounts o\u2019 de water, en dey brings me truck to eat every night, en tells me how you\u2019s a-gitt\u2019n along.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy didn\u2019t you tell my Jack to fetch me here sooner, Jim?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, \u2019twarn\u2019t no use to \u2019sturb you, Huck, tell we could do sumfn\u2014but we\u2019s all right now. I ben a-buyin\u2019 pots en pans en vittles, as I got a chanst, en a-patchin\u2019 up de raf\u2019 nights when\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat raft, Jim?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOur ole raf\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou mean to say our old raft warn\u2019t smashed all to flinders?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, she warn\u2019t. She was tore up a good deal\u2014one en\u2019 of her was; but dey warn\u2019t no great harm done, on\u2019y our traps was mos\u2019 all los\u2019. Ef we hadn\u2019 dive\u2019 so deep en swum so fur under water, en de night hadn\u2019 ben so dark, en we warn\u2019t so sk\u2019yerd, en ben sich punkin-heads, as de sayin\u2019 is, we\u2019d a seed de raf\u2019. But it\u2019s jis\u2019 as well we didn\u2019t, \u2019kase now she\u2019s all fixed up agin mos\u2019 as good as new, en we\u2019s got a new lot o\u2019 stuff, in de place o\u2019 what \u2019uz los\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, how did you get hold of the raft again, Jim\u2014did you catch her?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow I gwyne to ketch her en I out in de woods? No; some er de niggers foun\u2019 her ketched on a snag along heah in de ben\u2019, en dey hid her in a crick \u2019mongst de willows, en dey wuz so much jawin\u2019 \u2019bout which un \u2019um she b\u2019long to de mos\u2019 dat I come to heah \u2019bout it pooty soon, so I ups en settles de trouble by tellin\u2019 \u2019um she don\u2019t b\u2019long to none uv um, but to you en me; en I ast \u2019m if dey gwyne to grab a young white genlman\u2019s propaty, en git a hid\u2019n for it? Den I gin \u2019m ten cents apiece, en dey \u2019uz mighty well satisfied, en wisht some mo\u2019 raf\u2019s \u2019ud come along en make \u2019m rich agin. Dey\u2019s mighty good to me, dese niggers is, en whatever I wants \u2019m to do fur me, I doan\u2019 have to ast \u2019m twice, honey. Dat Jack\u2019s a good nigger, en pooty smart.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, he is. He ain\u2019t ever told me you was here; told me to come, and he\u2019d show me a lot of water-moccasins. If anything happens he ain\u2019t mixed up in it. He can say he never seen us together, and it\u2019ll be the truth.\u201d\r\n\r\nI don\u2019t want to talk much about the next day. I reckon I\u2019ll cut it pretty short. I waked up about dawn, and was a-going to turn over and go to sleep again, when I noticed how still it was\u2014didn\u2019t seem to be anybody stirring. That warn\u2019t usual. Next I noticed that Buck was up and gone. Well, I gets up, a-wondering, and goes down stairs\u2014nobody around; everything as still as a mouse. Just the same outside. Thinks I, what does it mean? Down by the wood-pile I comes across my Jack, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s it all about?\u201d\r\n\r\nSays he:\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you know, Mars Jawge?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo,\u201d says I, \u201cI don\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, den, Miss Sophia\u2019s run off! \u2019deed she has. She run off in de night some time\u2014nobody don\u2019t know jis\u2019 when; run off to get married to dat young Harney Shepherdson, you know\u2014leastways, so dey \u2019spec. De fambly foun\u2019 it out \u2019bout half an hour ago\u2014maybe a little mo\u2019\u2014en\u2019 I tell you dey warn\u2019t no time los\u2019. Sich another hurryin\u2019 up guns en hosses you never see! De women folks has gone for to stir up de relations, en ole Mars Saul en de boys tuck dey guns en rode up de river road for to try to ketch dat young man en kill him \u2019fo\u2019 he kin git acrost de river wid Miss Sophia. I reck\u2019n dey\u2019s gwyne to be mighty rough times.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBuck went off \u2019thout waking me up.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I reck\u2019n he did! Dey warn\u2019t gwyne to mix you up in it. Mars Buck he loaded up his gun en \u2019lowed he\u2019s gwyne to fetch home a Shepherdson or bust. Well, dey\u2019ll be plenty un \u2019m dah, I reck\u2019n, en you bet you he\u2019ll fetch one ef he gits a chanst.\u201d\r\n\r\nI took up the river road as hard as I could put. By-and-by I begin to hear guns a good ways off. When I come in sight of the log store and the woodpile where the steamboats lands, I worked along under the trees and brush till I got to a good place, and then I clumb up into the forks of a cottonwood that was out of reach, and watched. There was a wood-rank four foot high a little ways in front of the tree, and first I was going to hide behind that; but maybe it was luckier I didn\u2019t.\r\n\r\nThere was four or five men cavorting around on their horses in the open place before the log store, cussing and yelling, and trying to get at a couple of young chaps that was behind the wood-rank alongside of the steamboat landing; but they couldn\u2019t come it. Every time one of them showed himself on the river side of the woodpile he got shot at. The two boys was squatting back to back behind the pile, so they could watch both ways.\r\n\r\nBy-and-by the men stopped cavorting around and yelling. They started riding towards the store; then up gets one of the boys, draws a steady bead over the wood-rank, and drops one of them out of his saddle. All the men jumped off of their horses and grabbed the hurt one and started to carry him to the store; and that minute the two boys started on the run. They got half way to the tree I was in before the men noticed. Then the men see them, and jumped on their horses and took out after them. They gained on the boys, but it didn\u2019t do no good, the boys had too good a start; they got to the woodpile that was in front of my tree, and slipped in behind it, and so they had the bulge on the men again. One of the boys was Buck, and the other was a slim young chap about nineteen years old.\r\n\r\nThe men ripped around awhile, and then rode away. As soon as they was out of sight I sung out to Buck and told him. He didn\u2019t know what to make of my voice coming out of the tree at first. He was awful surprised. He told me to watch out sharp and let him know when the men come in sight again; said they was up to some devilment or other\u2014wouldn\u2019t be gone long. I wished I was out of that tree, but I dasn\u2019t come down. Buck begun to cry and rip, and \u2019lowed that him and his cousin Joe (that was the other young chap) would make up for this day yet. He said his father and his two brothers was killed, and two or three of the enemy. Said the Shepherdsons laid for them in ambush. Buck said his father and brothers ought to waited for their relations\u2014the Shepherdsons was too strong for them. I asked him what was become of young Harney and Miss Sophia. He said they\u2019d got across the river and was safe. I was glad of that; but the way Buck did take on because he didn\u2019t manage to kill Harney that day he shot at him\u2014I hain\u2019t ever heard anything like it.\r\n\r\nAll of a sudden, bang! bang! bang! goes three or four guns\u2014the men had slipped around through the woods and come in from behind without their horses! The boys jumped for the river\u2014both of them hurt\u2014and as they swum down the current the men run along the bank shooting at them and singing out, \u201cKill them, kill them!\u201d It made me so sick I most fell out of the tree. I ain\u2019t a-going to tell all that happened\u2014it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn\u2019t ever come ashore that night to see such things. I ain\u2019t ever going to get shut of them\u2014lots of times I dream about them.\r\n\r\nI stayed in the tree till it begun to get dark, afraid to come down. Sometimes I heard guns away off in the woods; and twice I seen little gangs of men gallop past the log store with guns; so I reckoned the trouble was still a-going on. I was mighty downhearted; so I made up my mind I wouldn\u2019t ever go anear that house again, because I reckoned I was to blame, somehow. I judged that that piece of paper meant that Miss Sophia was to meet Harney somewheres at half-past two and run off; and I judged I ought to told her father about that paper and the curious way she acted, and then maybe he would a locked her up, and this awful mess wouldn\u2019t ever happened.\r\n\r\nWhen I got down out of the tree, I crept along down the river bank a piece, and found the two bodies laying in the edge of the water, and tugged at them till I got them ashore; then I covered up their faces, and got away as quick as I could. I cried a little when I was covering up Buck\u2019s face, for he was mighty good to me.\r\n\r\nIt was just dark now. I never went near the house, but struck through the woods and made for the swamp. Jim warn\u2019t on his island, so I tramped off in a hurry for the crick, and crowded through the willows, red-hot to jump aboard and get out of that awful country. The raft was gone! My souls, but I was scared! I couldn\u2019t get my breath for most a minute. Then I raised a yell. A voice not twenty-five foot from me says:\r\n\r\n\u201cGood lan\u2019! is dat you, honey? Doan\u2019 make no noise.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt was Jim\u2019s voice\u2014nothing ever sounded so good before. I run along the bank a piece and got aboard, and Jim he grabbed me and hugged me, he was so glad to see me. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cLaws bless you, chile, I \u2019uz right down sho\u2019 you\u2019s dead agin. Jack\u2019s been heah; he say he reck\u2019n you\u2019s ben shot, kase you didn\u2019 come home no mo\u2019; so I\u2019s jes\u2019 dis minute a startin\u2019 de raf\u2019 down towards de mouf er de crick, so\u2019s to be all ready for to shove out en leave soon as Jack comes agin en tells me for certain you is dead. Lawsy, I\u2019s mighty glad to git you back agin, honey.\u201d\r\n\r\nI says:\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right\u2014that\u2019s mighty good; they won\u2019t find me, and they\u2019ll think I\u2019ve been killed, and floated down the river\u2014there\u2019s something up there that\u2019ll help them think so\u2014so don\u2019t you lose no time, Jim, but just shove off for the big water as fast as ever you can.\u201d\r\n\r\nI never felt easy till the raft was two mile below there and out in the middle of the Mississippi. Then we hung up our signal lantern, and judged that we was free and safe once more. I hadn\u2019t had a bite to eat since yesterday, so Jim he got out some corn-dodgers and buttermilk, and pork and cabbage and greens\u2014there ain\u2019t nothing in the world so good when it\u2019s cooked right\u2014and whilst I eat my supper we talked, and had a good time. I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn\u2019t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don\u2019t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.\r\nCHAPTER XIX.\r\n\r\nTwo or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there\u2014sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up\u2014nearly always in the dead water under a tow-head; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres\u2014perfectly still\u2014just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line\u2014that was the woods on t\u2019other side; you couldn\u2019t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn\u2019t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away\u2014trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks\u2014rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there\u2019s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t\u2019other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they\u2019ve left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you\u2019ve got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!\r\n\r\nA little smoke couldn\u2019t be noticed now, so we would take some fish off of the lines and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by-and-by lazy off to sleep. Wake up by-and-by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat coughing along up-stream, so far off towards the other side you couldn\u2019t tell nothing about her only whether she was a stern-wheel or side-wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn\u2019t be nothing to hear nor nothing to see\u2014just solid lonesomeness. Next you\u2019d see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they\u2019re most always doing it on a raft; you\u2019d see the axe flash and come down\u2014you don\u2019t hear nothing; you see that axe go up again, and by the time it\u2019s above the man\u2019s head then you hear the k\u2019chunk!\u2014it had took all that time to come over the water. So we would put in the day, lazying around, listening to the stillness. Once there was a thick fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steamboats wouldn\u2019t run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing\u2014heard them plain; but we couldn\u2019t see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly; it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air. Jim said he believed it was spirits; but I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNo; spirits wouldn\u2019t say, \u2018Dern the dern fog.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\nSoon as it was night out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and talked about all kinds of things\u2014we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us\u2014the new clothes Buck\u2019s folks made for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn\u2019t go much on clothes, nohow.\r\n\r\nSometimes we\u2019d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark\u2014which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two\u2014on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It\u2019s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn\u2019t say nothing against it, because I\u2019ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they\u2019d got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.\r\n\r\nOnce or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her powwow shut off and leave the river still again; and by-and-by her waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone, and joggle the raft a bit, and after that you wouldn\u2019t hear nothing for you couldn\u2019t tell how long, except maybe frogs or something.\r\n\r\nAfter midnight the people on shore went to bed, and then for two or three hours the shores was black\u2014no more sparks in the cabin windows. These sparks was our clock\u2014the first one that showed again meant morning was coming, so we hunted a place to hide and tie up right away.\r\n\r\nOne morning about daybreak I found a canoe and crossed over a chute to the main shore\u2014it was only two hundred yards\u2014and paddled about a mile up a crick amongst the cypress woods, to see if I couldn\u2019t get some berries. Just as I was passing a place where a kind of a cowpath crossed the crick, here comes a couple of men tearing up the path as tight as they could foot it. I thought I was a goner, for whenever anybody was after anybody I judged it was me\u2014or maybe Jim. I was about to dig out from there in a hurry, but they was pretty close to me then, and sung out and begged me to save their lives\u2014said they hadn\u2019t been doing nothing, and was being chased for it\u2014said there was men and dogs a-coming. They wanted to jump right in, but I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you do it. I don\u2019t hear the dogs and horses yet; you\u2019ve got time to crowd through the brush and get up the crick a little ways; then you take to the water and wade down to me and get in\u2014that\u2019ll throw the dogs off the scent.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey done it, and soon as they was aboard I lit out for our tow-head, and in about five or ten minutes we heard the dogs and the men away off, shouting. We heard them come along towards the crick, but couldn\u2019t see them; they seemed to stop and fool around a while; then, as we got further and further away all the time, we couldn\u2019t hardly hear them at all; by the time we had left a mile of woods behind us and struck the river, everything was quiet, and we paddled over to the tow-head and hid in the cottonwoods and was safe.\r\n\r\nOne of these fellows was about seventy or upwards, and had a bald head and very gray whiskers. He had an old battered-up slouch hat on, and a greasy blue woollen shirt, and ragged old blue jeans britches stuffed into his boot-tops, and home-knit galluses\u2014no, he only had one. He had an old long-tailed blue jeans coat with slick brass buttons flung over his arm, and both of them had big, fat, ratty-looking carpet-bags.\r\n\r\nThe other fellow was about thirty, and dressed about as ornery. After breakfast we all laid off and talked, and the first thing that come out was that these chaps didn\u2019t know one another.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat got you into trouble?\u201d says the baldhead to t\u2019other chap.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I\u2019d been selling an article to take the tartar off the teeth\u2014and it does take it off, too, and generly the enamel along with it\u2014but I stayed about one night longer than I ought to, and was just in the act of sliding out when I ran across you on the trail this side of town, and you told me they were coming, and begged me to help you to get off. So I told you I was expecting trouble myself, and would scatter out with you. That\u2019s the whole yarn\u2014what\u2019s yourn?\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I\u2019d ben a-runnin\u2019 a little temperance revival thar, \u2019bout a week, and was the pet of the women folks, big and little, for I was makin\u2019 it mighty warm for the rummies, I tell you, and takin\u2019 as much as five or six dollars a night\u2014ten cents a head, children and niggers free\u2014and business a-growin\u2019 all the time, when somehow or another a little report got around last night that I had a way of puttin\u2019 in my time with a private jug on the sly. A nigger rousted me out this mornin\u2019, and told me the people was getherin\u2019 on the quiet with their dogs and horses, and they\u2019d be along pretty soon and give me \u2019bout half an hour\u2019s start, and then run me down if they could; and if they got me they\u2019d tar and feather me and ride me on a rail, sure. I didn\u2019t wait for no breakfast\u2014I warn\u2019t hungry.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOld man,\u201d said the young one, \u201cI reckon we might double-team it together; what do you think?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI ain\u2019t undisposed. What\u2019s your line\u2014mainly?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJour printer by trade; do a little in patent medicines; theater-actor\u2014tragedy, you know; take a turn to mesmerism and phrenology when there\u2019s a chance; teach singing-geography school for a change; sling a lecture sometimes\u2014oh, I do lots of things\u2014most anything that comes handy, so it ain\u2019t work. What\u2019s your lay?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve done considerble in the doctoring way in my time. Layin\u2019 on o\u2019 hands is my best holt\u2014for cancer and paralysis, and sich things; and I k\u2019n tell a fortune pretty good when I\u2019ve got somebody along to find out the facts for me. Preachin\u2019s my line, too, and workin\u2019 camp-meetin\u2019s, and missionaryin\u2019 around.\u201d\r\n\r\nNobody never said anything for a while; then the young man hove a sigh and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cAlas!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat \u2019re you alassin\u2019 about?\u201d says the baldhead.\r\n\r\n\u201cTo think I should have lived to be leading such a life, and be degraded down into such company.\u201d And he begun to wipe the corner of his eye with a rag.\r\n\r\n\u201cDern your skin, ain\u2019t the company good enough for you?\u201d says the baldhead, pretty pert and uppish.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, it is good enough for me; it\u2019s as good as I deserve; for who fetched me so low when I was so high? I did myself. I don\u2019t blame you, gentlemen\u2014far from it; I don\u2019t blame anybody. I deserve it all. Let the cold world do its worst; one thing I know\u2014there\u2019s a grave somewhere for me. The world may go on just as it\u2019s always done, and take everything from me\u2014loved ones, property, everything; but it can\u2019t take that. Some day I\u2019ll lie down in it and forget it all, and my poor broken heart will be at rest.\u201d He went on a-wiping.\r\n\r\n\u201cDrot your pore broken heart,\u201d says the baldhead; \u201cwhat are you heaving your pore broken heart at us f\u2019r? We hain\u2019t done nothing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I know you haven\u2019t. I ain\u2019t blaming you, gentlemen. I brought myself down\u2014yes, I did it myself. It\u2019s right I should suffer\u2014perfectly right\u2014I don\u2019t make any moan.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBrought you down from whar? Whar was you brought down from?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAh, you would not believe me; the world never believes\u2014let it pass\u2014\u2019tis no matter. The secret of my birth\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe secret of your birth! Do you mean to say\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGentlemen,\u201d says the young man, very solemn, \u201cI will reveal it to you, for I feel I may have confidence in you. By rights I am a duke!\u201d\r\n\r\nJim\u2019s eyes bugged out when he heard that; and I reckon mine did, too. Then the baldhead says: \u201cNo! you can\u2019t mean it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes. My great-grandfather, eldest son of the Duke of Bridgewater, fled to this country about the end of the last century, to breathe the pure air of freedom; married here, and died, leaving a son, his own father dying about the same time. The second son of the late duke seized the titles and estates\u2014the infant real duke was ignored. I am the lineal descendant of that infant\u2014I am the rightful Duke of Bridgewater; and here am I, forlorn, torn from my high estate, hunted of men, despised by the cold world, ragged, worn, heart-broken, and degraded to the companionship of felons on a raft!\u201d\r\n\r\nJim pitied him ever so much, and so did I. We tried to comfort him, but he said it warn\u2019t much use, he couldn\u2019t be much comforted; said if we was a mind to acknowledge him, that would do him more good than most anything else; so we said we would, if he would tell us how. He said we ought to bow when we spoke to him, and say \u201cYour Grace,\u201d or \u201cMy Lord,\u201d or \u201cYour Lordship\u201d\u2014and he wouldn\u2019t mind it if we called him plain \u201cBridgewater,\u201d which, he said, was a title anyway, and not a name; and one of us ought to wait on him at dinner, and do any little thing for him he wanted done.\r\n\r\nWell, that was all easy, so we done it. All through dinner Jim stood around and waited on him, and says, \u201cWill yo\u2019 Grace have some o\u2019 dis or some o\u2019 dat?\u201d and so on, and a body could see it was mighty pleasing to him.\r\n\r\nBut the old man got pretty silent by-and-by\u2014didn\u2019t have much to say, and didn\u2019t look pretty comfortable over all that petting that was going on around that duke. He seemed to have something on his mind. So, along in the afternoon, he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cLooky here, Bilgewater,\u201d he says, \u201cI\u2019m nation sorry for you, but you ain\u2019t the only person that\u2019s had troubles like that.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo you ain\u2019t. You ain\u2019t the only person that\u2019s ben snaked down wrongfully out\u2019n a high place.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAlas!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, you ain\u2019t the only person that\u2019s had a secret of his birth.\u201d And, by jings, he begins to cry.\r\n\r\n\u201cHold! What do you mean?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBilgewater, kin I trust you?\u201d says the old man, still sort of sobbing.\r\n\r\n\u201cTo the bitter death!\u201d He took the old man by the hand and squeezed it, and says, \u201cThat secret of your being: speak!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBilgewater, I am the late Dauphin!\u201d\r\n\r\nYou bet you, Jim and me stared this time. Then the duke says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou are what?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, my friend, it is too true\u2014your eyes is lookin\u2019 at this very moment on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou! At your age! No! You mean you\u2019re the late Charlemagne; you must be six or seven hundred years old, at the very least.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTrouble has done it, Bilgewater, trouble has done it; trouble has brung these gray hairs and this premature balditude. Yes, gentlemen, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin\u2019, exiled, trampled-on, and sufferin\u2019 rightful King of France.\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, he cried and took on so that me and Jim didn\u2019t know hardly what to do, we was so sorry\u2014and so glad and proud we\u2019d got him with us, too. So we set in, like we done before with the duke, and tried to comfort him. But he said it warn\u2019t no use, nothing but to be dead and done with it all could do him any good; though he said it often made him feel easier and better for a while if people treated him according to his rights, and got down on one knee to speak to him, and always called him \u201cYour Majesty,\u201d and waited on him first at meals, and didn\u2019t set down in his presence till he asked them. So Jim and me set to majestying him, and doing this and that and t\u2019other for him, and standing up till he told us we might set down. This done him heaps of good, and so he got cheerful and comfortable. But the duke kind of soured on him, and didn\u2019t look a bit satisfied with the way things was going; still, the king acted real friendly towards him, and said the duke\u2019s great-grandfather and all the other Dukes of Bilgewater was a good deal thought of by his father, and was allowed to come to the palace considerable; but the duke stayed huffy a good while, till by-and-by the king says:\r\n\r\n\u201cLike as not we got to be together a blamed long time on this h-yer raft, Bilgewater, and so what\u2019s the use o\u2019 your bein\u2019 sour? It\u2019ll only make things oncomfortable. It ain\u2019t my fault I warn\u2019t born a duke, it ain\u2019t your fault you warn\u2019t born a king\u2014so what\u2019s the use to worry? Make the best o\u2019 things the way you find \u2019em, says I\u2014that\u2019s my motto. This ain\u2019t no bad thing that we\u2019ve struck here\u2014plenty grub and an easy life\u2014come, give us your hand, Duke, and le\u2019s all be friends.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke done it, and Jim and me was pretty glad to see it. It took away all the uncomfortableness and we felt mighty good over it, because it would a been a miserable business to have any unfriendliness on the raft; for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others.\r\n\r\nIt didn\u2019t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn\u2019t no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it\u2019s the best way; then you don\u2019t have no quarrels, and don\u2019t get into no trouble. If they wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn\u2019t no objections, \u2019long as it would keep peace in the family; and it warn\u2019t no use to tell Jim, so I didn\u2019t tell him. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.\r\nCHAPTER XX.\r\n\r\nThey asked us considerable many questions; wanted to know what we covered up the raft that way for, and laid by in the daytime instead of running\u2014was Jim a runaway nigger? Says I:\r\n\r\n\u201cGoodness sakes, would a runaway nigger run south?\u201d\r\n\r\nNo, they allowed he wouldn\u2019t. I had to account for things some way, so I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMy folks was living in Pike County, in Missouri, where I was born, and they all died off but me and pa and my brother Ike. Pa, he \u2019lowed he\u2019d break up and go down and live with Uncle Ben, who\u2019s got a little one-horse place on the river, forty-four mile below Orleans. Pa was pretty poor, and had some debts; so when he\u2019d squared up there warn\u2019t nothing left but sixteen dollars and our nigger, Jim. That warn\u2019t enough to take us fourteen hundred mile, deck passage nor no other way. Well, when the river rose pa had a streak of luck one day; he ketched this piece of a raft; so we reckoned we\u2019d go down to Orleans on it. Pa\u2019s luck didn\u2019t hold out; a steamboat run over the forrard corner of the raft one night, and we all went overboard and dove under the wheel; Jim and me come up all right, but pa was drunk, and Ike was only four years old, so they never come up no more. Well, for the next day or two we had considerable trouble, because people was always coming out in skiffs and trying to take Jim away from me, saying they believed he was a runaway nigger. We don\u2019t run daytimes no more now; nights they don\u2019t bother us.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke says:\r\n\r\n\u201cLeave me alone to cipher out a way so we can run in the daytime if we want to. I\u2019ll think the thing over\u2014I\u2019ll invent a plan that\u2019ll fix it. We\u2019ll let it alone for to-day, because of course we don\u2019t want to go by that town yonder in daylight\u2014it mightn\u2019t be healthy.\u201d\r\n\r\nTowards night it begun to darken up and look like rain; the heat lightning was squirting around low down in the sky, and the leaves was beginning to shiver\u2014it was going to be pretty ugly, it was easy to see that. So the duke and the king went to overhauling our wigwam, to see what the beds was like. My bed was a straw tick better than Jim\u2019s, which was a corn-shuck tick; there\u2019s always cobs around about in a shuck tick, and they poke into you and hurt; and when you roll over the dry shucks sound like you was rolling over in a pile of dead leaves; it makes such a rustling that you wake up. Well, the duke allowed he would take my bed; but the king allowed he wouldn\u2019t. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI should a reckoned the difference in rank would a sejested to you that a corn-shuck bed warn\u2019t just fitten for me to sleep on. Your Grace\u2019ll take the shuck bed yourself.\u201d\r\n\r\nJim and me was in a sweat again for a minute, being afraid there was going to be some more trouble amongst them; so we was pretty glad when the duke says:\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2019Tis my fate to be always ground into the mire under the iron heel of oppression. Misfortune has broken my once haughty spirit; I yield, I submit; \u2019tis my fate. I am alone in the world\u2014let me suffer; I can bear it.\u201d\r\n\r\nWe got away as soon as it was good and dark. The king told us to stand well out towards the middle of the river, and not show a light till we got a long ways below the town. We come in sight of the little bunch of lights by-and-by\u2014that was the town, you know\u2014and slid by, about a half a mile out, all right. When we was three-quarters of a mile below we hoisted up our signal lantern; and about ten o\u2019clock it come on to rain and blow and thunder and lighten like everything; so the king told us to both stay on watch till the weather got better; then him and the duke crawled into the wigwam and turned in for the night. It was my watch below till twelve, but I wouldn\u2019t a turned in anyway if I\u2019d had a bed, because a body don\u2019t see such a storm as that every day in the week, not by a long sight. My souls, how the wind did scream along! And every second or two there\u2019d come a glare that lit up the white-caps for a half a mile around, and you\u2019d see the islands looking dusty through the rain, and the trees thrashing around in the wind; then comes a h-whack!\u2014bum! bum! bumble-umble-um-bum-bum-bum-bum\u2014and the thunder would go rumbling and grumbling away, and quit\u2014and then rip comes another flash and another sockdolager. The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I hadn\u2019t any clothes on, and didn\u2019t mind. We didn\u2019t have no trouble about snags; the lightning was glaring and flittering around so constant that we could see them plenty soon enough to throw her head this way or that and miss them.\r\n\r\nI had the middle watch, you know, but I was pretty sleepy by that time, so Jim he said he would stand the first half of it for me; he was always mighty good that way, Jim was. I crawled into the wigwam, but the king and the duke had their legs sprawled around so there warn\u2019t no show for me; so I laid outside\u2014I didn\u2019t mind the rain, because it was warm, and the waves warn\u2019t running so high now. About two they come up again, though, and Jim was going to call me; but he changed his mind, because he reckoned they warn\u2019t high enough yet to do any harm; but he was mistaken about that, for pretty soon all of a sudden along comes a regular ripper and washed me overboard. It most killed Jim a-laughing. He was the easiest nigger to laugh that ever was, anyway.\r\n\r\nI took the watch, and Jim he laid down and snored away; and by-and-by the storm let up for good and all; and the first cabin-light that showed, I rousted him out and we slid the raft into hiding quarters for the day.\r\n\r\nThe king got out an old ratty deck of cards after breakfast, and him and the duke played seven-up a while, five cents a game. Then they got tired of it, and allowed they would \u201clay out a campaign,\u201d as they called it. The duke went down into his carpet-bag, and fetched up a lot of little printed bills and read them out loud. One bill said, \u201cThe celebrated Dr. Armand de Montalban, of Paris,\u201d would \u201clecture on the Science of Phrenology\u201d at such and such a place, on the blank day of blank, at ten cents admission, and \u201cfurnish charts of character at twenty-five cents apiece.\u201d The duke said that was him. In another bill he was the \u201cworld-renowned Shakespearian tragedian, Garrick the Younger, of Drury Lane, London.\u201d In other bills he had a lot of other names and done other wonderful things, like finding water and gold with a \u201cdivining-rod,\u201d \u201cdissipating witch spells,\u201d and so on. By-and-by he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cBut the histrionic muse is the darling. Have you ever trod the boards, Royalty?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo,\u201d says the king.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou shall, then, before you\u2019re three days older, Fallen Grandeur,\u201d says the duke. \u201cThe first good town we come to we\u2019ll hire a hall and do the sword fight in Richard III. and the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. How does that strike you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m in, up to the hub, for anything that will pay, Bilgewater; but, you see, I don\u2019t know nothing about play-actin\u2019, and hain\u2019t ever seen much of it. I was too small when pap used to have \u2019em at the palace. Do you reckon you can learn me?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cEasy!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right. I\u2019m jist a-freezn\u2019 for something fresh, anyway. Le\u2019s commence right away.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo the duke he told him all about who Romeo was and who Juliet was, and said he was used to being Romeo, so the king could be Juliet.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut if Juliet\u2019s such a young gal, duke, my peeled head and my white whiskers is goin\u2019 to look oncommon odd on her, maybe.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, don\u2019t you worry; these country jakes won\u2019t ever think of that. Besides, you know, you\u2019ll be in costume, and that makes all the difference in the world; Juliet\u2019s in a balcony, enjoying the moonlight before she goes to bed, and she\u2019s got on her night-gown and her ruffled nightcap. Here are the costumes for the parts.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe got out two or three curtain-calico suits, which he said was meedyevil armor for Richard III. and t\u2019other chap, and a long white cotton nightshirt and a ruffled nightcap to match. The king was satisfied; so the duke got out his book and read the parts over in the most splendid spread-eagle way, prancing around and acting at the same time, to show how it had got to be done; then he give the book to the king and told him to get his part by heart.\r\n\r\nThere was a little one-horse town about three mile down the bend, and after dinner the duke said he had ciphered out his idea about how to run in daylight without it being dangersome for Jim; so he allowed he would go down to the town and fix that thing. The king allowed he would go, too, and see if he couldn\u2019t strike something. We was out of coffee, so Jim said I better go along with them in the canoe and get some.\r\n\r\nWhen we got there there warn\u2019t nobody stirring; streets empty, and perfectly dead and still, like Sunday. We found a sick nigger sunning himself in a back yard, and he said everybody that warn\u2019t too young or too sick or too old was gone to camp-meeting, about two mile back in the woods. The king got the directions, and allowed he\u2019d go and work that camp-meeting for all it was worth, and I might go, too.\r\n\r\nThe duke said what he was after was a printing-office. We found it; a little bit of a concern, up over a carpenter shop\u2014carpenters and printers all gone to the meeting, and no doors locked. It was a dirty, littered-up place, and had ink marks, and handbills with pictures of horses and runaway niggers on them, all over the walls. The duke shed his coat and said he was all right now. So me and the king lit out for the camp-meeting.\r\n\r\nWe got there in about a half an hour fairly dripping, for it was a most awful hot day. There was as much as a thousand people there from twenty mile around. The woods was full of teams and wagons, hitched everywheres, feeding out of the wagon-troughs and stomping to keep off the flies. There was sheds made out of poles and roofed over with branches, where they had lemonade and gingerbread to sell, and piles of watermelons and green corn and such-like truck.\r\n\r\nThe preaching was going on under the same kinds of sheds, only they was bigger and held crowds of people. The benches was made out of outside slabs of logs, with holes bored in the round side to drive sticks into for legs. They didn\u2019t have no backs. The preachers had high platforms to stand on at one end of the sheds. The women had on sun-bonnets; and some had linsey-woolsey frocks, some gingham ones, and a few of the young ones had on calico. Some of the young men was barefooted, and some of the children didn\u2019t have on any clothes but just a tow-linen shirt. Some of the old women was knitting, and some of the young folks was courting on the sly.\r\n\r\nThe first shed we come to the preacher was lining out a hymn. He lined out two lines, everybody sung it, and it was kind of grand to hear it, there was so many of them and they done it in such a rousing way; then he lined out two more for them to sing\u2014and so on. The people woke up more and more, and sung louder and louder; and towards the end some begun to groan, and some begun to shout. Then the preacher begun to preach, and begun in earnest, too; and went weaving first to one side of the platform and then the other, and then a-leaning down over the front of it, with his arms and his body going all the time, and shouting his words out with all his might; and every now and then he would hold up his Bible and spread it open, and kind of pass it around this way and that, shouting, \u201cIt\u2019s the brazen serpent in the wilderness! Look upon it and live!\u201d And people would shout out, \u201cGlory!\u2014A-a-men!\u201d And so he went on, and the people groaning and crying and saying amen:\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, come to the mourners\u2019 bench! come, black with sin! (amen!) come, sick and sore! (amen!) come, lame and halt and blind! (amen!) come, pore and needy, sunk in shame! (a-a-men!) come, all that\u2019s worn and soiled and suffering!\u2014come with a broken spirit! come with a contrite heart! come in your rags and sin and dirt! the waters that cleanse is free, the door of heaven stands open\u2014oh, enter in and be at rest!\u201d (a-a-men! glory, glory hallelujah!)\r\n\r\nAnd so on. You couldn\u2019t make out what the preacher said any more, on account of the shouting and crying. Folks got up everywheres in the crowd, and worked their way just by main strength to the mourners\u2019 bench, with the tears running down their faces; and when all the mourners had got up there to the front benches in a crowd, they sung and shouted and flung themselves down on the straw, just crazy and wild.\r\n\r\nWell, the first I knowed the king got a-going, and you could hear him over everybody; and next he went a-charging up on to the platform, and the preacher he begged him to speak to the people, and he done it. He told them he was a pirate\u2014been a pirate for thirty years out in the Indian Ocean\u2014and his crew was thinned out considerable last spring in a fight, and he was home now to take out some fresh men, and thanks to goodness he\u2019d been robbed last night and put ashore off of a steamboat without a cent, and he was glad of it; it was the blessedest thing that ever happened to him, because he was a changed man now, and happy for the first time in his life; and, poor as he was, he was going to start right off and work his way back to the Indian Ocean, and put in the rest of his life trying to turn the pirates into the true path; for he could do it better than anybody else, being acquainted with all pirate crews in that ocean; and though it would take him a long time to get there without money, he would get there anyway, and every time he convinced a pirate he would say to him, \u201cDon\u2019t you thank me, don\u2019t you give me no credit; it all belongs to them dear people in Pokeville camp-meeting, natural brothers and benefactors of the race, and that dear preacher there, the truest friend a pirate ever had!\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd then he busted into tears, and so did everybody. Then somebody sings out, \u201cTake up a collection for him, take up a collection!\u201d Well, a half a dozen made a jump to do it, but somebody sings out, \u201cLet him pass the hat around!\u201d Then everybody said it, the preacher too.\r\n\r\nSo the king went all through the crowd with his hat swabbing his eyes, and blessing the people and praising them and thanking them for being so good to the poor pirates away off there; and every little while the prettiest kind of girls, with the tears running down their cheeks, would up and ask him would he let them kiss him for to remember him by; and he always done it; and some of them he hugged and kissed as many as five or six times\u2014and he was invited to stay a week; and everybody wanted him to live in their houses, and said they\u2019d think it was an honor; but he said as this was the last day of the camp-meeting he couldn\u2019t do no good, and besides he was in a sweat to get to the Indian Ocean right off and go to work on the pirates.\r\n\r\nWhen we got back to the raft and he come to count up he found he had collected eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents. And then he had fetched away a three-gallon jug of whisky, too, that he found under a wagon when he was starting home through the woods. The king said, take it all around, it laid over any day he\u2019d ever put in in the missionarying line. He said it warn\u2019t no use talking, heathens don\u2019t amount to shucks alongside of pirates to work a camp-meeting with.\r\n\r\nThe duke was thinking he\u2019d been doing pretty well till the king come to show up, but after that he didn\u2019t think so so much. He had set up and printed off two little jobs for farmers in that printing-office\u2014horse bills\u2014and took the money, four dollars. And he had got in ten dollars\u2019 worth of advertisements for the paper, which he said he would put in for four dollars if they would pay in advance\u2014so they done it. The price of the paper was two dollars a year, but he took in three subscriptions for half a dollar apiece on condition of them paying him in advance; they were going to pay in cordwood and onions as usual, but he said he had just bought the concern and knocked down the price as low as he could afford it, and was going to run it for cash. He set up a little piece of poetry, which he made, himself, out of his own head\u2014three verses\u2014kind of sweet and saddish\u2014the name of it was, \u201cYes, crush, cold world, this breaking heart\u201d\u2014and he left that all set up and ready to print in the paper, and didn\u2019t charge nothing for it. Well, he took in nine dollars and a half, and said he\u2019d done a pretty square day\u2019s work for it.\r\n\r\nThen he showed us another little job he\u2019d printed and hadn\u2019t charged for, because it was for us. It had a picture of a runaway nigger with a bundle on a stick over his shoulder, and \u201c$200 reward\u201d under it. The reading was all about Jim, and just described him to a dot. It said he run away from St. Jacques\u2019 plantation, forty mile below New Orleans, last winter, and likely went north, and whoever would catch him and send him back he could have the reward and expenses.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow,\u201d says the duke, \u201cafter to-night we can run in the daytime if we want to. Whenever we see anybody coming we can tie Jim hand and foot with a rope, and lay him in the wigwam and show this handbill and say we captured him up the river, and were too poor to travel on a steamboat, so we got this little raft on credit from our friends and are going down to get the reward. Handcuffs and chains would look still better on Jim, but it wouldn\u2019t go well with the story of us being so poor. Too much like jewelry. Ropes are the correct thing\u2014we must preserve the unities, as we say on the boards.\u201d\r\n\r\nWe all said the duke was pretty smart, and there couldn\u2019t be no trouble about running daytimes. We judged we could make miles enough that night to get out of the reach of the powwow we reckoned the duke\u2019s work in the printing office was going to make in that little town; then we could boom right along if we wanted to.\r\n\r\nWe laid low and kept still, and never shoved out till nearly ten o\u2019clock; then we slid by, pretty wide away from the town, and didn\u2019t hoist our lantern till we was clear out of sight of it.\r\n\r\nWhen Jim called me to take the watch at four in the morning, he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHuck, does you reck\u2019n we gwyne to run acrost any mo\u2019 kings on dis trip?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo,\u201d I says, \u201cI reckon not.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d says he, \u201cdat\u2019s all right, den. I doan\u2019 mine one er two kings, but dat\u2019s enough. Dis one\u2019s powerful drunk, en de duke ain\u2019 much better.\u201d\r\n\r\nI found Jim had been trying to get him to talk French, so he could hear what it was like; but he said he had been in this country so long, and had so much trouble, he\u2019d forgot it.\r\nCHAPTER XXI.\r\n\r\nIt was after sun-up now, but we went right on and didn\u2019t tie up. The king and the duke turned out by-and-by looking pretty rusty; but after they\u2019d jumped overboard and took a swim it chippered them up a good deal. After breakfast the king he took a seat on the corner of the raft, and pulled off his boots and rolled up his britches, and let his legs dangle in the water, so as to be comfortable, and lit his pipe, and went to getting his Romeo and Juliet by heart. When he had got it pretty good, him and the duke begun to practice it together. The duke had to learn him over and over again how to say every speech; and he made him sigh, and put his hand on his heart, and after a while he said he done it pretty well; \u201conly,\u201d he says, \u201cyou mustn\u2019t bellow out Romeo! that way, like a bull\u2014you must say it soft and sick and languishy, so\u2014R-o-o-meo! that is the idea; for Juliet\u2019s a dear sweet mere child of a girl, you know, and she doesn\u2019t bray like a jackass.\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, next they got out a couple of long swords that the duke made out of oak laths, and begun to practice the sword fight\u2014the duke called himself Richard III.; and the way they laid on and pranced around the raft was grand to see. But by-and-by the king tripped and fell overboard, and after that they took a rest, and had a talk about all kinds of adventures they\u2019d had in other times along the river.\r\n\r\nAfter dinner the duke says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, Capet, we\u2019ll want to make this a first-class show, you know, so I guess we\u2019ll add a little more to it. We want a little something to answer encores with, anyway.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s onkores, Bilgewater?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke told him, and then says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll answer by doing the Highland fling or the sailor\u2019s hornpipe; and you\u2014well, let me see\u2014oh, I\u2019ve got it\u2014you can do Hamlet\u2019s soliloquy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHamlet\u2019s which?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHamlet\u2019s soliloquy, you know; the most celebrated thing in Shakespeare. Ah, it\u2019s sublime, sublime! Always fetches the house. I haven\u2019t got it in the book\u2014I\u2019ve only got one volume\u2014but I reckon I can piece it out from memory. I\u2019ll just walk up and down a minute, and see if I can call it back from recollection\u2019s vaults.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo he went to marching up and down, thinking, and frowning horrible every now and then; then he would hoist up his eyebrows; next he would squeeze his hand on his forehead and stagger back and kind of moan; next he would sigh, and next he\u2019d let on to drop a tear. It was beautiful to see him. By-and-by he got it. He told us to give attention. Then he strikes a most noble attitude, with one leg shoved forwards, and his arms stretched away up, and his head tilted back, looking up at the sky; and then he begins to rip and rave and grit his teeth; and after that, all through his speech, he howled, and spread around, and swelled up his chest, and just knocked the spots out of any acting ever I see before. This is the speech\u2014I learned it, easy enough, while he was learning it to the king:\r\n\r\nTo be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin\r\nThat makes calamity of so long life;\r\nFor who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,\r\nBut that the fear of something after death\r\nMurders the innocent sleep,\r\nGreat nature\u2019s second course,\r\nAnd makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune\r\nThan fly to others that we know not of.\r\nThere\u2019s the respect must give us pause:\r\nWake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;\r\nFor who would bear the whips and scorns of time,\r\nThe oppressor\u2019s wrong, the proud man\u2019s contumely,\r\nThe law\u2019s delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take.\r\nIn the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn\r\nIn customary suits of solemn black,\r\nBut that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,\r\nBreathes forth contagion on the world,\r\nAnd thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i\u2019 the adage,\r\nIs sicklied o\u2019er with care.\r\nAnd all the clouds that lowered o\u2019er our housetops,\r\nWith this regard their currents turn awry,\r\nAnd lose the name of action.\r\n\u2019Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.\r\nBut soft you, the fair Ophelia:\r\nOpe not thy ponderous and marble jaws.\r\nBut get thee to a nunnery\u2014go!\r\n\r\nWell, the old man he liked that speech, and he mighty soon got it so he could do it first rate. It seemed like he was just born for it; and when he had his hand in and was excited, it was perfectly lovely the way he would rip and tear and rair up behind when he was getting it off.\r\n\r\nThe first chance we got, the duke he had some show bills printed; and after that, for two or three days as we floated along, the raft was a most uncommon lively place, for there warn\u2019t nothing but sword-fighting and rehearsing\u2014as the duke called it\u2014going on all the time. One morning, when we was pretty well down the State of Arkansaw, we come in sight of a little one-horse town in a big bend; so we tied up about three-quarters of a mile above it, in the mouth of a crick which was shut in like a tunnel by the cypress trees, and all of us but Jim took the canoe and went down there to see if there was any chance in that place for our show.\r\n\r\nWe struck it mighty lucky; there was going to be a circus there that afternoon, and the country people was already beginning to come in, in all kinds of old shackly wagons, and on horses. The circus would leave before night, so our show would have a pretty good chance. The duke he hired the court house, and we went around and stuck up our bills. They read like this:\r\n\r\nShaksperean Revival!!!\r\nWonderful Attraction!\r\nFor One Night Only!\r\nThe world renowned tragedians,\r\nDavid Garrick the younger, of Drury Lane Theatre, London,\r\nand\r\nEdmund Kean the elder, of the Royal Haymarket Theatre,\r\nWhitechapel, Pudding Lane, Piccadilly, London, and the\r\nRoyal Continental Theatres, in their sublime\r\nShaksperean Spectacle entitled\r\nThe Balcony Scene\r\nin\r\nRomeo and Juliet!!!\r\n\r\nRomeo...................................... Mr. Garrick.\r\nJuliet..................................... Mr. Kean.\r\n\r\nAssisted by the whole strength of the company!\r\nNew costumes, new scenery, new appointments!\r\n\r\nAlso:\r\nThe thrilling, masterly, and blood-curdling\r\nBroad-sword conflict\r\nIn Richard III.!!!\r\n\r\nRichard III................................ Mr. Garrick.\r\nRichmond................................... Mr. Kean.\r\n\r\nalso:\r\n(by special request,)\r\nHamlet\u2019s Immortal Soliloquy!!\r\nBy the Illustrious Kean!\r\nDone by him 300 consecutive nights in Paris!\r\nFor One Night Only,\r\nOn account of imperative European engagements!\r\nAdmission 25 cents; children and servants, 10 cents.\r\n\r\nThen we went loafing around the town. The stores and houses was most all old shackly dried-up frame concerns that hadn\u2019t ever been painted; they was set up three or four foot above ground on stilts, so as to be out of reach of the water when the river was overflowed. The houses had little gardens around them, but they didn\u2019t seem to raise hardly anything in them but jimpson weeds, and sunflowers, and ash-piles, and old curled-up boots and shoes, and pieces of bottles, and rags, and played-out tin-ware. The fences was made of different kinds of boards, nailed on at different times; and they leaned every which-way, and had gates that didn\u2019t generly have but one hinge\u2014a leather one. Some of the fences had been whitewashed, some time or another, but the duke said it was in Clumbus\u2019s time, like enough. There was generly hogs in the garden, and people driving them out.\r\n\r\nAll the stores was along one street. They had white domestic awnings in front, and the country people hitched their horses to the awning-posts. There was empty drygoods boxes under the awnings, and loafers roosting on them all day long, whittling them with their Barlow knives; and chawing tobacco, and gaping and yawning and stretching\u2014a mighty ornery lot. They generly had on yellow straw hats most as wide as an umbrella, but didn\u2019t wear no coats nor waistcoats, they called one another Bill, and Buck, and Hank, and Joe, and Andy, and talked lazy and drawly, and used considerable many cuss words. There was as many as one loafer leaning up against every awning-post, and he most always had his hands in his britches-pockets, except when he fetched them out to lend a chaw of tobacco or scratch. What a body was hearing amongst them all the time was:\r\n\r\n\u201cGimme a chaw \u2019v tobacker, Hank.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCain\u2019t; I hain\u2019t got but one chaw left. Ask Bill.\u201d\r\n\r\nMaybe Bill he gives him a chaw; maybe he lies and says he ain\u2019t got none. Some of them kinds of loafers never has a cent in the world, nor a chaw of tobacco of their own. They get all their chawing by borrowing; they say to a fellow, \u201cI wisht you\u2019d len\u2019 me a chaw, Jack, I jist this minute give Ben Thompson the last chaw I had\u201d\u2014which is a lie pretty much everytime; it don\u2019t fool nobody but a stranger; but Jack ain\u2019t no stranger, so he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou give him a chaw, did you? So did your sister\u2019s cat\u2019s grandmother. You pay me back the chaws you\u2019ve awready borry\u2019d off\u2019n me, Lafe Buckner, then I\u2019ll loan you one or two ton of it, and won\u2019t charge you no back intrust, nuther.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I did pay you back some of it wunst.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, you did\u2014\u2019bout six chaws. You borry\u2019d store tobacker and paid back nigger-head.\u201d\r\n\r\nStore tobacco is flat black plug, but these fellows mostly chaws the natural leaf twisted. When they borrow a chaw they don\u2019t generly cut it off with a knife, but set the plug in between their teeth, and gnaw with their teeth and tug at the plug with their hands till they get it in two; then sometimes the one that owns the tobacco looks mournful at it when it\u2019s handed back, and says, sarcastic:\r\n\r\n\u201cHere, gimme the chaw, and you take the plug.\u201d\r\n\r\nAll the streets and lanes was just mud; they warn\u2019t nothing else but mud\u2014mud as black as tar and nigh about a foot deep in some places, and two or three inches deep in all the places. The hogs loafed and grunted around everywheres. You\u2019d see a muddy sow and a litter of pigs come lazying along the street and whollop herself right down in the way, where folks had to walk around her, and she\u2019d stretch out and shut her eyes and wave her ears whilst the pigs was milking her, and look as happy as if she was on salary. And pretty soon you\u2019d hear a loafer sing out, \u201cHi! so boy! sick him, Tige!\u201d and away the sow would go, squealing most horrible, with a dog or two swinging to each ear, and three or four dozen more a-coming; and then you would see all the loafers get up and watch the thing out of sight, and laugh at the fun and look grateful for the noise. Then they\u2019d settle back again till there was a dog fight. There couldn\u2019t anything wake them up all over, and make them happy all over, like a dog fight\u2014unless it might be putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or tying a tin pan to his tail and see him run himself to death.\r\n\r\nOn the river front some of the houses was sticking out over the bank, and they was bowed and bent, and about ready to tumble in. The people had moved out of them. The bank was caved away under one corner of some others, and that corner was hanging over. People lived in them yet, but it was dangersome, because sometimes a strip of land as wide as a house caves in at a time. Sometimes a belt of land a quarter of a mile deep will start in and cave along and cave along till it all caves into the river in one summer. Such a town as that has to be always moving back, and back, and back, because the river\u2019s always gnawing at it.\r\n\r\nThe nearer it got to noon that day the thicker and thicker was the wagons and horses in the streets, and more coming all the time. Families fetched their dinners with them from the country, and eat them in the wagons. There was considerable whisky drinking going on, and I seen three fights. By-and-by somebody sings out:\r\n\r\n\u201cHere comes old Boggs!\u2014in from the country for his little old monthly drunk; here he comes, boys!\u201d\r\n\r\nAll the loafers looked glad; I reckoned they was used to having fun out of Boggs. One of them says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWonder who he\u2019s a-gwyne to chaw up this time. If he\u2019d a-chawed up all the men he\u2019s ben a-gwyne to chaw up in the last twenty year he\u2019d have considerable ruputation now.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnother one says, \u201cI wisht old Boggs \u2019d threaten me, \u2019cuz then I\u2019d know I warn\u2019t gwyne to die for a thousan\u2019 year.\u201d\r\n\r\nBoggs comes a-tearing along on his horse, whooping and yelling like an Injun, and singing out:\r\n\r\n\u201cCler the track, thar. I\u2019m on the waw-path, and the price uv coffins is a-gwyne to raise.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe was drunk, and weaving about in his saddle; he was over fifty year old, and had a very red face. Everybody yelled at him and laughed at him and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he\u2019d attend to them and lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn\u2019t wait now because he\u2019d come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, \u201cMeat first, and spoon vittles to top off on.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe see me, and rode up and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhar\u2019d you come f\u2019m, boy? You prepared to die?\u201d\r\n\r\nThen he rode on. I was scared, but a man says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHe don\u2019t mean nothing; he\u2019s always a-carryin\u2019 on like that when he\u2019s drunk. He\u2019s the best naturedest old fool in Arkansaw\u2014never hurt nobody, drunk nor sober.\u201d\r\n\r\nBoggs rode up before the biggest store in town, and bent his head down so he could see under the curtain of the awning and yells:\r\n\r\n\u201cCome out here, Sherburn! Come out and meet the man you\u2019ve swindled. You\u2019re the houn\u2019 I\u2019m after, and I\u2019m a-gwyne to have you, too!\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd so he went on, calling Sherburn everything he could lay his tongue to, and the whole street packed with people listening and laughing and going on. By-and-by a proud-looking man about fifty-five\u2014and he was a heap the best dressed man in that town, too\u2014steps out of the store, and the crowd drops back on each side to let him come. He says to Boggs, mighty ca\u2019m and slow\u2014he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m tired of this, but I\u2019ll endure it till one o\u2019clock. Till one o\u2019clock, mind\u2014no longer. If you open your mouth against me only once after that time you can\u2019t travel so far but I will find you.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen he turns and goes in. The crowd looked mighty sober; nobody stirred, and there warn\u2019t no more laughing. Boggs rode off blackguarding Sherburn as loud as he could yell, all down the street; and pretty soon back he comes and stops before the store, still keeping it up. Some men crowded around him and tried to get him to shut up, but he wouldn\u2019t; they told him it would be one o\u2019clock in about fifteen minutes, and so he must go home\u2014he must go right away. But it didn\u2019t do no good. He cussed away with all his might, and throwed his hat down in the mud and rode over it, and pretty soon away he went a-raging down the street again, with his gray hair a-flying. Everybody that could get a chance at him tried their best to coax him off of his horse so they could lock him up and get him sober; but it warn\u2019t no use\u2014up the street he would tear again, and give Sherburn another cussing. By-and-by somebody says:\r\n\r\n\u201cGo for his daughter!\u2014quick, go for his daughter; sometimes he\u2019ll listen to her. If anybody can persuade him, she can.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo somebody started on a run. I walked down street a ways and stopped. In about five or ten minutes here comes Boggs again, but not on his horse. He was a-reeling across the street towards me, bare-headed, with a friend on both sides of him a-holt of his arms and hurrying him along. He was quiet, and looked uneasy; and he warn\u2019t hanging back any, but was doing some of the hurrying himself. Somebody sings out:\r\n\r\n\u201cBoggs!\u201d\r\n\r\nI looked over there to see who said it, and it was that Colonel Sherburn. He was standing perfectly still in the street, and had a pistol raised in his right hand\u2014not aiming it, but holding it out with the barrel tilted up towards the sky. The same second I see a young girl coming on the run, and two men with her. Boggs and the men turned round to see who called him, and when they see the pistol the men jumped to one side, and the pistol-barrel come down slow and steady to a level\u2014both barrels cocked. Boggs throws up both of his hands and says, \u201cO Lord, don\u2019t shoot!\u201d Bang! goes the first shot, and he staggers back, clawing at the air\u2014bang! goes the second one, and he tumbles backwards onto the ground, heavy and solid, with his arms spread out. That young girl screamed out and comes rushing, and down she throws herself on her father, crying, and saying, \u201cOh, he\u2019s killed him, he\u2019s killed him!\u201d The crowd closed up around them, and shouldered and jammed one another, with their necks stretched, trying to see, and people on the inside trying to shove them back and shouting, \u201cBack, back! give him air, give him air!\u201d\r\n\r\nColonel Sherburn he tossed his pistol onto the ground, and turned around on his heels and walked off.\r\n\r\nThey took Boggs to a little drug store, the crowd pressing around just the same, and the whole town following, and I rushed and got a good place at the window, where I was close to him and could see in. They laid him on the floor and put one large Bible under his head, and opened another one and spread it on his breast; but they tore open his shirt first, and I seen where one of the bullets went in. He made about a dozen long gasps, his breast lifting the Bible up when he drawed in his breath, and letting it down again when he breathed it out\u2014and after that he laid still; he was dead. Then they pulled his daughter away from him, screaming and crying, and took her off. She was about sixteen, and very sweet and gentle-looking, but awful pale and scared.\r\n\r\nWell, pretty soon the whole town was there, squirming and scrouging and pushing and shoving to get at the window and have a look, but people that had the places wouldn\u2019t give them up, and folks behind them was saying all the time, \u201cSay, now, you\u2019ve looked enough, you fellows; \u2019tain\u2019t right and \u2019tain\u2019t fair for you to stay thar all the time, and never give nobody a chance; other folks has their rights as well as you.\u201d\r\n\r\nThere was considerable jawing back, so I slid out, thinking maybe there was going to be trouble. The streets was full, and everybody was excited. Everybody that seen the shooting was telling how it happened, and there was a big crowd packed around each one of these fellows, stretching their necks and listening. One long, lanky man, with long hair and a big white fur stovepipe hat on the back of his head, and a crooked-handled cane, marked out the places on the ground where Boggs stood and where Sherburn stood, and the people following him around from one place to t\u2019other and watching everything he done, and bobbing their heads to show they understood, and stooping a little and resting their hands on their thighs to watch him mark the places on the ground with his cane; and then he stood up straight and stiff where Sherburn had stood, frowning and having his hat-brim down over his eyes, and sung out, \u201cBoggs!\u201d and then fetched his cane down slow to a level, and says \u201cBang!\u201d staggered backwards, says \u201cBang!\u201d again, and fell down flat on his back. The people that had seen the thing said he done it perfect; said it was just exactly the way it all happened. Then as much as a dozen people got out their bottles and treated him.\r\n\r\nWell, by-and-by somebody said Sherburn ought to be lynched. In about a minute everybody was saying it; so away they went, mad and yelling, and snatching down every clothes-line they come to, to do the hanging with.\r\nCHAPTER XXII.\r\n\r\nThey swarmed up towards Sherburn\u2019s house, a-whooping and raging like Injuns, and everything had to clear the way or get run over and tromped to mush, and it was awful to see. Children was heeling it ahead of the mob, screaming and trying to get out of the way; and every window along the road was full of women\u2019s heads, and there was nigger boys in every tree, and bucks and wenches looking over every fence; and as soon as the mob would get nearly to them they would break and skaddle back out of reach. Lots of the women and girls was crying and taking on, scared most to death.\r\n\r\nThey swarmed up in front of Sherburn\u2019s palings as thick as they could jam together, and you couldn\u2019t hear yourself think for the noise. It was a little twenty-foot yard. Some sung out \u201cTear down the fence! tear down the fence!\u201d Then there was a racket of ripping and tearing and smashing, and down she goes, and the front wall of the crowd begins to roll in like a wave.\r\n\r\nJust then Sherburn steps out on to the roof of his little front porch, with a double-barrel gun in his hand, and takes his stand, perfectly ca\u2019m and deliberate, not saying a word. The racket stopped, and the wave sucked back.\r\n\r\nSherburn never said a word\u2014just stood there, looking down. The stillness was awful creepy and uncomfortable. Sherburn run his eye slow along the crowd; and wherever it struck the people tried a little to out-gaze him, but they couldn\u2019t; they dropped their eyes and looked sneaky. Then pretty soon Sherburn sort of laughed; not the pleasant kind, but the kind that makes you feel like when you are eating bread that\u2019s got sand in it.\r\n\r\nThen he says, slow and scornful:\r\n\r\n\u201cThe idea of you lynching anybody! It\u2019s amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! Because you\u2019re brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man? Why, a man\u2019s safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind\u2014as long as it\u2019s daytime and you\u2019re not behind him.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I\u2019ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man\u2019s a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in the daytime, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people\u2014whereas you\u2019re just as brave, and no braver. Why don\u2019t your juries hang murderers? Because they\u2019re afraid the man\u2019s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark\u2014and it\u2019s just what they would do.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that you didn\u2019t bring a man with you; that\u2019s one mistake, and the other is that you didn\u2019t come in the dark and fetch your masks. You brought part of a man\u2014Buck Harkness, there\u2014and if you hadn\u2019t had him to start you, you\u2019d a taken it out in blowing.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou didn\u2019t want to come. The average man don\u2019t like trouble and danger. You don\u2019t like trouble and danger. But if only half a man\u2014like Buck Harkness, there\u2014shouts \u2018Lynch him! lynch him!\u2019 you\u2019re afraid to back down\u2014afraid you\u2019ll be found out to be what you are\u2014cowards\u2014and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that half-a-man\u2019s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you\u2019re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that\u2019s what an army is\u2014a mob; they don\u2019t fight with courage that\u2019s born in them, but with courage that\u2019s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness. Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching\u2019s going to be done, it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they\u2019ll bring their masks, and fetch a man along. Now leave\u2014and take your half-a-man with you\u201d\u2014tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking it when he says this.\r\n\r\nThe crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart, and went tearing off every which way, and Buck Harkness he heeled it after them, looking tolerable cheap. I could a staid if I wanted to, but I didn\u2019t want to.\r\n\r\nI went to the circus and loafed around the back side till the watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent. I had my twenty-dollar gold piece and some other money, but I reckoned I better save it, because there ain\u2019t no telling how soon you are going to need it, away from home and amongst strangers that way. You can\u2019t be too careful. I ain\u2019t opposed to spending money on circuses when there ain\u2019t no other way, but there ain\u2019t no use in wasting it on them.\r\n\r\nIt was a real bully circus. It was the splendidest sight that ever was when they all come riding in, two and two, a gentleman and lady, side by side, the men just in their drawers and undershirts, and no shoes nor stirrups, and resting their hands on their thighs easy and comfortable\u2014there must a been twenty of them\u2014and every lady with a lovely complexion, and perfectly beautiful, and looking just like a gang of real sure-enough queens, and dressed in clothes that cost millions of dollars, and just littered with diamonds. It was a powerful fine sight; I never see anything so lovely. And then one by one they got up and stood, and went a-weaving around the ring so gentle and wavy and graceful, the men looking ever so tall and airy and straight, with their heads bobbing and skimming along, away up there under the tent-roof, and every lady\u2019s rose-leafy dress flapping soft and silky around her hips, and she looking like the most loveliest parasol.\r\n\r\nAnd then faster and faster they went, all of them dancing, first one foot out in the air and then the other, the horses leaning more and more, and the ring-master going round and round the center-pole, cracking his whip and shouting \u201cHi!\u2014hi!\u201d and the clown cracking jokes behind him; and by-and-by all hands dropped the reins, and every lady put her knuckles on her hips and every gentleman folded his arms, and then how the horses did lean over and hump themselves! And so one after the other they all skipped off into the ring, and made the sweetest bow I ever see, and then scampered out, and everybody clapped their hands and went just about wild.\r\n\r\nWell, all through the circus they done the most astonishing things; and all the time that clown carried on so it most killed the people. The ring-master couldn\u2019t ever say a word to him but he was back at him quick as a wink with the funniest things a body ever said; and how he ever could think of so many of them, and so sudden and so pat, was what I couldn\u2019t noway understand. Why, I couldn\u2019t a thought of them in a year. And by-and-by a drunk man tried to get into the ring\u2014said he wanted to ride; said he could ride as well as anybody that ever was. They argued and tried to keep him out, but he wouldn\u2019t listen, and the whole show come to a standstill. Then the people begun to holler at him and make fun of him, and that made him mad, and he begun to rip and tear; so that stirred up the people, and a lot of men begun to pile down off of the benches and swarm towards the ring, saying, \u201cKnock him down! throw him out!\u201d and one or two women begun to scream. So, then, the ring-master he made a little speech, and said he hoped there wouldn\u2019t be no disturbance, and if the man would promise he wouldn\u2019t make no more trouble he would let him ride if he thought he could stay on the horse. So everybody laughed and said all right, and the man got on. The minute he was on, the horse begun to rip and tear and jump and cavort around, with two circus men hanging on to his bridle trying to hold him, and the drunk man hanging on to his neck, and his heels flying in the air every jump, and the whole crowd of people standing up shouting and laughing till tears rolled down. And at last, sure enough, all the circus men could do, the horse broke loose, and away he went like the very nation, round and round the ring, with that sot laying down on him and hanging to his neck, with first one leg hanging most to the ground on one side, and then t\u2019other one on t\u2019other side, and the people just crazy. It warn\u2019t funny to me, though; I was all of a tremble to see his danger. But pretty soon he struggled up astraddle and grabbed the bridle, a-reeling this way and that; and the next minute he sprung up and dropped the bridle and stood! and the horse a-going like a house afire too. He just stood up there, a-sailing around as easy and comfortable as if he warn\u2019t ever drunk in his life\u2014and then he begun to pull off his clothes and sling them. He shed them so thick they kind of clogged up the air, and altogether he shed seventeen suits. And, then, there he was, slim and handsome, and dressed the gaudiest and prettiest you ever saw, and he lit into that horse with his whip and made him fairly hum\u2014and finally skipped off, and made his bow and danced off to the dressing-room, and everybody just a-howling with pleasure and astonishment.\r\n\r\nThen the ring-master he see how he had been fooled, and he was the sickest ring-master you ever see, I reckon. Why, it was one of his own men! He had got up that joke all out of his own head, and never let on to nobody. Well, I felt sheepish enough to be took in so, but I wouldn\u2019t a been in that ring-master\u2019s place, not for a thousand dollars. I don\u2019t know; there may be bullier circuses than what that one was, but I never struck them yet. Anyways, it was plenty good enough for me; and wherever I run across it, it can have all of my custom every time.\r\n\r\nWell, that night we had our show; but there warn\u2019t only about twelve people there\u2014just enough to pay expenses. And they laughed all the time, and that made the duke mad; and everybody left, anyway, before the show was over, but one boy which was asleep. So the duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn\u2019t come up to Shakespeare; what they wanted was low comedy\u2014and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy, he reckoned. He said he could size their style. So next morning he got some big sheets of wrapping paper and some black paint, and drawed off some handbills, and stuck them up all over the village. The bills said:\r\n\r\nAT THE COURT HOUSE!\r\nFOR 3 NIGHTS ONLY!\r\nThe World-Renowned Tragedians\r\nDAVID GARRICK THE YOUNGER!\r\nAND\r\nEDMUND KEAN THE ELDER!\r\nOf the London and Continental\r\nTheatres,\r\nIn their Thrilling Tragedy of\r\nTHE KING\u2019S CAMELOPARD\r\nOR\r\nTHE ROYAL NONESUCH!!!\r\nAdmission 50 cents.\r\n\r\nThen at the bottom was the biggest line of all\u2014which said:\r\n\r\nLADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere,\u201d says he, \u201cif that line don\u2019t fetch them, I dont know Arkansaw!\u201d\r\nCHAPTER XXIII.\r\n\r\nWell, all day him and the king was hard at it, rigging up a stage and a curtain and a row of candles for footlights; and that night the house was jam full of men in no time. When the place couldn\u2019t hold no more, the duke he quit tending door and went around the back way and come on to the stage and stood up before the curtain and made a little speech, and praised up this tragedy, and said it was the most thrillingest one that ever was; and so he went on a-bragging about the tragedy, and about Edmund Kean the Elder, which was to play the main principal part in it; and at last when he\u2019d got everybody\u2019s expectations up high enough, he rolled up the curtain, and the next minute the king come a-prancing out on all fours, naked; and he was painted all over, ring-streaked-and-striped, all sorts of colors, as splendid as a rainbow. And\u2014but never mind the rest of his outfit; it was just wild, but it was awful funny. The people most killed themselves laughing; and when the king got done capering and capered off behind the scenes, they roared and clapped and stormed and haw-hawed till he come back and done it over again, and after that they made him do it another time. Well, it would make a cow laugh to see the shines that old idiot cut.\r\n\r\nThen the duke he lets the curtain down, and bows to the people, and says the great tragedy will be performed only two nights more, on accounts of pressing London engagements, where the seats is all sold already for it in Drury Lane; and then he makes them another bow, and says if he has succeeded in pleasing them and instructing them, he will be deeply obleeged if they will mention it to their friends and get them to come and see it.\r\n\r\nTwenty people sings out:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat, is it over? Is that all?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke says yes. Then there was a fine time. Everybody sings out, \u201cSold!\u201d and rose up mad, and was a-going for that stage and them tragedians. But a big, fine looking man jumps up on a bench and shouts:\r\n\r\n\u201cHold on! Just a word, gentlemen.\u201d They stopped to listen. \u201cWe are sold\u2014mighty badly sold. But we don\u2019t want to be the laughing stock of this whole town, I reckon, and never hear the last of this thing as long as we live. No. What we want is to go out of here quiet, and talk this show up, and sell the rest of the town! Then we\u2019ll all be in the same boat. Ain\u2019t that sensible?\u201d (\u201cYou bet it is!\u2014the jedge is right!\u201d everybody sings out.) \u201cAll right, then\u2014not a word about any sell. Go along home, and advise everybody to come and see the tragedy.\u201d\r\n\r\nNext day you couldn\u2019t hear nothing around that town but how splendid that show was. House was jammed again that night, and we sold this crowd the same way. When me and the king and the duke got home to the raft we all had a supper; and by-and-by, about midnight, they made Jim and me back her out and float her down the middle of the river, and fetch her in and hide her about two mile below town.\r\n\r\nThe third night the house was crammed again\u2014and they warn\u2019t new-comers this time, but people that was at the show the other two nights. I stood by the duke at the door, and I see that every man that went in had his pockets bulging, or something muffled up under his coat\u2014and I see it warn\u2019t no perfumery, neither, not by a long sight. I smelt sickly eggs by the barrel, and rotten cabbages, and such things; and if I know the signs of a dead cat being around, and I bet I do, there was sixty-four of them went in. I shoved in there for a minute, but it was too various for me; I couldn\u2019t stand it. Well, when the place couldn\u2019t hold no more people the duke he give a fellow a quarter and told him to tend door for him a minute, and then he started around for the stage door, I after him; but the minute we turned the corner and was in the dark he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWalk fast now till you get away from the houses, and then shin for the raft like the dickens was after you!\u201d\r\n\r\nI done it, and he done the same. We struck the raft at the same time, and in less than two seconds we was gliding down stream, all dark and still, and edging towards the middle of the river, nobody saying a word. I reckoned the poor king was in for a gaudy time of it with the audience, but nothing of the sort; pretty soon he crawls out from under the wigwam, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, how\u2019d the old thing pan out this time, duke?\u201d\r\n\r\nHe hadn\u2019t been up town at all.\r\n\r\nWe never showed a light till we was about ten mile below the village. Then we lit up and had a supper, and the king and the duke fairly laughed their bones loose over the way they\u2019d served them people. The duke says:\r\n\r\n\u201cGreenhorns, flatheads! I knew the first house would keep mum and let the rest of the town get roped in; and I knew they\u2019d lay for us the third night, and consider it was their turn now. Well, it is their turn, and I\u2019d give something to know how much they\u2019d take for it. I would just like to know how they\u2019re putting in their opportunity. They can turn it into a picnic if they want to\u2014they brought plenty provisions.\u201d\r\n\r\nThem rapscallions took in four hundred and sixty-five dollars in that three nights. I never see money hauled in by the wagon-load like that before. By-and-by, when they was asleep and snoring, Jim says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t it s\u2019prise you de way dem kings carries on, Huck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo,\u201d I says, \u201cit don\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy don\u2019t it, Huck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it don\u2019t, because it\u2019s in the breed. I reckon they\u2019re all alike.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut, Huck, dese kings o\u2019 ourn is reglar rapscallions; dat\u2019s jist what dey is; dey\u2019s reglar rapscallions.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, that\u2019s what I\u2019m a-saying; all kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIs dat so?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou read about them once\u2014you\u2019ll see. Look at Henry the Eight; this\u2019n \u2019s a Sunday-school Superintendent to him. And look at Charles Second, and Louis Fourteen, and Louis Fifteen, and James Second, and Edward Second, and Richard Third, and forty more; besides all them Saxon heptarchies that used to rip around so in old times and raise Cain. My, you ought to seen old Henry the Eight when he was in bloom. He was a blossom. He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head next morning. And he would do it just as indifferent as if he was ordering up eggs. \u2018Fetch up Nell Gwynn,\u2019 he says. They fetch her up. Next morning, \u2018Chop off her head!\u2019 And they chop it off. \u2018Fetch up Jane Shore,\u2019 he says; and up she comes, Next morning, \u2018Chop off her head\u2019\u2014and they chop it off. \u2018Ring up Fair Rosamun.\u2019 Fair Rosamun answers the bell. Next morning, \u2018Chop off her head.\u2019 And he made every one of them tell him a tale every night; and he kept that up till he had hogged a thousand and one tales that way, and then he put them all in a book, and called it Domesday Book\u2014which was a good name and stated the case. You don\u2019t know kings, Jim, but I know them; and this old rip of ourn is one of the cleanest I\u2019ve struck in history. Well, Henry he takes a notion he wants to get up some trouble with this country. How does he go at it\u2014give notice?\u2014give the country a show? No. All of a sudden he heaves all the tea in Boston Harbor overboard, and whacks out a declaration of independence, and dares them to come on. That was his style\u2014he never give anybody a chance. He had suspicions of his father, the Duke of Wellington. Well, what did he do? Ask him to show up? No\u2014drownded him in a butt of mamsey, like a cat. S\u2019pose people left money laying around where he was\u2014what did he do? He collared it. S\u2019pose he contracted to do a thing, and you paid him, and didn\u2019t set down there and see that he done it\u2014what did he do? He always done the other thing. S\u2019pose he opened his mouth\u2014what then? If he didn\u2019t shut it up powerful quick he\u2019d lose a lie every time. That\u2019s the kind of a bug Henry was; and if we\u2019d a had him along \u2019stead of our kings he\u2019d a fooled that town a heap worse than ourn done. I don\u2019t say that ourn is lambs, because they ain\u2019t, when you come right down to the cold facts; but they ain\u2019t nothing to that old ram, anyway. All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they\u2019re a mighty ornery lot. It\u2019s the way they\u2019re raised.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut dis one do smell so like de nation, Huck.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, they all do, Jim. We can\u2019t help the way a king smells; history don\u2019t tell no way.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow de duke, he\u2019s a tolerble likely man in some ways.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, a duke\u2019s different. But not very different. This one\u2019s a middling hard lot for a duke. When he\u2019s drunk, there ain\u2019t no near-sighted man could tell him from a king.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, anyways, I doan\u2019 hanker for no mo\u2019 un um, Huck. Dese is all I kin stan\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s the way I feel, too, Jim. But we\u2019ve got them on our hands, and we got to remember what they are, and make allowances. Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that\u2019s out of kings.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhat was the use to tell Jim these warn\u2019t real kings and dukes? It wouldn\u2019t a done no good; and, besides, it was just as I said: you couldn\u2019t tell them from the real kind.\r\n\r\nI went to sleep, and Jim didn\u2019t call me when it was my turn. He often done that. When I waked up just at daybreak, he was sitting there with his head down betwixt his knees, moaning and mourning to himself. I didn\u2019t take notice nor let on. I knowed what it was about. He was thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he hadn\u2019t ever been away from home before in his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their\u2019n. It don\u2019t seem natural, but I reckon it\u2019s so. He was often moaning and mourning that way nights, when he judged I was asleep, and saying, \u201cPo\u2019 little \u2019Lizabeth! po\u2019 little Johnny! it\u2019s mighty hard; I spec\u2019 I ain\u2019t ever gwyne to see you no mo\u2019, no mo\u2019!\u201d He was a mighty good nigger, Jim was.\r\n\r\nBut this time I somehow got to talking to him about his wife and young ones; and by-and-by he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat makes me feel so bad dis time \u2019uz bekase I hear sumpn over yonder on de bank like a whack, er a slam, while ago, en it mine me er de time I treat my little \u2019Lizabeth so ornery. She warn\u2019t on\u2019y \u2019bout fo\u2019 year ole, en she tuck de sk\u2019yarlet fever, en had a powful rough spell; but she got well, en one day she was a-stannin\u2019 aroun\u2019, en I says to her, I says:\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Shet de do\u2019.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cShe never done it; jis\u2019 stood dah, kiner smilin\u2019 up at me. It make me mad; en I says agin, mighty loud, I says:\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Doan\u2019 you hear me?\u2014shet de do\u2019!\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cShe jis stood de same way, kiner smilin\u2019 up. I was a-bilin\u2019! I says:\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018I lay I make you mine!\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cEn wid dat I fetch\u2019 her a slap side de head dat sont her a-sprawlin\u2019. Den I went into de yuther room, en \u2019uz gone \u2019bout ten minutes; en when I come back dah was dat do\u2019 a-stannin\u2019 open yit, en dat chile stannin\u2019 mos\u2019 right in it, a-lookin\u2019 down and mournin\u2019, en de tears runnin\u2019 down. My, but I wuz mad! I was a-gwyne for de chile, but jis\u2019 den\u2014it was a do\u2019 dat open innerds\u2014jis\u2019 den, \u2019long come de wind en slam it to, behine de chile, ker-blam!\u2014en my lan\u2019, de chile never move\u2019! My breff mos\u2019 hop outer me; en I feel so\u2014so\u2014I doan\u2019 know how I feel. I crope out, all a-tremblin\u2019, en crope aroun\u2019 en open de do\u2019 easy en slow, en poke my head in behine de chile, sof\u2019 en still, en all uv a sudden I says pow! jis\u2019 as loud as I could yell. She never budge! Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin\u2019 en grab her up in my arms, en say, \u2018Oh, de po\u2019 little thing! De Lord God Amighty fogive po\u2019 ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive hisself as long\u2019s he live!\u2019 Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb deef en dumb\u2014en I\u2019d ben a-treat\u2019n her so!\u201d\r\nCHAPTER XXIV.\r\n\r\nNext day, towards night, we laid up under a little willow tow-head out in the middle, where there was a village on each side of the river, and the duke and the king begun to lay out a plan for working them towns. Jim he spoke to the duke, and said he hoped it wouldn\u2019t take but a few hours, because it got mighty heavy and tiresome to him when he had to lay all day in the wigwam tied with the rope. You see, when we left him all alone we had to tie him, because if anybody happened on to him all by himself and not tied it wouldn\u2019t look much like he was a runaway nigger, you know. So the duke said it was kind of hard to have to lay roped all day, and he\u2019d cipher out some way to get around it.\r\n\r\nHe was uncommon bright, the duke was, and he soon struck it. He dressed Jim up in King Lear\u2019s outfit\u2014it was a long curtain-calico gown, and a white horse-hair wig and whiskers; and then he took his theater paint and painted Jim\u2019s face and hands and ears and neck all over a dead, dull, solid blue, like a man that\u2019s been drownded nine days. Blamed if he warn\u2019t the horriblest looking outrage I ever see. Then the duke took and wrote out a sign on a shingle so:\r\n\r\nSick Arab\u2014but harmless when not out of his head.\r\n\r\nAnd he nailed that shingle to a lath, and stood the lath up four or five foot in front of the wigwam. Jim was satisfied. He said it was a sight better than lying tied a couple of years every day, and trembling all over every time there was a sound. The duke told him to make himself free and easy, and if anybody ever come meddling around, he must hop out of the wigwam, and carry on a little, and fetch a howl or two like a wild beast, and he reckoned they would light out and leave him alone. Which was sound enough judgment; but you take the average man, and he wouldn\u2019t wait for him to howl. Why, he didn\u2019t only look like he was dead, he looked considerable more than that.\r\n\r\nThese rapscallions wanted to try the Nonesuch again, because there was so much money in it, but they judged it wouldn\u2019t be safe, because maybe the news might a worked along down by this time. They couldn\u2019t hit no project that suited exactly; so at last the duke said he reckoned he\u2019d lay off and work his brains an hour or two and see if he couldn\u2019t put up something on the Arkansaw village; and the king he allowed he would drop over to t\u2019other village without any plan, but just trust in Providence to lead him the profitable way\u2014meaning the devil, I reckon. We had all bought store clothes where we stopped last; and now the king put his\u2019n on, and he told me to put mine on. I done it, of course. The king\u2019s duds was all black, and he did look real swell and starchy. I never knowed how clothes could change a body before. Why, before, he looked like the orneriest old rip that ever was; but now, when he\u2019d take off his new white beaver and make a bow and do a smile, he looked that grand and good and pious that you\u2019d say he had walked right out of the ark, and maybe was old Leviticus himself. Jim cleaned up the canoe, and I got my paddle ready. There was a big steamboat laying at the shore away up under the point, about three mile above the town\u2014been there a couple of hours, taking on freight. Says the king:\r\n\r\n\u201cSeein\u2019 how I\u2019m dressed, I reckon maybe I better arrive down from St. Louis or Cincinnati, or some other big place. Go for the steamboat, Huckleberry; we\u2019ll come down to the village on her.\u201d\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t have to be ordered twice to go and take a steamboat ride. I fetched the shore a half a mile above the village, and then went scooting along the bluff bank in the easy water. Pretty soon we come to a nice innocent-looking young country jake setting on a log swabbing the sweat off of his face, for it was powerful warm weather; and he had a couple of big carpet-bags by him.\r\n\r\n\u201cRun her nose in shore,\u201d says the king. I done it. \u201cWher\u2019 you bound for, young man?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFor the steamboat; going to Orleans.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGit aboard,\u201d says the king. \u201cHold on a minute, my servant \u2019ll he\u2019p you with them bags. Jump out and he\u2019p the gentleman, Adolphus\u201d\u2014meaning me, I see.\r\n\r\nI done so, and then we all three started on again. The young chap was mighty thankful; said it was tough work toting his baggage such weather. He asked the king where he was going, and the king told him he\u2019d come down the river and landed at the other village this morning, and now he was going up a few mile to see an old friend on a farm up there. The young fellow says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen I first see you I says to myself, \u2018It\u2019s Mr. Wilks, sure, and he come mighty near getting here in time.\u2019 But then I says again, \u2018No, I reckon it ain\u2019t him, or else he wouldn\u2019t be paddling up the river.\u2019 You ain\u2019t him, are you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, my name\u2019s Blodgett\u2014Elexander Blodgett\u2014Reverend Elexander Blodgett, I s\u2019pose I must say, as I\u2019m one o\u2019 the Lord\u2019s poor servants. But still I\u2019m jist as able to be sorry for Mr. Wilks for not arriving in time, all the same, if he\u2019s missed anything by it\u2014which I hope he hasn\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, he don\u2019t miss any property by it, because he\u2019ll get that all right; but he\u2019s missed seeing his brother Peter die\u2014which he mayn\u2019t mind, nobody can tell as to that\u2014but his brother would a give anything in this world to see him before he died; never talked about nothing else all these three weeks; hadn\u2019t seen him since they was boys together\u2014and hadn\u2019t ever seen his brother William at all\u2014that\u2019s the deef and dumb one\u2014William ain\u2019t more than thirty or thirty-five. Peter and George were the only ones that come out here; George was the married brother; him and his wife both died last year. Harvey and William\u2019s the only ones that\u2019s left now; and, as I was saying, they haven\u2019t got here in time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDid anybody send \u2019em word?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes; a month or two ago, when Peter was first took; because Peter said then that he sorter felt like he warn\u2019t going to get well this time. You see, he was pretty old, and George\u2019s g\u2019yirls was too young to be much company for him, except Mary Jane, the red-headed one; and so he was kinder lonesome after George and his wife died, and didn\u2019t seem to care much to live. He most desperately wanted to see Harvey\u2014and William, too, for that matter\u2014because he was one of them kind that can\u2019t bear to make a will. He left a letter behind for Harvey, and said he\u2019d told in it where his money was hid, and how he wanted the rest of the property divided up so George\u2019s g\u2019yirls would be all right\u2014for George didn\u2019t leave nothing. And that letter was all they could get him to put a pen to.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy do you reckon Harvey don\u2019t come? Wher\u2019 does he live?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, he lives in England\u2014Sheffield\u2014preaches there\u2014hasn\u2019t ever been in this country. He hasn\u2019t had any too much time\u2014and besides he mightn\u2019t a got the letter at all, you know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cToo bad, too bad he couldn\u2019t a lived to see his brothers, poor soul. You going to Orleans, you say?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, but that ain\u2019t only a part of it. I\u2019m going in a ship, next Wednesday, for Ryo Janeero, where my uncle lives.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a pretty long journey. But it\u2019ll be lovely; wisht I was a-going. Is Mary Jane the oldest? How old is the others?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMary Jane\u2019s nineteen, Susan\u2019s fifteen, and Joanna\u2019s about fourteen\u2014that\u2019s the one that gives herself to good works and has a hare-lip.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor things! to be left alone in the cold world so.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, they could be worse off. Old Peter had friends, and they ain\u2019t going to let them come to no harm. There\u2019s Hobson, the Babtis\u2019 preacher; and Deacon Lot Hovey, and Ben Rucker, and Abner Shackleford, and Levi Bell, the lawyer; and Dr. Robinson, and their wives, and the widow Bartley, and\u2014well, there\u2019s a lot of them; but these are the ones that Peter was thickest with, and used to write about sometimes, when he wrote home; so Harvey \u2019ll know where to look for friends when he gets here.\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, the old man went on asking questions till he just fairly emptied that young fellow. Blamed if he didn\u2019t inquire about everybody and everything in that blessed town, and all about the Wilkses; and about Peter\u2019s business\u2014which was a tanner; and about George\u2019s\u2014which was a carpenter; and about Harvey\u2019s\u2014which was a dissentering minister; and so on, and so on. Then he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat did you want to walk all the way up to the steamboat for?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause she\u2019s a big Orleans boat, and I was afeard she mightn\u2019t stop there. When they\u2019re deep they won\u2019t stop for a hail. A Cincinnati boat will, but this is a St. Louis one.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWas Peter Wilks well off?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes, pretty well off. He had houses and land, and it\u2019s reckoned he left three or four thousand in cash hid up som\u2019ers.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen did you say he died?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t say, but it was last night.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFuneral to-morrow, likely?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, \u2019bout the middle of the day.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it\u2019s all terrible sad; but we\u2019ve all got to go, one time or another. So what we want to do is to be prepared; then we\u2019re all right.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, sir, it\u2019s the best way. Ma used to always say that.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen we struck the boat she was about done loading, and pretty soon she got off. The king never said nothing about going aboard, so I lost my ride, after all. When the boat was gone the king made me paddle up another mile to a lonesome place, and then he got ashore and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNow hustle back, right off, and fetch the duke up here, and the new carpet-bags. And if he\u2019s gone over to t\u2019other side, go over there and git him. And tell him to git himself up regardless. Shove along, now.\u201d\r\n\r\nI see what he was up to; but I never said nothing, of course. When I got back with the duke we hid the canoe, and then they set down on a log, and the king told him everything, just like the young fellow had said it\u2014every last word of it. And all the time he was a-doing it he tried to talk like an Englishman; and he done it pretty well, too, for a slouch. I can\u2019t imitate him, and so I ain\u2019t a-going to try to; but he really done it pretty good. Then he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHow are you on the deef and dumb, Bilgewater?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke said, leave him alone for that; said he had played a deef and dumb person on the histronic boards. So then they waited for a steamboat.\r\n\r\nAbout the middle of the afternoon a couple of little boats come along, but they didn\u2019t come from high enough up the river; but at last there was a big one, and they hailed her. She sent out her yawl, and we went aboard, and she was from Cincinnati; and when they found we only wanted to go four or five mile they was booming mad, and gave us a cussing, and said they wouldn\u2019t land us. But the king was ca\u2019m. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIf gentlemen kin afford to pay a dollar a mile apiece to be took on and put off in a yawl, a steamboat kin afford to carry \u2019em, can\u2019t it?\u201d\r\n\r\nSo they softened down and said it was all right; and when we got to the village they yawled us ashore. About two dozen men flocked down when they see the yawl a-coming, and when the king says:\r\n\r\n\u201cKin any of you gentlemen tell me wher\u2019 Mr. Peter Wilks lives?\u201d they give a glance at one another, and nodded their heads, as much as to say, \u201cWhat d\u2019 I tell you?\u201d Then one of them says, kind of soft and gentle:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m sorry sir, but the best we can do is to tell you where he did live yesterday evening.\u201d\r\n\r\nSudden as winking the ornery old cretur went an to smash, and fell up against the man, and put his chin on his shoulder, and cried down his back, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cAlas, alas, our poor brother\u2014gone, and we never got to see him; oh, it\u2019s too, too hard!\u201d\r\n\r\nThen he turns around, blubbering, and makes a lot of idiotic signs to the duke on his hands, and blamed if he didn\u2019t drop a carpet-bag and bust out a-crying. If they warn\u2019t the beatenest lot, them two frauds, that ever I struck.\r\n\r\nWell, the men gathered around and sympathized with them, and said all sorts of kind things to them, and carried their carpet-bags up the hill for them, and let them lean on them and cry, and told the king all about his brother\u2019s last moments, and the king he told it all over again on his hands to the duke, and both of them took on about that dead tanner like they\u2019d lost the twelve disciples. Well, if ever I struck anything like it, I\u2019m a nigger. It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.\r\nCHAPTER XXV.\r\n\r\nThe news was all over town in two minutes, and you could see the people tearing down on the run from every which way, some of them putting on their coats as they come. Pretty soon we was in the middle of a crowd, and the noise of the tramping was like a soldier march. The windows and dooryards was full; and every minute somebody would say, over a fence:\r\n\r\n\u201cIs it them?\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd somebody trotting along with the gang would answer back and say:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou bet it is.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen we got to the house the street in front of it was packed, and the three girls was standing in the door. Mary Jane was red-headed, but that don\u2019t make no difference, she was most awful beautiful, and her face and her eyes was all lit up like glory, she was so glad her uncles was come. The king he spread his arms, and Mary Jane she jumped for them, and the hare-lip jumped for the duke, and there they had it! Everybody most, leastways women, cried for joy to see them meet again at last and have such good times.\r\n\r\nThen the king he hunched the duke private\u2014I see him do it\u2014and then he looked around and see the coffin, over in the corner on two chairs; so then him and the duke, with a hand across each other\u2019s shoulder, and t\u2019other hand to their eyes, walked slow and solemn over there, everybody dropping back to give them room, and all the talk and noise stopping, people saying \u201cSh!\u201d and all the men taking their hats off and drooping their heads, so you could a heard a pin fall. And when they got there they bent over and looked in the coffin, and took one sight, and then they bust out a-crying so you could a heard them to Orleans, most; and then they put their arms around each other\u2019s necks, and hung their chins over each other\u2019s shoulders; and then for three minutes, or maybe four, I never see two men leak the way they done. And, mind you, everybody was doing the same; and the place was that damp I never see anything like it. Then one of them got on one side of the coffin, and t\u2019other on t\u2019other side, and they kneeled down and rested their foreheads on the coffin, and let on to pray all to themselves. Well, when it come to that it worked the crowd like you never see anything like it, and everybody broke down and went to sobbing right out loud\u2014the poor girls, too; and every woman, nearly, went up to the girls, without saying a word, and kissed them, solemn, on the forehead, and then put their hand on their head, and looked up towards the sky, with the tears running down, and then busted out and went off sobbing and swabbing, and give the next woman a show. I never see anything so disgusting.\r\n\r\nWell, by-and-by the king he gets up and comes forward a little, and works himself up and slobbers out a speech, all full of tears and flapdoodle about its being a sore trial for him and his poor brother to lose the diseased, and to miss seeing diseased alive after the long journey of four thousand mile, but it\u2019s a trial that\u2019s sweetened and sanctified to us by this dear sympathy and these holy tears, and so he thanks them out of his heart and out of his brother\u2019s heart, because out of their mouths they can\u2019t, words being too weak and cold, and all that kind of rot and slush, till it was just sickening; and then he blubbers out a pious goody-goody Amen, and turns himself loose and goes to crying fit to bust.\r\n\r\nAnd the minute the words were out of his mouth somebody over in the crowd struck up the doxolojer, and everybody joined in with all their might, and it just warmed you up and made you feel as good as church letting out. Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.\r\n\r\nThen the king begins to work his jaw again, and says how him and his nieces would be glad if a few of the main principal friends of the family would take supper here with them this evening, and help set up with the ashes of the diseased; and says if his poor brother laying yonder could speak he knows who he would name, for they was names that was very dear to him, and mentioned often in his letters; and so he will name the same, to wit, as follows, vizz.:\u2014Rev. Mr. Hobson, and Deacon Lot Hovey, and Mr. Ben Rucker, and Abner Shackleford, and Levi Bell, and Dr. Robinson, and their wives, and the widow Bartley.\r\n\r\nRev. Hobson and Dr. Robinson was down to the end of the town a-hunting together\u2014that is, I mean the doctor was shipping a sick man to t\u2019other world, and the preacher was pinting him right. Lawyer Bell was away up to Louisville on business. But the rest was on hand, and so they all come and shook hands with the king and thanked him and talked to him; and then they shook hands with the duke and didn\u2019t say nothing, but just kept a-smiling and bobbing their heads like a passel of sapheads whilst he made all sorts of signs with his hands and said \u201cGoo-goo\u2014goo-goo-goo\u201d all the time, like a baby that can\u2019t talk.\r\n\r\nSo the king he blattered along, and managed to inquire about pretty much everybody and dog in town, by his name, and mentioned all sorts of little things that happened one time or another in the town, or to George\u2019s family, or to Peter. And he always let on that Peter wrote him the things; but that was a lie: he got every blessed one of them out of that young flathead that we canoed up to the steamboat.\r\n\r\nThen Mary Jane she fetched the letter her father left behind, and the king he read it out loud and cried over it. It give the dwelling-house and three thousand dollars, gold, to the girls; and it give the tanyard (which was doing a good business), along with some other houses and land (worth about seven thousand), and three thousand dollars in gold to Harvey and William, and told where the six thousand cash was hid down cellar. So these two frauds said they\u2019d go and fetch it up, and have everything square and above-board; and told me to come with a candle. We shut the cellar door behind us, and when they found the bag they spilt it out on the floor, and it was a lovely sight, all them yaller-boys. My, the way the king\u2019s eyes did shine! He slaps the duke on the shoulder and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, this ain\u2019t bully nor noth\u2019n! Oh, no, I reckon not! Why, Bilji, it beats the Nonesuch, don\u2019t it?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke allowed it did. They pawed the yaller-boys, and sifted them through their fingers and let them jingle down on the floor; and the king says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt ain\u2019t no use talkin\u2019; bein\u2019 brothers to a rich dead man and representatives of furrin heirs that\u2019s got left is the line for you and me, Bilge. Thish yer comes of trust\u2019n to Providence. It\u2019s the best way, in the long run. I\u2019ve tried \u2019em all, and ther\u2019 ain\u2019t no better way.\u201d\r\n\r\nMost everybody would a been satisfied with the pile, and took it on trust; but no, they must count it. So they counts it, and it comes out four hundred and fifteen dollars short. Says the king:\r\n\r\n\u201cDern him, I wonder what he done with that four hundred and fifteen dollars?\u201d\r\n\r\nThey worried over that awhile, and ransacked all around for it. Then the duke says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, he was a pretty sick man, and likely he made a mistake\u2014I reckon that\u2019s the way of it. The best way\u2019s to let it go, and keep still about it. We can spare it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, shucks, yes, we can spare it. I don\u2019t k\u2019yer noth\u2019n \u2019bout that\u2014it\u2019s the count I\u2019m thinkin\u2019 about. We want to be awful square and open and above-board here, you know. We want to lug this h-yer money up stairs and count it before everybody\u2014then ther\u2019 ain\u2019t noth\u2019n suspicious. But when the dead man says ther\u2019s six thous\u2019n dollars, you know, we don\u2019t want to\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHold on,\u201d says the duke. \u201cLe\u2019s make up the deffisit,\u201d and he begun to haul out yaller-boys out of his pocket.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a most amaz\u2019n\u2019 good idea, duke\u2014you have got a rattlin\u2019 clever head on you,\u201d says the king. \u201cBlest if the old Nonesuch ain\u2019t a heppin\u2019 us out agin,\u201d and he begun to haul out yaller-jackets and stack them up.\r\n\r\nIt most busted them, but they made up the six thousand clean and clear.\r\n\r\n\u201cSay,\u201d says the duke, \u201cI got another idea. Le\u2019s go up stairs and count this money, and then take and give it to the girls.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood land, duke, lemme hug you! It\u2019s the most dazzling idea \u2019at ever a man struck. You have cert\u2019nly got the most astonishin\u2019 head I ever see. Oh, this is the boss dodge, ther\u2019 ain\u2019t no mistake \u2019bout it. Let \u2019em fetch along their suspicions now if they want to\u2014this\u2019ll lay \u2019em out.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen we got up-stairs everybody gethered around the table, and the king he counted it and stacked it up, three hundred dollars in a pile\u2014twenty elegant little piles. Everybody looked hungry at it, and licked their chops. Then they raked it into the bag again, and I see the king begin to swell himself up for another speech. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cFriends all, my poor brother that lays yonder has done generous by them that\u2019s left behind in the vale of sorrers. He has done generous by these yer poor little lambs that he loved and sheltered, and that\u2019s left fatherless and motherless. Yes, and we that knowed him knows that he would a done more generous by \u2019em if he hadn\u2019t ben afeard o\u2019 woundin\u2019 his dear William and me. Now, wouldn\u2019t he? Ther\u2019 ain\u2019t no question \u2019bout it in my mind. Well, then, what kind o\u2019 brothers would it be that \u2019d stand in his way at sech a time? And what kind o\u2019 uncles would it be that \u2019d rob\u2014yes, rob\u2014sech poor sweet lambs as these \u2019at he loved so at sech a time? If I know William\u2014and I think I do\u2014he\u2014well, I\u2019ll jest ask him.\u201d He turns around and begins to make a lot of signs to the duke with his hands, and the duke he looks at him stupid and leather-headed a while; then all of a sudden he seems to catch his meaning, and jumps for the king, goo-gooing with all his might for joy, and hugs him about fifteen times before he lets up. Then the king says, \u201cI knowed it; I reckon that\u2019ll convince anybody the way he feels about it. Here, Mary Jane, Susan, Joanner, take the money\u2014take it all. It\u2019s the gift of him that lays yonder, cold but joyful.\u201d\r\n\r\nMary Jane she went for him, Susan and the hare-lip went for the duke, and then such another hugging and kissing I never see yet. And everybody crowded up with the tears in their eyes, and most shook the hands off of them frauds, saying all the time:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou dear good souls!\u2014how lovely!\u2014how could you!\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, then, pretty soon all hands got to talking about the diseased again, and how good he was, and what a loss he was, and all that; and before long a big iron-jawed man worked himself in there from outside, and stood a-listening and looking, and not saying anything; and nobody saying anything to him either, because the king was talking and they was all busy listening. The king was saying\u2014in the middle of something he\u2019d started in on\u2014\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2014they bein\u2019 partickler friends o\u2019 the diseased. That\u2019s why they\u2019re invited here this evenin\u2019; but tomorrow we want all to come\u2014everybody; for he respected everybody, he liked everybody, and so it\u2019s fitten that his funeral orgies sh\u2019d be public.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd so he went a-mooning on and on, liking to hear himself talk, and every little while he fetched in his funeral orgies again, till the duke he couldn\u2019t stand it no more; so he writes on a little scrap of paper, \u201cobsequies, you old fool,\u201d and folds it up, and goes to goo-gooing and reaching it over people\u2019s heads to him. The king he reads it and puts it in his pocket, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor William, afflicted as he is, his heart\u2019s aluz right. Asks me to invite everybody to come to the funeral\u2014wants me to make \u2019em all welcome. But he needn\u2019t a worried\u2014it was jest what I was at.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen he weaves along again, perfectly ca\u2019m, and goes to dropping in his funeral orgies again every now and then, just like he done before. And when he done it the third time he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI say orgies, not because it\u2019s the common term, because it ain\u2019t\u2014obsequies bein\u2019 the common term\u2014but because orgies is the right term. Obsequies ain\u2019t used in England no more now\u2014it\u2019s gone out. We say orgies now in England. Orgies is better, because it means the thing you\u2019re after more exact. It\u2019s a word that\u2019s made up out\u2019n the Greek orgo, outside, open, abroad; and the Hebrew jeesum, to plant, cover up; hence inter. So, you see, funeral orgies is an open er public funeral.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe was the worst I ever struck. Well, the iron-jawed man he laughed right in his face. Everybody was shocked. Everybody says, \u201cWhy, doctor!\u201d and Abner Shackleford says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Robinson, hain\u2019t you heard the news? This is Harvey Wilks.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe king he smiled eager, and shoved out his flapper, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIs it my poor brother\u2019s dear good friend and physician? I\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cKeep your hands off of me!\u201d says the doctor. \u201cYou talk like an Englishman, don\u2019t you? It\u2019s the worst imitation I ever heard. You Peter Wilks\u2019s brother! You\u2019re a fraud, that\u2019s what you are!\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, how they all took on! They crowded around the doctor and tried to quiet him down, and tried to explain to him and tell him how Harvey \u2019d showed in forty ways that he was Harvey, and knowed everybody by name, and the names of the very dogs, and begged and begged him not to hurt Harvey\u2019s feelings and the poor girl\u2019s feelings, and all that. But it warn\u2019t no use; he stormed right along, and said any man that pretended to be an Englishman and couldn\u2019t imitate the lingo no better than what he did was a fraud and a liar. The poor girls was hanging to the king and crying; and all of a sudden the doctor ups and turns on them. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI was your father\u2019s friend, and I\u2019m your friend; and I warn you as a friend, and an honest one that wants to protect you and keep you out of harm and trouble, to turn your backs on that scoundrel and have nothing to do with him, the ignorant tramp, with his idiotic Greek and Hebrew, as he calls it. He is the thinnest kind of an impostor\u2014has come here with a lot of empty names and facts which he picked up somewheres, and you take them for proofs, and are helped to fool yourselves by these foolish friends here, who ought to know better. Mary Jane Wilks, you know me for your friend, and for your unselfish friend, too. Now listen to me; turn this pitiful rascal out\u2014I beg you to do it. Will you?\u201d\r\n\r\nMary Jane straightened herself up, and my, but she was handsome! She says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHere is my answer.\u201d She hove up the bag of money and put it in the king\u2019s hands, and says, \u201cTake this six thousand dollars, and invest for me and my sisters any way you want to, and don\u2019t give us no receipt for it.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen she put her arm around the king on one side, and Susan and the hare-lip done the same on the other. Everybody clapped their hands and stomped on the floor like a perfect storm, whilst the king held up his head and smiled proud. The doctor says:\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right; I wash my hands of the matter. But I warn you all that a time \u2019s coming when you\u2019re going to feel sick whenever you think of this day.\u201d And away he went.\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right, doctor,\u201d says the king, kinder mocking him; \u201cwe\u2019ll try and get \u2019em to send for you;\u201d which made them all laugh, and they said it was a prime good hit.\r\nCHAPTER XXVI.\r\n\r\nWell, when they was all gone the king he asks Mary Jane how they was off for spare rooms, and she said she had one spare room, which would do for Uncle William, and she\u2019d give her own room to Uncle Harvey, which was a little bigger, and she would turn into the room with her sisters and sleep on a cot; and up garret was a little cubby, with a pallet in it. The king said the cubby would do for his valley\u2014meaning me.\r\n\r\nSo Mary Jane took us up, and she showed them their rooms, which was plain but nice. She said she\u2019d have her frocks and a lot of other traps took out of her room if they was in Uncle Harvey\u2019s way, but he said they warn\u2019t. The frocks was hung along the wall, and before them was a curtain made out of calico that hung down to the floor. There was an old hair trunk in one corner, and a guitar-box in another, and all sorts of little knickknacks and jimcracks around, like girls brisken up a room with. The king said it was all the more homely and more pleasanter for these fixings, and so don\u2019t disturb them. The duke\u2019s room was pretty small, but plenty good enough, and so was my cubby.\r\n\r\nThat night they had a big supper, and all them men and women was there, and I stood behind the king and the duke\u2019s chairs and waited on them, and the niggers waited on the rest. Mary Jane she set at the head of the table, with Susan alongside of her, and said how bad the biscuits was, and how mean the preserves was, and how ornery and tough the fried chickens was\u2014and all that kind of rot, the way women always do for to force out compliments; and the people all knowed everything was tiptop, and said so\u2014said \u201cHow do you get biscuits to brown so nice?\u201d and \u201cWhere, for the land\u2019s sake, did you get these amaz\u2019n pickles?\u201d and all that kind of humbug talky-talk, just the way people always does at a supper, you know.\r\n\r\nAnd when it was all done me and the hare-lip had supper in the kitchen off of the leavings, whilst the others was helping the niggers clean up the things. The hare-lip she got to pumping me about England, and blest if I didn\u2019t think the ice was getting mighty thin sometimes. She says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDid you ever see the king?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho? William Fourth? Well, I bet I have\u2014he goes to our church.\u201d I knowed he was dead years ago, but I never let on. So when I says he goes to our church, she says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2014regular?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes\u2014regular. His pew\u2019s right over opposite ourn\u2014on t\u2019other side the pulpit.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought he lived in London?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, he does. Where would he live?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I thought you lived in Sheffield?\u201d\r\n\r\nI see I was up a stump. I had to let on to get choked with a chicken bone, so as to get time to think how to get down again. Then I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI mean he goes to our church regular when he\u2019s in Sheffield. That\u2019s only in the summer time, when he comes there to take the sea baths.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, how you talk\u2014Sheffield ain\u2019t on the sea.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, who said it was?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, you did.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t nuther.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou did!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou did.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI never said nothing of the kind.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, what did you say, then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSaid he come to take the sea baths\u2014that\u2019s what I said.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, how\u2019s he going to take the sea baths if it ain\u2019t on the sea?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLooky here,\u201d I says; \u201cdid you ever see any Congress-water?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, did you have to go to Congress to get it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, no.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, neither does William Fourth have to go to the sea to get a sea bath.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow does he get it, then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGets it the way people down here gets Congress-water\u2014in barrels. There in the palace at Sheffield they\u2019ve got furnaces, and he wants his water hot. They can\u2019t bile that amount of water away off there at the sea. They haven\u2019t got no conveniences for it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, I see, now. You might a said that in the first place and saved time.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen she said that I see I was out of the woods again, and so I was comfortable and glad. Next, she says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you go to church, too?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes\u2014regular.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere do you set?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, in our pew.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhose pew?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, ourn\u2014your Uncle Harvey\u2019s.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHis\u2019n? What does he want with a pew?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWants it to set in. What did you reckon he wanted with it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, I thought he\u2019d be in the pulpit.\u201d\r\n\r\nRot him, I forgot he was a preacher. I see I was up a stump again, so I played another chicken bone and got another think. Then I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cBlame it, do you suppose there ain\u2019t but one preacher to a church?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, what do they want with more?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat!\u2014to preach before a king? I never did see such a girl as you. They don\u2019t have no less than seventeen.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSeventeen! My land! Why, I wouldn\u2019t set out such a string as that, not if I never got to glory. It must take \u2019em a week.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShucks, they don\u2019t all of \u2019em preach the same day\u2014only one of \u2019em.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, what does the rest of \u2019em do?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, nothing much. Loll around, pass the plate\u2014and one thing or another. But mainly they don\u2019t do nothing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, what are they for?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, they\u2019re for style. Don\u2019t you know nothing?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I don\u2019t want to know no such foolishness as that. How is servants treated in England? Do they treat \u2019em better \u2019n we treat our niggers?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo! A servant ain\u2019t nobody there. They treat them worse than dogs.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t they give \u2019em holidays, the way we do, Christmas and New Year\u2019s week, and Fourth of July?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, just listen! A body could tell you hain\u2019t ever been to England by that. Why, Hare-l\u2014why, Joanna, they never see a holiday from year\u2019s end to year\u2019s end; never go to the circus, nor theater, nor nigger shows, nor nowheres.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNor church?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNor church.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut you always went to church.\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, I was gone up again. I forgot I was the old man\u2019s servant. But next minute I whirled in on a kind of an explanation how a valley was different from a common servant and had to go to church whether he wanted to or not, and set with the family, on account of its being the law. But I didn\u2019t do it pretty good, and when I got done I see she warn\u2019t satisfied. She says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHonest injun, now, hain\u2019t you been telling me a lot of lies?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHonest injun,\u201d says I.\r\n\r\n\u201cNone of it at all?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNone of it at all. Not a lie in it,\u201d says I.\r\n\r\n\u201cLay your hand on this book and say it.\u201d\r\n\r\nI see it warn\u2019t nothing but a dictionary, so I laid my hand on it and said it. So then she looked a little better satisfied, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, I\u2019ll believe some of it; but I hope to gracious if I\u2019ll believe the rest.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat is it you won\u2019t believe, Joe?\u201d says Mary Jane, stepping in with Susan behind her. \u201cIt ain\u2019t right nor kind for you to talk so to him, and him a stranger and so far from his people. How would you like to be treated so?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s always your way, Maim\u2014always sailing in to help somebody before they\u2019re hurt. I hain\u2019t done nothing to him. He\u2019s told some stretchers, I reckon, and I said I wouldn\u2019t swallow it all; and that\u2019s every bit and grain I did say. I reckon he can stand a little thing like that, can\u2019t he?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t care whether \u2019twas little or whether \u2019twas big; he\u2019s here in our house and a stranger, and it wasn\u2019t good of you to say it. If you was in his place it would make you feel ashamed; and so you oughtn\u2019t to say a thing to another person that will make them feel ashamed.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Mam, he said\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt don\u2019t make no difference what he said\u2014that ain\u2019t the thing. The thing is for you to treat him kind, and not be saying things to make him remember he ain\u2019t in his own country and amongst his own folks.\u201d\r\n\r\nI says to myself, this is a girl that I\u2019m letting that old reptile rob her of her money!\r\n\r\nThen Susan she waltzed in; and if you\u2019ll believe me, she did give Hare-lip hark from the tomb!\r\n\r\nSays I to myself, and this is another one that I\u2019m letting him rob her of her money!\r\n\r\nThen Mary Jane she took another inning, and went in sweet and lovely again\u2014which was her way; but when she got done there warn\u2019t hardly anything left o\u2019 poor Hare-lip. So she hollered.\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right, then,\u201d says the other girls; \u201cyou just ask his pardon.\u201d\r\n\r\nShe done it, too; and she done it beautiful. She done it so beautiful it was good to hear; and I wished I could tell her a thousand lies, so she could do it again.\r\n\r\nI says to myself, this is another one that I\u2019m letting him rob her of her money. And when she got through they all jest laid theirselves out to make me feel at home and know I was amongst friends. I felt so ornery and low down and mean that I says to myself, my mind\u2019s made up; I\u2019ll hive that money for them or bust.\r\n\r\nSo then I lit out\u2014for bed, I said, meaning some time or another. When I got by myself I went to thinking the thing over. I says to myself, shall I go to that doctor, private, and blow on these frauds? No\u2014that won\u2019t do. He might tell who told him; then the king and the duke would make it warm for me. Shall I go, private, and tell Mary Jane? No\u2014I dasn\u2019t do it. Her face would give them a hint, sure; they\u2019ve got the money, and they\u2019d slide right out and get away with it. If she was to fetch in help I\u2019d get mixed up in the business before it was done with, I judge. No; there ain\u2019t no good way but one. I got to steal that money, somehow; and I got to steal it some way that they won\u2019t suspicion that I done it. They\u2019ve got a good thing here, and they ain\u2019t a-going to leave till they\u2019ve played this family and this town for all they\u2019re worth, so I\u2019ll find a chance time enough. I\u2019ll steal it and hide it; and by-and-by, when I\u2019m away down the river, I\u2019ll write a letter and tell Mary Jane where it\u2019s hid. But I better hive it tonight if I can, because the doctor maybe hasn\u2019t let up as much as he lets on he has; he might scare them out of here yet.\r\n\r\nSo, thinks I, I\u2019ll go and search them rooms. Upstairs the hall was dark, but I found the duke\u2019s room, and started to paw around it with my hands; but I recollected it wouldn\u2019t be much like the king to let anybody else take care of that money but his own self; so then I went to his room and begun to paw around there. But I see I couldn\u2019t do nothing without a candle, and I dasn\u2019t light one, of course. So I judged I\u2019d got to do the other thing\u2014lay for them and eavesdrop. About that time I hears their footsteps coming, and was going to skip under the bed; I reached for it, but it wasn\u2019t where I thought it would be; but I touched the curtain that hid Mary Jane\u2019s frocks, so I jumped in behind that and snuggled in amongst the gowns, and stood there perfectly still.\r\n\r\nThey come in and shut the door; and the first thing the duke done was to get down and look under the bed. Then I was glad I hadn\u2019t found the bed when I wanted it. And yet, you know, it\u2019s kind of natural to hide under the bed when you are up to anything private. They sets down then, and the king says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, what is it? And cut it middlin\u2019 short, because it\u2019s better for us to be down there a-whoopin\u2019 up the mournin\u2019 than up here givin\u2019 \u2019em a chance to talk us over.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, this is it, Capet. I ain\u2019t easy; I ain\u2019t comfortable. That doctor lays on my mind. I wanted to know your plans. I\u2019ve got a notion, and I think it\u2019s a sound one.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat is it, duke?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat we better glide out of this before three in the morning, and clip it down the river with what we\u2019ve got. Specially, seeing we got it so easy\u2014given back to us, flung at our heads, as you may say, when of course we allowed to have to steal it back. I\u2019m for knocking off and lighting out.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat made me feel pretty bad. About an hour or two ago it would a been a little different, but now it made me feel bad and disappointed, The king rips out and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat! And not sell out the rest o\u2019 the property? March off like a passel of fools and leave eight or nine thous\u2019n\u2019 dollars\u2019 worth o\u2019 property layin\u2019 around jest sufferin\u2019 to be scooped in?\u2014and all good, salable stuff, too.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke he grumbled; said the bag of gold was enough, and he didn\u2019t want to go no deeper\u2014didn\u2019t want to rob a lot of orphans of everything they had.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, how you talk!\u201d says the king. \u201cWe sha\u2019n\u2019t rob \u2019em of nothing at all but jest this money. The people that buys the property is the suff\u2019rers; because as soon \u2019s it\u2019s found out \u2019at we didn\u2019t own it\u2014which won\u2019t be long after we\u2019ve slid\u2014the sale won\u2019t be valid, and it\u2019ll all go back to the estate. These yer orphans \u2019ll git their house back agin, and that\u2019s enough for them; they\u2019re young and spry, and k\u2019n easy earn a livin\u2019. They ain\u2019t a-goin to suffer. Why, jest think\u2014there\u2019s thous\u2019n\u2019s and thous\u2019n\u2019s that ain\u2019t nigh so well off. Bless you, they ain\u2019t got noth\u2019n\u2019 to complain of.\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, the king he talked him blind; so at last he give in, and said all right, but said he believed it was blamed foolishness to stay, and that doctor hanging over them. But the king says:\r\n\r\n\u201cCuss the doctor! What do we k\u2019yer for him? Hain\u2019t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain\u2019t that a big enough majority in any town?\u201d\r\n\r\nSo they got ready to go down stairs again. The duke says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t think we put that money in a good place.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat cheered me up. I\u2019d begun to think I warn\u2019t going to get a hint of no kind to help me. The king says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause Mary Jane \u2019ll be in mourning from this out; and first you know the nigger that does up the rooms will get an order to box these duds up and put \u2019em away; and do you reckon a nigger can run across money and not borrow some of it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYour head\u2019s level agin, duke,\u201d says the king; and he comes a-fumbling under the curtain two or three foot from where I was. I stuck tight to the wall and kept mighty still, though quivery; and I wondered what them fellows would say to me if they catched me; and I tried to think what I\u2019d better do if they did catch me. But the king he got the bag before I could think more than about a half a thought, and he never suspicioned I was around. They took and shoved the bag through a rip in the straw tick that was under the feather-bed, and crammed it in a foot or two amongst the straw and said it was all right now, because a nigger only makes up the feather-bed, and don\u2019t turn over the straw tick only about twice a year, and so it warn\u2019t in no danger of getting stole now.\r\n\r\nBut I knowed better. I had it out of there before they was half-way down stairs. I groped along up to my cubby, and hid it there till I could get a chance to do better. I judged I better hide it outside of the house somewheres, because if they missed it they would give the house a good ransacking: I knowed that very well. Then I turned in, with my clothes all on; but I couldn\u2019t a gone to sleep if I\u2019d a wanted to, I was in such a sweat to get through with the business. By-and-by I heard the king and the duke come up; so I rolled off my pallet and laid with my chin at the top of my ladder, and waited to see if anything was going to happen. But nothing did.\r\n\r\nSo I held on till all the late sounds had quit and the early ones hadn\u2019t begun yet; and then I slipped down the ladder.\r\nCHAPTER XXVII.\r\n\r\nI crept to their doors and listened; they was snoring. So I tiptoed along, and got down stairs all right. There warn\u2019t a sound anywheres. I peeped through a crack of the dining-room door, and see the men that was watching the corpse all sound asleep on their chairs. The door was open into the parlor, where the corpse was laying, and there was a candle in both rooms. I passed along, and the parlor door was open; but I see there warn\u2019t nobody in there but the remainders of Peter; so I shoved on by; but the front door was locked, and the key wasn\u2019t there. Just then I heard somebody coming down the stairs, back behind me. I run in the parlor and took a swift look around, and the only place I see to hide the bag was in the coffin. The lid was shoved along about a foot, showing the dead man\u2019s face down in there, with a wet cloth over it, and his shroud on. I tucked the money-bag in under the lid, just down beyond where his hands was crossed, which made me creep, they was so cold, and then I run back across the room and in behind the door.\r\n\r\nThe person coming was Mary Jane. She went to the coffin, very soft, and kneeled down and looked in; then she put up her handkerchief, and I see she begun to cry, though I couldn\u2019t hear her, and her back was to me. I slid out, and as I passed the dining-room I thought I\u2019d make sure them watchers hadn\u2019t seen me; so I looked through the crack, and everything was all right. They hadn\u2019t stirred.\r\n\r\nI slipped up to bed, feeling ruther blue, on accounts of the thing playing out that way after I had took so much trouble and run so much resk about it. Says I, if it could stay where it is, all right; because when we get down the river a hundred mile or two I could write back to Mary Jane, and she could dig him up again and get it; but that ain\u2019t the thing that\u2019s going to happen; the thing that\u2019s going to happen is, the money \u2019ll be found when they come to screw on the lid. Then the king \u2019ll get it again, and it \u2019ll be a long day before he gives anybody another chance to smouch it from him. Of course I wanted to slide down and get it out of there, but I dasn\u2019t try it. Every minute it was getting earlier now, and pretty soon some of them watchers would begin to stir, and I might get catched\u2014catched with six thousand dollars in my hands that nobody hadn\u2019t hired me to take care of. I don\u2019t wish to be mixed up in no such business as that, I says to myself.\r\n\r\nWhen I got down stairs in the morning the parlor was shut up, and the watchers was gone. There warn\u2019t nobody around but the family and the widow Bartley and our tribe. I watched their faces to see if anything had been happening, but I couldn\u2019t tell.\r\n\r\nTowards the middle of the day the undertaker come with his man, and they set the coffin in the middle of the room on a couple of chairs, and then set all our chairs in rows, and borrowed more from the neighbors till the hall and the parlor and the dining-room was full. I see the coffin lid was the way it was before, but I dasn\u2019t go to look in under it, with folks around.\r\n\r\nThen the people begun to flock in, and the beats and the girls took seats in the front row at the head of the coffin, and for a half an hour the people filed around slow, in single rank, and looked down at the dead man\u2019s face a minute, and some dropped in a tear, and it was all very still and solemn, only the girls and the beats holding handkerchiefs to their eyes and keeping their heads bent, and sobbing a little. There warn\u2019t no other sound but the scraping of the feet on the floor and blowing noses\u2014because people always blows them more at a funeral than they do at other places except church.\r\n\r\nWhen the place was packed full the undertaker he slid around in his black gloves with his softy soothering ways, putting on the last touches, and getting people and things all ship-shape and comfortable, and making no more sound than a cat. He never spoke; he moved people around, he squeezed in late ones, he opened up passageways, and done it with nods, and signs with his hands. Then he took his place over against the wall. He was the softest, glidingest, stealthiest man I ever see; and there warn\u2019t no more smile to him than there is to a ham.\r\n\r\nThey had borrowed a melodeum\u2014a sick one; and when everything was ready a young woman set down and worked it, and it was pretty skreeky and colicky, and everybody joined in and sung, and Peter was the only one that had a good thing, according to my notion. Then the Reverend Hobson opened up, slow and solemn, and begun to talk; and straight off the most outrageous row busted out in the cellar a body ever heard; it was only one dog, but he made a most powerful racket, and he kept it up right along; the parson he had to stand there, over the coffin, and wait\u2014you couldn\u2019t hear yourself think. It was right down awkward, and nobody didn\u2019t seem to know what to do. But pretty soon they see that long-legged undertaker make a sign to the preacher as much as to say, \u201cDon\u2019t you worry\u2014just depend on me.\u201d Then he stooped down and begun to glide along the wall, just his shoulders showing over the people\u2019s heads. So he glided along, and the powwow and racket getting more and more outrageous all the time; and at last, when he had gone around two sides of the room, he disappears down cellar. Then in about two seconds we heard a whack, and the dog he finished up with a most amazing howl or two, and then everything was dead still, and the parson begun his solemn talk where he left off. In a minute or two here comes this undertaker\u2019s back and shoulders gliding along the wall again; and so he glided and glided around three sides of the room, and then rose up, and shaded his mouth with his hands, and stretched his neck out towards the preacher, over the people\u2019s heads, and says, in a kind of a coarse whisper, \u201cHe had a rat!\u201d Then he drooped down and glided along the wall again to his place. You could see it was a great satisfaction to the people, because naturally they wanted to know. A little thing like that don\u2019t cost nothing, and it\u2019s just the little things that makes a man to be looked up to and liked. There warn\u2019t no more popular man in town than what that undertaker was.\r\n\r\nWell, the funeral sermon was very good, but pison long and tiresome; and then the king he shoved in and got off some of his usual rubbage, and at last the job was through, and the undertaker begun to sneak up on the coffin with his screw-driver. I was in a sweat then, and watched him pretty keen. But he never meddled at all; just slid the lid along as soft as mush, and screwed it down tight and fast. So there I was! I didn\u2019t know whether the money was in there or not. So, says I, s\u2019pose somebody has hogged that bag on the sly?\u2014now how do I know whether to write to Mary Jane or not? S\u2019pose she dug him up and didn\u2019t find nothing, what would she think of me? Blame it, I says, I might get hunted up and jailed; I\u2019d better lay low and keep dark, and not write at all; the thing\u2019s awful mixed now; trying to better it, I\u2019ve worsened it a hundred times, and I wish to goodness I\u2019d just let it alone, dad fetch the whole business!\r\n\r\nThey buried him, and we come back home, and I went to watching faces again\u2014I couldn\u2019t help it, and I couldn\u2019t rest easy. But nothing come of it; the faces didn\u2019t tell me nothing.\r\n\r\nThe king he visited around in the evening, and sweetened everybody up, and made himself ever so friendly; and he give out the idea that his congregation over in England would be in a sweat about him, so he must hurry and settle up the estate right away and leave for home. He was very sorry he was so pushed, and so was everybody; they wished he could stay longer, but they said they could see it couldn\u2019t be done. And he said of course him and William would take the girls home with them; and that pleased everybody too, because then the girls would be well fixed and amongst their own relations; and it pleased the girls, too\u2014tickled them so they clean forgot they ever had a trouble in the world; and told him to sell out as quick as he wanted to, they would be ready. Them poor things was that glad and happy it made my heart ache to see them getting fooled and lied to so, but I didn\u2019t see no safe way for me to chip in and change the general tune.\r\n\r\nWell, blamed if the king didn\u2019t bill the house and the niggers and all the property for auction straight off\u2014sale two days after the funeral; but anybody could buy private beforehand if they wanted to.\r\n\r\nSo the next day after the funeral, along about noon-time, the girls\u2019 joy got the first jolt. A couple of nigger traders come along, and the king sold them the niggers reasonable, for three-day drafts as they called it, and away they went, the two sons up the river to Memphis, and their mother down the river to Orleans. I thought them poor girls and them niggers would break their hearts for grief; they cried around each other, and took on so it most made me down sick to see it. The girls said they hadn\u2019t ever dreamed of seeing the family separated or sold away from the town. I can\u2019t ever get it out of my memory, the sight of them poor miserable girls and niggers hanging around each other\u2019s necks and crying; and I reckon I couldn\u2019t a stood it all, but would a had to bust out and tell on our gang if I hadn\u2019t knowed the sale warn\u2019t no account and the niggers would be back home in a week or two.\r\n\r\nThe thing made a big stir in the town, too, and a good many come out flatfooted and said it was scandalous to separate the mother and the children that way. It injured the frauds some; but the old fool he bulled right along, spite of all the duke could say or do, and I tell you the duke was powerful uneasy.\r\n\r\nNext day was auction day. About broad day in the morning the king and the duke come up in the garret and woke me up, and I see by their look that there was trouble. The king says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWas you in my room night before last?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, your majesty\u201d\u2014which was the way I always called him when nobody but our gang warn\u2019t around.\r\n\r\n\u201cWas you in there yisterday er last night?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, your majesty.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHonor bright, now\u2014no lies.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHonor bright, your majesty, I\u2019m telling you the truth. I hain\u2019t been a-near your room since Miss Mary Jane took you and the duke and showed it to you.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHave you seen anybody else go in there?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, your grace, not as I remember, I believe.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStop and think.\u201d\r\n\r\nI studied awhile and see my chance; then I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I see the niggers go in there several times.\u201d\r\n\r\nBoth of them gave a little jump, and looked like they hadn\u2019t ever expected it, and then like they had. Then the duke says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat, all of them?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo\u2014leastways, not all at once\u2014that is, I don\u2019t think I ever see them all come out at once but just one time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHello! When was that?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was the day we had the funeral. In the morning. It warn\u2019t early, because I overslept. I was just starting down the ladder, and I see them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, go on, go on! What did they do? How\u2019d they act?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey didn\u2019t do nothing. And they didn\u2019t act anyway much, as fur as I see. They tiptoed away; so I seen, easy enough, that they\u2019d shoved in there to do up your majesty\u2019s room, or something, s\u2019posing you was up; and found you warn\u2019t up, and so they was hoping to slide out of the way of trouble without waking you up, if they hadn\u2019t already waked you up.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGreat guns, this is a go!\u201d says the king; and both of them looked pretty sick and tolerable silly. They stood there a-thinking and scratching their heads a minute, and the duke he bust into a kind of a little raspy chuckle, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt does beat all how neat the niggers played their hand. They let on to be sorry they was going out of this region! And I believed they was sorry, and so did you, and so did everybody. Don\u2019t ever tell me any more that a nigger ain\u2019t got any histrionic talent. Why, the way they played that thing it would fool anybody. In my opinion, there\u2019s a fortune in \u2019em. If I had capital and a theater, I wouldn\u2019t want a better lay-out than that\u2014and here we\u2019ve gone and sold \u2019em for a song. Yes, and ain\u2019t privileged to sing the song yet. Say, where is that song\u2014that draft?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIn the bank for to be collected. Where would it be?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, that\u2019s all right then, thank goodness.\u201d\r\n\r\nSays I, kind of timid-like:\r\n\r\n\u201cIs something gone wrong?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe king whirls on me and rips out:\r\n\r\n\u201cNone o\u2019 your business! You keep your head shet, and mind y\u2019r own affairs\u2014if you got any. Long as you\u2019re in this town don\u2019t you forgit that\u2014you hear?\u201d Then he says to the duke, \u201cWe got to jest swaller it and say noth\u2019n\u2019: mum\u2019s the word for us.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs they was starting down the ladder the duke he chuckles again, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cQuick sales and small profits! It\u2019s a good business\u2014yes.\u201d\r\nv\r\n\r\nThe king snarls around on him and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI was trying to do for the best in sellin\u2019 \u2019em out so quick. If the profits has turned out to be none, lackin\u2019 considable, and none to carry, is it my fault any more\u2019n it\u2019s yourn?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, they\u2019d be in this house yet and we wouldn\u2019t if I could a got my advice listened to.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe king sassed back as much as was safe for him, and then swapped around and lit into me again. He give me down the banks for not coming and telling him I see the niggers come out of his room acting that way\u2014said any fool would a knowed something was up. And then waltzed in and cussed himself awhile, and said it all come of him not laying late and taking his natural rest that morning, and he\u2019d be blamed if he\u2019d ever do it again. So they went off a-jawing; and I felt dreadful glad I\u2019d worked it all off on to the niggers, and yet hadn\u2019t done the niggers no harm by it.\r\nCHAPTER XXVIII.\r\n\r\nBy-and-by it was getting-up time. So I come down the ladder and started for down-stairs; but as I come to the girls\u2019 room the door was open, and I see Mary Jane setting by her old hair trunk, which was open and she\u2019d been packing things in it\u2014getting ready to go to England. But she had stopped now with a folded gown in her lap, and had her face in her hands, crying. I felt awful bad to see it; of course anybody would. I went in there and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMiss Mary Jane, you can\u2019t a-bear to see people in trouble, and I can\u2019t\u2014most always. Tell me about it.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo she done it. And it was the niggers\u2014I just expected it. She said the beautiful trip to England was most about spoiled for her; she didn\u2019t know how she was ever going to be happy there, knowing the mother and the children warn\u2019t ever going to see each other no more\u2014and then busted out bitterer than ever, and flung up her hands, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, dear, dear, to think they ain\u2019t ever going to see each other any more!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut they will\u2014and inside of two weeks\u2014and I know it!\u201d says I.\r\n\r\nLaws, it was out before I could think! And before I could budge she throws her arms around my neck and told me to say it again, say it again, say it again!\r\n\r\nI see I had spoke too sudden and said too much, and was in a close place. I asked her to let me think a minute; and she set there, very impatient and excited and handsome, but looking kind of happy and eased-up, like a person that\u2019s had a tooth pulled out. So I went to studying it out. I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain\u2019t had no experience, and can\u2019t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here\u2019s a case where I\u2019m blest if it don\u2019t look to me like the truth is better and actuly safer than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it\u2019s so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it. Well, I says to myself at last, I\u2019m a-going to chance it; I\u2019ll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you\u2019ll go to. Then I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMiss Mary Jane, is there any place out of town a little ways where you could go and stay three or four days?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes; Mr. Lothrop\u2019s. Why?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNever mind why yet. If I\u2019ll tell you how I know the niggers will see each other again inside of two weeks\u2014here in this house\u2014and prove how I know it\u2014will you go to Mr. Lothrop\u2019s and stay four days?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFour days!\u201d she says; \u201cI\u2019ll stay a year!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right,\u201d I says, \u201cI don\u2019t want nothing more out of you than just your word\u2014I druther have it than another man\u2019s kiss-the-Bible.\u201d She smiled and reddened up very sweet, and I says, \u201cIf you don\u2019t mind it, I\u2019ll shut the door\u2014and bolt it.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen I come back and set down again, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you holler. Just set still and take it like a man. I got to tell the truth, and you want to brace up, Miss Mary, because it\u2019s a bad kind, and going to be hard to take, but there ain\u2019t no help for it. These uncles of yourn ain\u2019t no uncles at all; they\u2019re a couple of frauds\u2014regular dead-beats. There, now we\u2019re over the worst of it, you can stand the rest middling easy.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt jolted her up like everything, of course; but I was over the shoal water now, so I went right along, her eyes a-blazing higher and higher all the time, and told her every blame thing, from where we first struck that young fool going up to the steamboat, clear through to where she flung herself on to the king\u2019s breast at the front door and he kissed her sixteen or seventeen times\u2014and then up she jumps, with her face afire like sunset, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cThe brute! Come, don\u2019t waste a minute\u2014not a second\u2014we\u2019ll have them tarred and feathered, and flung in the river!\u201d\r\n\r\nSays I:\r\n\r\n\u201cCert\u2019nly. But do you mean before you go to Mr. Lothrop\u2019s, or\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh,\u201d she says, \u201cwhat am I thinking about!\u201d she says, and set right down again. \u201cDon\u2019t mind what I said\u2014please don\u2019t\u2014you won\u2019t, now, will you?\u201d Laying her silky hand on mine in that kind of a way that I said I would die first. \u201cI never thought, I was so stirred up,\u201d she says; \u201cnow go on, and I won\u2019t do so any more. You tell me what to do, and whatever you say I\u2019ll do it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d I says, \u201cit\u2019s a rough gang, them two frauds, and I\u2019m fixed so I got to travel with them a while longer, whether I want to or not\u2014I druther not tell you why; and if you was to blow on them this town would get me out of their claws, and I\u2019d be all right; but there\u2019d be another person that you don\u2019t know about who\u2019d be in big trouble. Well, we got to save him, hain\u2019t we? Of course. Well, then, we won\u2019t blow on them.\u201d\r\n\r\nSaying them words put a good idea in my head. I see how maybe I could get me and Jim rid of the frauds; get them jailed here, and then leave. But I didn\u2019t want to run the raft in the daytime without anybody aboard to answer questions but me; so I didn\u2019t want the plan to begin working till pretty late to-night. I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMiss Mary Jane, I\u2019ll tell you what we\u2019ll do, and you won\u2019t have to stay at Mr. Lothrop\u2019s so long, nuther. How fur is it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA little short of four miles\u2014right out in the country, back here.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, that\u2019ll answer. Now you go along out there, and lay low till nine or half-past to-night, and then get them to fetch you home again\u2014tell them you\u2019ve thought of something. If you get here before eleven put a candle in this window, and if I don\u2019t turn up wait till eleven, and then if I don\u2019t turn up it means I\u2019m gone, and out of the way, and safe. Then you come out and spread the news around, and get these beats jailed.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood,\u201d she says, \u201cI\u2019ll do it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd if it just happens so that I don\u2019t get away, but get took up along with them, you must up and say I told you the whole thing beforehand, and you must stand by me all you can.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStand by you! indeed I will. They sha\u2019n\u2019t touch a hair of your head!\u201d she says, and I see her nostrils spread and her eyes snap when she said it, too.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf I get away I sha\u2019n\u2019t be here,\u201d I says, \u201cto prove these rapscallions ain\u2019t your uncles, and I couldn\u2019t do it if I was here. I could swear they was beats and bummers, that\u2019s all, though that\u2019s worth something. Well, there\u2019s others can do that better than what I can, and they\u2019re people that ain\u2019t going to be doubted as quick as I\u2019d be. I\u2019ll tell you how to find them. Gimme a pencil and a piece of paper. There\u2014\u2018Royal Nonesuch, Bricksville.\u2019 Put it away, and don\u2019t lose it. When the court wants to find out something about these two, let them send up to Bricksville and say they\u2019ve got the men that played the Royal Nonesuch, and ask for some witnesses\u2014why, you\u2019ll have that entire town down here before you can hardly wink, Miss Mary. And they\u2019ll come a-biling, too.\u201d\r\n\r\nI judged we had got everything fixed about right now. So I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cJust let the auction go right along, and don\u2019t worry. Nobody don\u2019t have to pay for the things they buy till a whole day after the auction on accounts of the short notice, and they ain\u2019t going out of this till they get that money; and the way we\u2019ve fixed it the sale ain\u2019t going to count, and they ain\u2019t going to get no money. It\u2019s just like the way it was with the niggers\u2014it warn\u2019t no sale, and the niggers will be back before long. Why, they can\u2019t collect the money for the niggers yet\u2014they\u2019re in the worst kind of a fix, Miss Mary.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d she says, \u201cI\u2019ll run down to breakfast now, and then I\u2019ll start straight for Mr. Lothrop\u2019s.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2019Deed, that ain\u2019t the ticket, Miss Mary Jane,\u201d I says, \u201cby no manner of means; go before breakfast.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat did you reckon I wanted you to go at all for, Miss Mary?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I never thought\u2014and come to think, I don\u2019t know. What was it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, it\u2019s because you ain\u2019t one of these leather-face people. I don\u2019t want no better book than what your face is. A body can set down and read it off like coarse print. Do you reckon you can go and face your uncles when they come to kiss you good-morning, and never\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere, there, don\u2019t! Yes, I\u2019ll go before breakfast\u2014I\u2019ll be glad to. And leave my sisters with them?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes; never mind about them. They\u2019ve got to stand it yet a while. They might suspicion something if all of you was to go. I don\u2019t want you to see them, nor your sisters, nor nobody in this town; if a neighbor was to ask how is your uncles this morning your face would tell something. No, you go right along, Miss Mary Jane, and I\u2019ll fix it with all of them. I\u2019ll tell Miss Susan to give your love to your uncles and say you\u2019ve went away for a few hours for to get a little rest and change, or to see a friend, and you\u2019ll be back to-night or early in the morning.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGone to see a friend is all right, but I won\u2019t have my love given to them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, it sha\u2019n\u2019t be.\u201d It was well enough to tell her so\u2014no harm in it. It was only a little thing to do, and no trouble; and it\u2019s the little things that smooths people\u2019s roads the most, down here below; it would make Mary Jane comfortable, and it wouldn\u2019t cost nothing. Then I says: \u201cThere\u2019s one more thing\u2014that bag of money.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, they\u2019ve got that; and it makes me feel pretty silly to think how they got it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, you\u2019re out, there. They hain\u2019t got it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, who\u2019s got it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish I knowed, but I don\u2019t. I had it, because I stole it from them; and I stole it to give to you; and I know where I hid it, but I\u2019m afraid it ain\u2019t there no more. I\u2019m awful sorry, Miss Mary Jane, I\u2019m just as sorry as I can be; but I done the best I could; I did honest. I come nigh getting caught, and I had to shove it into the first place I come to, and run\u2014and it warn\u2019t a good place.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, stop blaming yourself\u2014it\u2019s too bad to do it, and I won\u2019t allow it\u2014you couldn\u2019t help it; it wasn\u2019t your fault. Where did you hide it?\u201d\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t want to set her to thinking about her troubles again; and I couldn\u2019t seem to get my mouth to tell her what would make her see that corpse laying in the coffin with that bag of money on his stomach. So for a minute I didn\u2019t say nothing; then I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019d ruther not tell you where I put it, Miss Mary Jane, if you don\u2019t mind letting me off; but I\u2019ll write it for you on a piece of paper, and you can read it along the road to Mr. Lothrop\u2019s, if you want to. Do you reckon that\u2019ll do?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo I wrote: \u201cI put it in the coffin. It was in there when you was crying there, away in the night. I was behind the door, and I was mighty sorry for you, Miss Mary Jane.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt made my eyes water a little to remember her crying there all by herself in the night, and them devils laying there right under her own roof, shaming her and robbing her; and when I folded it up and give it to her I see the water come into her eyes, too; and she shook me by the hand, hard, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cGood-bye. I\u2019m going to do everything just as you\u2019ve told me; and if I don\u2019t ever see you again, I sha\u2019n\u2019t ever forget you and I\u2019ll think of you a many and a many a time, and I\u2019ll pray for you, too!\u201d\u2014and she was gone.\r\n\r\nPray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she\u2019d take a job that was more nearer her size. But I bet she done it, just the same\u2014she was just that kind. She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notion\u2014there warn\u2019t no back-down to her, I judge. You may say what you want to, but in my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of sand. It sounds like flattery, but it ain\u2019t no flattery. And when it comes to beauty\u2014and goodness, too\u2014she lays over them all. I hain\u2019t ever seen her since that time that I see her go out of that door; no, I hain\u2019t ever seen her since, but I reckon I\u2019ve thought of her a many and a many a million times, and of her saying she would pray for me; and if ever I\u2019d a thought it would do any good for me to pray for her, blamed if I wouldn\u2019t a done it or bust.\r\n\r\nWell, Mary Jane she lit out the back way, I reckon; because nobody see her go. When I struck Susan and the hare-lip, I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the name of them people over on t\u2019other side of the river that you all goes to see sometimes?\u201d\r\n\r\nThey says:\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s several; but it\u2019s the Proctors, mainly.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s the name,\u201d I says; \u201cI most forgot it. Well, Miss Mary Jane she told me to tell you she\u2019s gone over there in a dreadful hurry\u2014one of them\u2019s sick.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhich one?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know; leastways, I kinder forget; but I thinks it\u2019s\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSakes alive, I hope it ain\u2019t Hanner?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m sorry to say it,\u201d I says, \u201cbut Hanner\u2019s the very one.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy goodness, and she so well only last week! Is she took bad?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt ain\u2019t no name for it. They set up with her all night, Miss Mary Jane said, and they don\u2019t think she\u2019ll last many hours.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOnly think of that, now! What\u2019s the matter with her?\u201d\r\n\r\nI couldn\u2019t think of anything reasonable, right off that way, so I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMumps.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMumps your granny! They don\u2019t set up with people that\u2019s got the mumps.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey don\u2019t, don\u2019t they? You better bet they do with these mumps. These mumps is different. It\u2019s a new kind, Miss Mary Jane said.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow\u2019s it a new kind?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause it\u2019s mixed up with other things.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat other things?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, measles, and whooping-cough, and erysiplas, and consumption, and yaller janders, and brain-fever, and I don\u2019t know what all.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy land! And they call it the mumps?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s what Miss Mary Jane said.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, what in the nation do they call it the mumps for?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, because it is the mumps. That\u2019s what it starts with.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, ther\u2019 ain\u2019t no sense in it. A body might stump his toe, and take pison, and fall down the well, and break his neck, and bust his brains out, and somebody come along and ask what killed him, and some numskull up and say, \u2018Why, he stumped his toe.\u2019 Would ther\u2019 be any sense in that? No. And ther\u2019 ain\u2019t no sense in this, nuther. Is it ketching?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIs it ketching? Why, how you talk. Is a harrow catching\u2014in the dark? If you don\u2019t hitch on to one tooth, you\u2019re bound to on another, ain\u2019t you? And you can\u2019t get away with that tooth without fetching the whole harrow along, can you? Well, these kind of mumps is a kind of a harrow, as you may say\u2014and it ain\u2019t no slouch of a harrow, nuther, you come to get it hitched on good.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it\u2019s awful, I think,\u201d says the hare-lip. \u201cI\u2019ll go to Uncle Harvey and\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes,\u201d I says, \u201cI would. Of course I would. I wouldn\u2019t lose no time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, why wouldn\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJust look at it a minute, and maybe you can see. Hain\u2019t your uncles obleegd to get along home to England as fast as they can? And do you reckon they\u2019d be mean enough to go off and leave you to go all that journey by yourselves? You know they\u2019ll wait for you. So fur, so good. Your uncle Harvey\u2019s a preacher, ain\u2019t he? Very well, then; is a preacher going to deceive a steamboat clerk? is he going to deceive a ship clerk?\u2014so as to get them to let Miss Mary Jane go aboard? Now you know he ain\u2019t. What will he do, then? Why, he\u2019ll say, \u2018It\u2019s a great pity, but my church matters has got to get along the best way they can; for my niece has been exposed to the dreadful pluribus-unum mumps, and so it\u2019s my bounden duty to set down here and wait the three months it takes to show on her if she\u2019s got it.\u2019 But never mind, if you think it\u2019s best to tell your uncle Harvey\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShucks, and stay fooling around here when we could all be having good times in England whilst we was waiting to find out whether Mary Jane\u2019s got it or not? Why, you talk like a muggins.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, anyway, maybe you\u2019d better tell some of the neighbors.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cListen at that, now. You do beat all for natural stupidness. Can\u2019t you see that they\u2019d go and tell? Ther\u2019 ain\u2019t no way but just to not tell anybody at all.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, maybe you\u2019re right\u2014yes, I judge you are right.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I reckon we ought to tell Uncle Harvey she\u2019s gone out a while, anyway, so he won\u2019t be uneasy about her?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Miss Mary Jane she wanted you to do that. She says, \u2018Tell them to give Uncle Harvey and William my love and a kiss, and say I\u2019ve run over the river to see Mr.\u2019\u2014Mr.\u2014what is the name of that rich family your uncle Peter used to think so much of?\u2014I mean the one that\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, you must mean the Apthorps, ain\u2019t it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course; bother them kind of names, a body can\u2019t ever seem to remember them, half the time, somehow. Yes, she said, say she has run over for to ask the Apthorps to be sure and come to the auction and buy this house, because she allowed her uncle Peter would ruther they had it than anybody else; and she\u2019s going to stick to them till they say they\u2019ll come, and then, if she ain\u2019t too tired, she\u2019s coming home; and if she is, she\u2019ll be home in the morning anyway. She said, don\u2019t say nothing about the Proctors, but only about the Apthorps\u2014which\u2019ll be perfectly true, because she is going there to speak about their buying the house; I know it, because she told me so herself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right,\u201d they said, and cleared out to lay for their uncles, and give them the love and the kisses, and tell them the message.\r\n\r\nEverything was all right now. The girls wouldn\u2019t say nothing because they wanted to go to England; and the king and the duke would ruther Mary Jane was off working for the auction than around in reach of Doctor Robinson. I felt very good; I judged I had done it pretty neat\u2014I reckoned Tom Sawyer couldn\u2019t a done it no neater himself. Of course he would a throwed more style into it, but I can\u2019t do that very handy, not being brung up to it.\r\n\r\nWell, they held the auction in the public square, along towards the end of the afternoon, and it strung along, and strung along, and the old man he was on hand and looking his level pisonest, up there longside of the auctioneer, and chipping in a little Scripture now and then, or a little goody-goody saying of some kind, and the duke he was around goo-gooing for sympathy all he knowed how, and just spreading himself generly.\r\n\r\nBut by-and-by the thing dragged through, and everything was sold\u2014everything but a little old trifling lot in the graveyard. So they\u2019d got to work that off\u2014I never see such a girafft as the king was for wanting to swallow everything. Well, whilst they was at it a steamboat landed, and in about two minutes up comes a crowd a-whooping and yelling and laughing and carrying on, and singing out:\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s your opposition line! here\u2019s your two sets o\u2019 heirs to old Peter Wilks\u2014and you pays your money and you takes your choice!\u201d\r\nCHAPTER XXIX.\r\n\r\nThey was fetching a very nice-looking old gentleman along, and a nice-looking younger one, with his right arm in a sling. And, my souls, how the people yelled and laughed, and kept it up. But I didn\u2019t see no joke about it, and I judged it would strain the duke and the king some to see any. I reckoned they\u2019d turn pale. But no, nary a pale did they turn. The duke he never let on he suspicioned what was up, but just went a goo-gooing around, happy and satisfied, like a jug that\u2019s googling out buttermilk; and as for the king, he just gazed and gazed down sorrowful on them new-comers like it give him the stomach-ache in his very heart to think there could be such frauds and rascals in the world. Oh, he done it admirable. Lots of the principal people gethered around the king, to let him see they was on his side. That old gentleman that had just come looked all puzzled to death. Pretty soon he begun to speak, and I see straight off he pronounced like an Englishman\u2014not the king\u2019s way, though the king\u2019s was pretty good for an imitation. I can\u2019t give the old gent\u2019s words, nor I can\u2019t imitate him; but he turned around to the crowd, and says, about like this:\r\n\r\n\u201cThis is a surprise to me which I wasn\u2019t looking for; and I\u2019ll acknowledge, candid and frank, I ain\u2019t very well fixed to meet it and answer it; for my brother and me has had misfortunes; he\u2019s broke his arm, and our baggage got put off at a town above here last night in the night by a mistake. I am Peter Wilks\u2019 brother Harvey, and this is his brother William, which can\u2019t hear nor speak\u2014and can\u2019t even make signs to amount to much, now\u2019t he\u2019s only got one hand to work them with. We are who we say we are; and in a day or two, when I get the baggage, I can prove it. But up till then I won\u2019t say nothing more, but go to the hotel and wait.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo him and the new dummy started off; and the king he laughs, and blethers out:\r\n\r\n\u201cBroke his arm\u2014very likely, ain\u2019t it?\u2014and very convenient, too, for a fraud that\u2019s got to make signs, and ain\u2019t learnt how. Lost their baggage! That\u2019s mighty good!\u2014and mighty ingenious\u2014under the circumstances!\u201d\r\n\r\nSo he laughed again; and so did everybody else, except three or four, or maybe half a dozen. One of these was that doctor; another one was a sharp-looking gentleman, with a carpet-bag of the old-fashioned kind made out of carpet-stuff, that had just come off of the steamboat and was talking to him in a low voice, and glancing towards the king now and then and nodding their heads\u2014it was Levi Bell, the lawyer that was gone up to Louisville; and another one was a big rough husky that come along and listened to all the old gentleman said, and was listening to the king now. And when the king got done this husky up and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cSay, looky here; if you are Harvey Wilks, when\u2019d you come to this town?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe day before the funeral, friend,\u201d says the king.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut what time o\u2019 day?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIn the evenin\u2019\u2014\u2019bout an hour er two before sundown.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow\u2019d you come?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI come down on the Susan Powell from Cincinnati.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, how\u2019d you come to be up at the Pint in the mornin\u2019\u2014in a canoe?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI warn\u2019t up at the Pint in the mornin\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a lie.\u201d\r\n\r\nSeveral of them jumped for him and begged him not to talk that way to an old man and a preacher.\r\n\r\n\u201cPreacher be hanged, he\u2019s a fraud and a liar. He was up at the Pint that mornin\u2019. I live up there, don\u2019t I? Well, I was up there, and he was up there. I see him there. He come in a canoe, along with Tim Collins and a boy.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe doctor he up and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWould you know the boy again if you was to see him, Hines?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI reckon I would, but I don\u2019t know. Why, yonder he is, now. I know him perfectly easy.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt was me he pointed at. The doctor says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNeighbors, I don\u2019t know whether the new couple is frauds or not; but if these two ain\u2019t frauds, I am an idiot, that\u2019s all. I think it\u2019s our duty to see that they don\u2019t get away from here till we\u2019ve looked into this thing. Come along, Hines; come along, the rest of you. We\u2019ll take these fellows to the tavern and affront them with t\u2019other couple, and I reckon we\u2019ll find out something before we get through.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt was nuts for the crowd, though maybe not for the king\u2019s friends; so we all started. It was about sundown. The doctor he led me along by the hand, and was plenty kind enough, but he never let go my hand.\r\n\r\nWe all got in a big room in the hotel, and lit up some candles, and fetched in the new couple. First, the doctor says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t wish to be too hard on these two men, but I think they\u2019re frauds, and they may have complices that we don\u2019t know nothing about. If they have, won\u2019t the complices get away with that bag of gold Peter Wilks left? It ain\u2019t unlikely. If these men ain\u2019t frauds, they won\u2019t object to sending for that money and letting us keep it till they prove they\u2019re all right\u2014ain\u2019t that so?\u201d\r\n\r\nEverybody agreed to that. So I judged they had our gang in a pretty tight place right at the outstart. But the king he only looked sorrowful, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cGentlemen, I wish the money was there, for I ain\u2019t got no disposition to throw anything in the way of a fair, open, out-and-out investigation o\u2019 this misable business; but, alas, the money ain\u2019t there; you k\u2019n send and see, if you want to.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere is it, then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, when my niece give it to me to keep for her I took and hid it inside o\u2019 the straw tick o\u2019 my bed, not wishin\u2019 to bank it for the few days we\u2019d be here, and considerin\u2019 the bed a safe place, we not bein\u2019 used to niggers, and suppos\u2019n\u2019 \u2019em honest, like servants in England. The niggers stole it the very next mornin\u2019 after I had went down stairs; and when I sold \u2019em I hadn\u2019t missed the money yit, so they got clean away with it. My servant here k\u2019n tell you \u2019bout it, gentlemen.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe doctor and several said \u201cShucks!\u201d and I see nobody didn\u2019t altogether believe him. One man asked me if I see the niggers steal it. I said no, but I see them sneaking out of the room and hustling away, and I never thought nothing, only I reckoned they was afraid they had waked up my master and was trying to get away before he made trouble with them. That was all they asked me. Then the doctor whirls on me and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cAre you English, too?\u201d\r\n\r\nI says yes; and him and some others laughed, and said, \u201cStuff!\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, then they sailed in on the general investigation, and there we had it, up and down, hour in, hour out, and nobody never said a word about supper, nor ever seemed to think about it\u2014and so they kept it up, and kept it up; and it was the worst mixed-up thing you ever see. They made the king tell his yarn, and they made the old gentleman tell his\u2019n; and anybody but a lot of prejudiced chuckleheads would a seen that the old gentleman was spinning truth and t\u2019other one lies. And by-and-by they had me up to tell what I knowed. The king he give me a left-handed look out of the corner of his eye, and so I knowed enough to talk on the right side. I begun to tell about Sheffield, and how we lived there, and all about the English Wilkses, and so on; but I didn\u2019t get pretty fur till the doctor begun to laugh; and Levi Bell, the lawyer, says:\r\n\r\n\u201cSet down, my boy; I wouldn\u2019t strain myself if I was you. I reckon you ain\u2019t used to lying, it don\u2019t seem to come handy; what you want is practice. You do it pretty awkward.\u201d\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t care nothing for the compliment, but I was glad to be let off, anyway.\r\n\r\nThe doctor he started to say something, and turns and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you\u2019d been in town at first, Levi Bell\u2014\u201d The king broke in and reached out his hand, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, is this my poor dead brother\u2019s old friend that he\u2019s wrote so often about?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe lawyer and him shook hands, and the lawyer smiled and looked pleased, and they talked right along awhile, and then got to one side and talked low; and at last the lawyer speaks up and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019ll fix it. I\u2019ll take the order and send it, along with your brother\u2019s, and then they\u2019ll know it\u2019s all right.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo they got some paper and a pen, and the king he set down and twisted his head to one side, and chawed his tongue, and scrawled off something; and then they give the pen to the duke\u2014and then for the first time the duke looked sick. But he took the pen and wrote. So then the lawyer turns to the new old gentleman and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou and your brother please write a line or two and sign your names.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe old gentleman wrote, but nobody couldn\u2019t read it. The lawyer looked powerful astonished, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it beats me\u201d\u2014and snaked a lot of old letters out of his pocket, and examined them, and then examined the old man\u2019s writing, and then them again; and then says: \u201cThese old letters is from Harvey Wilks; and here\u2019s these two handwritings, and anybody can see they didn\u2019t write them\u201d (the king and the duke looked sold and foolish, I tell you, to see how the lawyer had took them in), \u201cand here\u2019s this old gentleman\u2019s hand writing, and anybody can tell, easy enough, he didn\u2019t write them\u2014fact is, the scratches he makes ain\u2019t properly writing at all. Now, here\u2019s some letters from\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\nThe new old gentleman says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you please, let me explain. Nobody can read my hand but my brother there\u2014so he copies for me. It\u2019s his hand you\u2019ve got there, not mine.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell!\u201d says the lawyer, \u201cthis is a state of things. I\u2019ve got some of William\u2019s letters, too; so if you\u2019ll get him to write a line or so we can com\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe can\u2019t write with his left hand,\u201d says the old gentleman. \u201cIf he could use his right hand, you would see that he wrote his own letters and mine too. Look at both, please\u2014they\u2019re by the same hand.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe lawyer done it, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI believe it\u2019s so\u2014and if it ain\u2019t so, there\u2019s a heap stronger resemblance than I\u2019d noticed before, anyway. Well, well, well! I thought we was right on the track of a solution, but it\u2019s gone to grass, partly. But anyway, one thing is proved\u2014these two ain\u2019t either of \u2019em Wilkses\u201d\u2014and he wagged his head towards the king and the duke.\r\n\r\nWell, what do you think? That muleheaded old fool wouldn\u2019t give in then! Indeed he wouldn\u2019t. Said it warn\u2019t no fair test. Said his brother William was the cussedest joker in the world, and hadn\u2019t tried to write\u2014he see William was going to play one of his jokes the minute he put the pen to paper. And so he warmed up and went warbling and warbling right along till he was actuly beginning to believe what he was saying himself; but pretty soon the new gentleman broke in, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve thought of something. Is there anybody here that helped to lay out my br\u2014helped to lay out the late Peter Wilks for burying?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d says somebody, \u201cme and Ab Turner done it. We\u2019re both here.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen the old man turns towards the king, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cPerhaps this gentleman can tell me what was tattooed on his breast?\u201d\r\n\r\nBlamed if the king didn\u2019t have to brace up mighty quick, or he\u2019d a squshed down like a bluff bank that the river has cut under, it took him so sudden; and, mind you, it was a thing that was calculated to make most anybody sqush to get fetched such a solid one as that without any notice, because how was he going to know what was tattooed on the man? He whitened a little; he couldn\u2019t help it; and it was mighty still in there, and everybody bending a little forwards and gazing at him. Says I to myself, Now he\u2019ll throw up the sponge\u2014there ain\u2019t no more use. Well, did he? A body can\u2019t hardly believe it, but he didn\u2019t. I reckon he thought he\u2019d keep the thing up till he tired them people out, so they\u2019d thin out, and him and the duke could break loose and get away. Anyway, he set there, and pretty soon he begun to smile, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMf! It\u2019s a very tough question, ain\u2019t it! Yes, sir, I k\u2019n tell you what\u2019s tattooed on his breast. It\u2019s jest a small, thin, blue arrow\u2014that\u2019s what it is; and if you don\u2019t look clost, you can\u2019t see it. Now what do you say\u2014hey?\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, I never see anything like that old blister for clean out-and-out cheek.\r\n\r\nThe new old gentleman turns brisk towards Ab Turner and his pard, and his eye lights up like he judged he\u2019d got the king this time, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2014you\u2019ve heard what he said! Was there any such mark on Peter Wilks\u2019 breast?\u201d\r\n\r\nBoth of them spoke up and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWe didn\u2019t see no such mark.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood!\u201d says the old gentleman. \u201cNow, what you did see on his breast was a small dim P, and a B (which is an initial he dropped when he was young), and a W, with dashes between them, so: P\u2014B\u2014W\u201d\u2014and he marked them that way on a piece of paper. \u201cCome, ain\u2019t that what you saw?\u201d\r\n\r\nBoth of them spoke up again, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, we didn\u2019t. We never seen any marks at all.\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, everybody was in a state of mind now, and they sings out:\r\n\r\n\u201cThe whole bilin\u2019 of \u2019m \u2019s frauds! Le\u2019s duck \u2019em! le\u2019s drown \u2019em! le\u2019s ride \u2019em on a rail!\u201d and everybody was whooping at once, and there was a rattling powwow. But the lawyer he jumps on the table and yells, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cGentlemen\u2014gentlemen! Hear me just a word\u2014just a single word\u2014if you PLEASE! There\u2019s one way yet\u2014let\u2019s go and dig up the corpse and look.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat took them.\r\n\r\n\u201cHooray!\u201d they all shouted, and was starting right off; but the lawyer and the doctor sung out:\r\n\r\n\u201cHold on, hold on! Collar all these four men and the boy, and fetch them along, too!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe\u2019ll do it!\u201d they all shouted; \u201cand if we don\u2019t find them marks we\u2019ll lynch the whole gang!\u201d\r\n\r\nI was scared, now, I tell you. But there warn\u2019t no getting away, you know. They gripped us all, and marched us right along, straight for the graveyard, which was a mile and a half down the river, and the whole town at our heels, for we made noise enough, and it was only nine in the evening.\r\n\r\nAs we went by our house I wished I hadn\u2019t sent Mary Jane out of town; because now if I could tip her the wink she\u2019d light out and save me, and blow on our dead-beats.\r\n\r\nWell, we swarmed along down the river road, just carrying on like wildcats; and to make it more scary the sky was darking up, and the lightning beginning to wink and flitter, and the wind to shiver amongst the leaves. This was the most awful trouble and most dangersome I ever was in; and I was kinder stunned; everything was going so different from what I had allowed for; stead of being fixed so I could take my own time if I wanted to, and see all the fun, and have Mary Jane at my back to save me and set me free when the close-fit come, here was nothing in the world betwixt me and sudden death but just them tattoo-marks. If they didn\u2019t find them\u2014\r\n\r\nI couldn\u2019t bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn\u2019t think about nothing else. It got darker and darker, and it was a beautiful time to give the crowd the slip; but that big husky had me by the wrist\u2014Hines\u2014and a body might as well try to give Goliar the slip. He dragged me right along, he was so excited, and I had to run to keep up.\r\n\r\nWhen they got there they swarmed into the graveyard and washed over it like an overflow. And when they got to the grave they found they had about a hundred times as many shovels as they wanted, but nobody hadn\u2019t thought to fetch a lantern. But they sailed into digging anyway by the flicker of the lightning, and sent a man to the nearest house, a half a mile off, to borrow one.\r\n\r\nSo they dug and dug like everything; and it got awful dark, and the rain started, and the wind swished and swushed along, and the lightning come brisker and brisker, and the thunder boomed; but them people never took no notice of it, they was so full of this business; and one minute you could see everything and every face in that big crowd, and the shovelfuls of dirt sailing up out of the grave, and the next second the dark wiped it all out, and you couldn\u2019t see nothing at all.\r\n\r\nAt last they got out the coffin and begun to unscrew the lid, and then such another crowding and shouldering and shoving as there was, to scrouge in and get a sight, you never see; and in the dark, that way, it was awful. Hines he hurt my wrist dreadful pulling and tugging so, and I reckon he clean forgot I was in the world, he was so excited and panting.\r\n\r\nAll of a sudden the lightning let go a perfect sluice of white glare, and somebody sings out:\r\n\r\n\u201cBy the living jingo, here\u2019s the bag of gold on his breast!\u201d\r\n\r\nHines let out a whoop, like everybody else, and dropped my wrist and give a big surge to bust his way in and get a look, and the way I lit out and shinned for the road in the dark there ain\u2019t nobody can tell.\r\n\r\nI had the road all to myself, and I fairly flew\u2014leastways, I had it all to myself except the solid dark, and the now-and-then glares, and the buzzing of the rain, and the thrashing of the wind, and the splitting of the thunder; and sure as you are born I did clip it along!\r\n\r\nWhen I struck the town I see there warn\u2019t nobody out in the storm, so I never hunted for no back streets, but humped it straight through the main one; and when I begun to get towards our house I aimed my eye and set it. No light there; the house all dark\u2014which made me feel sorry and disappointed, I didn\u2019t know why. But at last, just as I was sailing by, flash comes the light in Mary Jane\u2019s window! and my heart swelled up sudden, like to bust; and the same second the house and all was behind me in the dark, and wasn\u2019t ever going to be before me no more in this world. She was the best girl I ever see, and had the most sand.\r\n\r\nThe minute I was far enough above the town to see I could make the tow-head, I begun to look sharp for a boat to borrow, and the first time the lightning showed me one that wasn\u2019t chained I snatched it and shoved. It was a canoe, and warn\u2019t fastened with nothing but a rope. The tow-head was a rattling big distance off, away out there in the middle of the river, but I didn\u2019t lose no time; and when I struck the raft at last I was so fagged I would a just laid down to blow and gasp if I could afforded it. But I didn\u2019t. As I sprung aboard I sung out:\r\n\r\n\u201cOut with you, Jim, and set her loose! Glory be to goodness, we\u2019re shut of them!\u201d\r\n\r\nJim lit out, and was a-coming for me with both arms spread, he was so full of joy; but when I glimpsed him in the lightning my heart shot up in my mouth and I went overboard backwards; for I forgot he was old King Lear and a drownded A-rab all in one, and it most scared the livers and lights out of me. But Jim fished me out, and was going to hug me and bless me, and so on, he was so glad I was back and we was shut of the king and the duke, but I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNot now; have it for breakfast, have it for breakfast! Cut loose and let her slide!\u201d\r\n\r\nSo in two seconds away we went a-sliding down the river, and it did seem so good to be free again and all by ourselves on the big river, and nobody to bother us. I had to skip around a bit, and jump up and crack my heels a few times\u2014I couldn\u2019t help it; but about the third crack I noticed a sound that I knowed mighty well, and held my breath and listened and waited; and sure enough, when the next flash busted out over the water, here they come!\u2014and just a-laying to their oars and making their skiff hum! It was the king and the duke.\r\n\r\nSo I wilted right down on to the planks then, and give up; and it was all I could do to keep from crying.\r\nCHAPTER XXX.\r\n\r\nWhen they got aboard the king went for me, and shook me by the collar, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cTryin\u2019 to give us the slip, was ye, you pup! Tired of our company, hey?\u201d\r\n\r\nI says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, your majesty, we warn\u2019t\u2014please don\u2019t, your majesty!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cQuick, then, and tell us what was your idea, or I\u2019ll shake the insides out o\u2019 you!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHonest, I\u2019ll tell you everything just as it happened, your majesty. The man that had a-holt of me was very good to me, and kept saying he had a boy about as big as me that died last year, and he was sorry to see a boy in such a dangerous fix; and when they was all took by surprise by finding the gold, and made a rush for the coffin, he lets go of me and whispers, \u2018Heel it now, or they\u2019ll hang ye, sure!\u2019 and I lit out. It didn\u2019t seem no good for me to stay\u2014I couldn\u2019t do nothing, and I didn\u2019t want to be hung if I could get away. So I never stopped running till I found the canoe; and when I got here I told Jim to hurry, or they\u2019d catch me and hang me yet, and said I was afeard you and the duke wasn\u2019t alive now, and I was awful sorry, and so was Jim, and was awful glad when we see you coming; you may ask Jim if I didn\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\nJim said it was so; and the king told him to shut up, and said, \u201cOh, yes, it\u2019s mighty likely!\u201d and shook me up again, and said he reckoned he\u2019d drownd me. But the duke says:\r\n\r\n\u201cLeggo the boy, you old idiot! Would you a done any different? Did you inquire around for him when you got loose? I don\u2019t remember it.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo the king let go of me, and begun to cuss that town and everybody in it. But the duke says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou better a blame sight give yourself a good cussing, for you\u2019re the one that\u2019s entitled to it most. You hain\u2019t done a thing from the start that had any sense in it, except coming out so cool and cheeky with that imaginary blue-arrow mark. That was bright\u2014it was right down bully; and it was the thing that saved us. For if it hadn\u2019t been for that, they\u2019d a jailed us till them Englishmen\u2019s baggage come\u2014and then\u2014the penitentiary, you bet! But that trick took \u2019em to the graveyard, and the gold done us a still bigger kindness; for if the excited fools hadn\u2019t let go all holts and made that rush to get a look, we\u2019d a slept in our cravats to-night\u2014cravats warranted to wear, too\u2014longer than we\u2019d need \u2019em.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey was still a minute\u2014thinking; then the king says, kind of absent-minded like:\r\n\r\n\u201cMf! And we reckoned the niggers stole it!\u201d\r\n\r\nThat made me squirm!\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d says the duke, kinder slow and deliberate and sarcastic, \u201cWe did.\u201d\r\n\r\nAfter about a half a minute the king drawls out:\r\n\r\n\u201cLeastways, I did.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke says, the same way:\r\n\r\n\u201cOn the contrary, I did.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe king kind of ruffles up, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cLooky here, Bilgewater, what\u2019r you referrin\u2019 to?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke says, pretty brisk:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen it comes to that, maybe you\u2019ll let me ask, what was you referring to?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShucks!\u201d says the king, very sarcastic; \u201cbut I don\u2019t know\u2014maybe you was asleep, and didn\u2019t know what you was about.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke bristles up now, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, let up on this cussed nonsense; do you take me for a blame\u2019 fool? Don\u2019t you reckon I know who hid that money in that coffin?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, sir! I know you do know, because you done it yourself!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a lie!\u201d\u2014and the duke went for him. The king sings out:\r\n\r\n\u201cTake y\u2019r hands off!\u2014leggo my throat!\u2014I take it all back!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, you just own up, first, that you did hide that money there, intending to give me the slip one of these days, and come back and dig it up, and have it all to yourself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWait jest a minute, duke\u2014answer me this one question, honest and fair; if you didn\u2019t put the money there, say it, and I\u2019ll b\u2019lieve you, and take back everything I said.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou old scoundrel, I didn\u2019t, and you know I didn\u2019t. There, now!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, I b\u2019lieve you. But answer me only jest this one more\u2014now don\u2019t git mad; didn\u2019t you have it in your mind to hook the money and hide it?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe duke never said nothing for a little bit; then he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I don\u2019t care if I did, I didn\u2019t do it, anyway. But you not only had it in mind to do it, but you done it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wisht I never die if I done it, duke, and that\u2019s honest. I won\u2019t say I warn\u2019t goin\u2019 to do it, because I was; but you\u2014I mean somebody\u2014got in ahead o\u2019 me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a lie! You done it, and you got to say you done it, or\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\nThe king began to gurgle, and then he gasps out:\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2019Nough!\u2014I own up!\u201d\r\n\r\nI was very glad to hear him say that; it made me feel much more easier than what I was feeling before. So the duke took his hands off and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you ever deny it again I\u2019ll drown you. It\u2019s well for you to set there and blubber like a baby\u2014it\u2019s fitten for you, after the way you\u2019ve acted. I never see such an old ostrich for wanting to gobble everything\u2014and I a-trusting you all the time, like you was my own father. You ought to been ashamed of yourself to stand by and hear it saddled on to a lot of poor niggers, and you never say a word for \u2019em. It makes me feel ridiculous to think I was soft enough to believe that rubbage. Cuss you, I can see now why you was so anxious to make up the deffisit\u2014you wanted to get what money I\u2019d got out of the Nonesuch and one thing or another, and scoop it all!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe king says, timid, and still a-snuffling:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, duke, it was you that said make up the deffisit; it warn\u2019t me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDry up! I don\u2019t want to hear no more out of you!\u201d says the duke. \u201cAnd now you see what you got by it. They\u2019ve got all their own money back, and all of ourn but a shekel or two besides. G\u2019long to bed, and don\u2019t you deffersit me no more deffersits, long \u2019s you live!\u201d\r\n\r\nSo the king sneaked into the wigwam and took to his bottle for comfort, and before long the duke tackled his bottle; and so in about a half an hour they was as thick as thieves again, and the tighter they got, the lovinger they got, and went off a-snoring in each other\u2019s arms. They both got powerful mellow, but I noticed the king didn\u2019t get mellow enough to forget to remember to not deny about hiding the money-bag again. That made me feel easy and satisfied. Of course when they got to snoring we had a long gabble, and I told Jim everything.\r\nCHAPTER XXXI.\r\n\r\nWe dasn\u2019t stop again at any town for days and days; kept right along down the river. We was down south in the warm weather now, and a mighty long ways from home. We begun to come to trees with Spanish moss on them, hanging down from the limbs like long, gray beards. It was the first I ever see it growing, and it made the woods look solemn and dismal. So now the frauds reckoned they was out of danger, and they begun to work the villages again.\r\n\r\nFirst they done a lecture on temperance; but they didn\u2019t make enough for them both to get drunk on. Then in another village they started a dancing-school; but they didn\u2019t know no more how to dance than a kangaroo does; so the first prance they made the general public jumped in and pranced them out of town. Another time they tried to go at yellocution; but they didn\u2019t yellocute long till the audience got up and give them a solid good cussing, and made them skip out. They tackled missionarying, and mesmerizing, and doctoring, and telling fortunes, and a little of everything; but they couldn\u2019t seem to have no luck. So at last they got just about dead broke, and laid around the raft as she floated along, thinking and thinking, and never saying nothing, by the half a day at a time, and dreadful blue and desperate.\r\n\r\nAnd at last they took a change and begun to lay their heads together in the wigwam and talk low and confidential two or three hours at a time. Jim and me got uneasy. We didn\u2019t like the look of it. We judged they was studying up some kind of worse deviltry than ever. We turned it over and over, and at last we made up our minds they was going to break into somebody\u2019s house or store, or was going into the counterfeit-money business, or something. So then we was pretty scared, and made up an agreement that we wouldn\u2019t have nothing in the world to do with such actions, and if we ever got the least show we would give them the cold shake and clear out and leave them behind. Well, early one morning we hid the raft in a good, safe place about two mile below a little bit of a shabby village named Pikesville, and the king he went ashore and told us all to stay hid whilst he went up to town and smelt around to see if anybody had got any wind of the Royal Nonesuch there yet. (\u201cHouse to rob, you mean,\u201d says I to myself; \u201cand when you get through robbing it you\u2019ll come back here and wonder what has become of me and Jim and the raft\u2014and you\u2019ll have to take it out in wondering.\u201d) And he said if he warn\u2019t back by midday the duke and me would know it was all right, and we was to come along.\r\n\r\nSo we stayed where we was. The duke he fretted and sweated around, and was in a mighty sour way. He scolded us for everything, and we couldn\u2019t seem to do nothing right; he found fault with every little thing. Something was a-brewing, sure. I was good and glad when midday come and no king; we could have a change, anyway\u2014and maybe a chance for the change on top of it. So me and the duke went up to the village, and hunted around there for the king, and by-and-by we found him in the back room of a little low doggery, very tight, and a lot of loafers bullyragging him for sport, and he a-cussing and a-threatening with all his might, and so tight he couldn\u2019t walk, and couldn\u2019t do nothing to them. The duke he begun to abuse him for an old fool, and the king begun to sass back, and the minute they was fairly at it I lit out and shook the reefs out of my hind legs, and spun down the river road like a deer, for I see our chance; and I made up my mind that it would be a long day before they ever see me and Jim again. I got down there all out of breath but loaded up with joy, and sung out:\r\n\r\n\u201cSet her loose, Jim! we\u2019re all right now!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut there warn\u2019t no answer, and nobody come out of the wigwam. Jim was gone! I set up a shout\u2014and then another\u2014and then another one; and run this way and that in the woods, whooping and screeching; but it warn\u2019t no use\u2014old Jim was gone. Then I set down and cried; I couldn\u2019t help it. But I couldn\u2019t set still long. Pretty soon I went out on the road, trying to think what I better do, and I run across a boy walking, and asked him if he\u2019d seen a strange nigger dressed so and so, and he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhereabouts?\u201d says I.\r\n\r\n\u201cDown to Silas Phelps\u2019 place, two mile below here. He\u2019s a runaway nigger, and they\u2019ve got him. Was you looking for him?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou bet I ain\u2019t! I run across him in the woods about an hour or two ago, and he said if I hollered he\u2019d cut my livers out\u2014and told me to lay down and stay where I was; and I done it. Been there ever since; afeard to come out.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d he says, \u201cyou needn\u2019t be afeard no more, becuz they\u2019ve got him. He run off f\u2019m down South, som\u2019ers.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a good job they got him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I reckon! There\u2019s two hunderd dollars reward on him. It\u2019s like picking up money out\u2019n the road.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, it is\u2014and I could a had it if I\u2019d been big enough; I see him first. Who nailed him?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was an old fellow\u2014a stranger\u2014and he sold out his chance in him for forty dollars, becuz he\u2019s got to go up the river and can\u2019t wait. Think o\u2019 that, now! You bet I\u2019d wait, if it was seven year.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s me, every time,\u201d says I. \u201cBut maybe his chance ain\u2019t worth no more than that, if he\u2019ll sell it so cheap. Maybe there\u2019s something ain\u2019t straight about it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut it is, though\u2014straight as a string. I see the handbill myself. It tells all about him, to a dot\u2014paints him like a picture, and tells the plantation he\u2019s frum, below Newrleans. No-sirree-bob, they ain\u2019t no trouble \u2019bout that speculation, you bet you. Say, gimme a chaw tobacker, won\u2019t ye?\u201d\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t have none, so he left. I went to the raft, and set down in the wigwam to think. But I couldn\u2019t come to nothing. I thought till I wore my head sore, but I couldn\u2019t see no way out of the trouble. After all this long journey, and after all we\u2019d done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.\r\n\r\nOnce I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he\u2019d got to be a slave, and so I\u2019d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: she\u2019d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she\u2019d sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn\u2019t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger, and they\u2019d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he\u2019d feel ornery and disgraced. And then think of me! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I\u2019d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That\u2019s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don\u2019t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain\u2019t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman\u2019s nigger that hadn\u2019t ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there\u2019s One that\u2019s always on the lookout, and ain\u2019t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn\u2019t so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, \u201cThere was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and if you\u2019d a done it they\u2019d a learnt you there that people that acts as I\u2019d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn\u2019t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn\u2019t come. Why wouldn\u2019t they? It warn\u2019t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn\u2019t come. It was because my heart warn\u2019t right; it was because I warn\u2019t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger\u2019s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can\u2019t pray a lie\u2014I found that out.\r\n\r\nSo I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn\u2019t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I\u2019ll go and write the letter\u2014and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:\r\n\r\nMiss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.\r\n\r\nHUCK FINN.\r\n\r\nI felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn\u2019t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking\u2014thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn\u2019t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I\u2019d see him standing my watch on top of his\u2019n, \u2019stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he\u2019s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.\r\n\r\nIt was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I\u2019d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right, then, I\u2019ll go to hell\u201d\u2014and tore it up.\r\n\r\nIt was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn\u2019t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.\r\n\r\nThen I set to thinking over how to get at it, and turned over some considerable many ways in my mind; and at last fixed up a plan that suited me. So then I took the bearings of a woody island that was down the river a piece, and as soon as it was fairly dark I crept out with my raft and went for it, and hid it there, and then turned in. I slept the night through, and got up before it was light, and had my breakfast, and put on my store clothes, and tied up some others and one thing or another in a bundle, and took the canoe and cleared for shore. I landed below where I judged was Phelps\u2019s place, and hid my bundle in the woods, and then filled up the canoe with water, and loaded rocks into her and sunk her where I could find her again when I wanted her, about a quarter of a mile below a little steam sawmill that was on the bank.\r\n\r\nThen I struck up the road, and when I passed the mill I see a sign on it, \u201cPhelps\u2019s Sawmill,\u201d and when I come to the farm-houses, two or three hundred yards further along, I kept my eyes peeled, but didn\u2019t see nobody around, though it was good daylight now. But I didn\u2019t mind, because I didn\u2019t want to see nobody just yet\u2014I only wanted to get the lay of the land. According to my plan, I was going to turn up there from the village, not from below. So I just took a look, and shoved along, straight for town. Well, the very first man I see when I got there was the duke. He was sticking up a bill for the Royal Nonesuch\u2014three-night performance\u2014like that other time. They had the cheek, them frauds! I was right on him before I could shirk. He looked astonished, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHel-lo! Where\u2019d you come from?\u201d Then he says, kind of glad and eager, \u201cWhere\u2019s the raft?\u2014got her in a good place?\u201d\r\n\r\nI says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, that\u2019s just what I was going to ask your grace.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen he didn\u2019t look so joyful, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat was your idea for asking me?\u201d he says.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d I says, \u201cwhen I see the king in that doggery yesterday I says to myself, we can\u2019t get him home for hours, till he\u2019s soberer; so I went a-loafing around town to put in the time and wait. A man up and offered me ten cents to help him pull a skiff over the river and back to fetch a sheep, and so I went along; but when we was dragging him to the boat, and the man left me a-holt of the rope and went behind him to shove him along, he was too strong for me and jerked loose and run, and we after him. We didn\u2019t have no dog, and so we had to chase him all over the country till we tired him out. We never got him till dark; then we fetched him over, and I started down for the raft. When I got there and see it was gone, I says to myself, \u2018they\u2019ve got into trouble and had to leave; and they\u2019ve took my nigger, which is the only nigger I\u2019ve got in the world, and now I\u2019m in a strange country, and ain\u2019t got no property no more, nor nothing, and no way to make my living;\u2019 so I set down and cried. I slept in the woods all night. But what did become of the raft, then?\u2014and Jim\u2014poor Jim!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBlamed if I know\u2014that is, what\u2019s become of the raft. That old fool had made a trade and got forty dollars, and when we found him in the doggery the loafers had matched half-dollars with him and got every cent but what he\u2019d spent for whisky; and when I got him home late last night and found the raft gone, we said, \u2018That little rascal has stole our raft and shook us, and run off down the river.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wouldn\u2019t shake my nigger, would I?\u2014the only nigger I had in the world, and the only property.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe never thought of that. Fact is, I reckon we\u2019d come to consider him our nigger; yes, we did consider him so\u2014goodness knows we had trouble enough for him. So when we see the raft was gone and we flat broke, there warn\u2019t anything for it but to try the Royal Nonesuch another shake. And I\u2019ve pegged along ever since, dry as a powder-horn. Where\u2019s that ten cents? Give it here.\u201d\r\n\r\nI had considerable money, so I give him ten cents, but begged him to spend it for something to eat, and give me some, because it was all the money I had, and I hadn\u2019t had nothing to eat since yesterday. He never said nothing. The next minute he whirls on me and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you reckon that nigger would blow on us? We\u2019d skin him if he done that!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow can he blow? Hain\u2019t he run off?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo! That old fool sold him, and never divided with me, and the money\u2019s gone.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSold him?\u201d I says, and begun to cry; \u201cwhy, he was my nigger, and that was my money. Where is he?\u2014I want my nigger.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, you can\u2019t get your nigger, that\u2019s all\u2014so dry up your blubbering. Looky here\u2014do you think you\u2019d venture to blow on us? Blamed if I think I\u2019d trust you. Why, if you was to blow on us\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\nHe stopped, but I never see the duke look so ugly out of his eyes before. I went on a-whimpering, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t want to blow on nobody; and I ain\u2019t got no time to blow, nohow. I got to turn out and find my nigger.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe looked kinder bothered, and stood there with his bills fluttering on his arm, thinking, and wrinkling up his forehead. At last he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll tell you something. We got to be here three days. If you\u2019ll promise you won\u2019t blow, and won\u2019t let the nigger blow, I\u2019ll tell you where to find him.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo I promised, and he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cA farmer by the name of Silas Ph\u2014\u201d and then he stopped. You see, he started to tell me the truth; but when he stopped that way, and begun to study and think again, I reckoned he was changing his mind. And so he was. He wouldn\u2019t trust me; he wanted to make sure of having me out of the way the whole three days. So pretty soon he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cThe man that bought him is named Abram Foster\u2014Abram G. Foster\u2014and he lives forty mile back here in the country, on the road to Lafayette.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right,\u201d I says, \u201cI can walk it in three days. And I\u2019ll start this very afternoon.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo you wont, you\u2019ll start now; and don\u2019t you lose any time about it, neither, nor do any gabbling by the way. Just keep a tight tongue in your head and move right along, and then you won\u2019t get into trouble with us, d\u2019ye hear?\u201d\r\n\r\nThat was the order I wanted, and that was the one I played for. I wanted to be left free to work my plans.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo clear out,\u201d he says; \u201cand you can tell Mr. Foster whatever you want to. Maybe you can get him to believe that Jim is your nigger\u2014some idiots don\u2019t require documents\u2014leastways I\u2019ve heard there\u2019s such down South here. And when you tell him the handbill and the reward\u2019s bogus, maybe he\u2019ll believe you when you explain to him what the idea was for getting \u2019em out. Go \u2019long now, and tell him anything you want to; but mind you don\u2019t work your jaw any between here and there.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo I left, and struck for the back country. I didn\u2019t look around, but I kinder felt like he was watching me. But I knowed I could tire him out at that. I went straight out in the country as much as a mile before I stopped; then I doubled back through the woods towards Phelps\u2019. I reckoned I better start in on my plan straight off without fooling around, because I wanted to stop Jim\u2019s mouth till these fellows could get away. I didn\u2019t want no trouble with their kind. I\u2019d seen all I wanted to of them, and wanted to get entirely shut of them.\r\nCHAPTER XXXII.\r\n\r\nWhen I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny; the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody\u2019s dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it\u2019s spirits whispering\u2014spirits that\u2019s been dead ever so many years\u2014and you always think they\u2019re talking about you. As a general thing it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all.\r\n\r\nPhelps\u2019 was one of these little one-horse cotton plantations, and they all look alike. A rail fence round a two-acre yard; a stile made out of logs sawed off and up-ended in steps, like barrels of a different length, to climb over the fence with, and for the women to stand on when they are going to jump on to a horse; some sickly grass-patches in the big yard, but mostly it was bare and smooth, like an old hat with the nap rubbed off; big double log-house for the white folks\u2014hewed logs, with the chinks stopped up with mud or mortar, and these mud-stripes been whitewashed some time or another; round-log kitchen, with a big broad, open but roofed passage joining it to the house; log smoke-house back of the kitchen; three little log nigger-cabins in a row t\u2019other side the smoke-house; one little hut all by itself away down against the back fence, and some outbuildings down a piece the other side; ash-hopper and big kettle to bile soap in by the little hut; bench by the kitchen door, with bucket of water and a gourd; hound asleep there in the sun; more hounds asleep round about; about three shade trees away off in a corner; some currant bushes and gooseberry bushes in one place by the fence; outside of the fence a garden and a watermelon patch; then the cotton fields begins, and after the fields the woods.\r\n\r\nI went around and clumb over the back stile by the ash-hopper, and started for the kitchen. When I got a little ways I heard the dim hum of a spinning-wheel wailing along up and sinking along down again; and then I knowed for certain I wished I was dead\u2014for that is the lonesomest sound in the whole world.\r\n\r\nI went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come; for I\u2019d noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth if I left it alone.\r\n\r\nWhen I got half-way, first one hound and then another got up and went for me, and of course I stopped and faced them, and kept still. And such another powwow as they made! In a quarter of a minute I was a kind of a hub of a wheel, as you may say\u2014spokes made out of dogs\u2014circle of fifteen of them packed together around me, with their necks and noses stretched up towards me, a-barking and howling; and more a-coming; you could see them sailing over fences and around corners from everywheres.\r\n\r\nA nigger woman come tearing out of the kitchen with a rolling-pin in her hand, singing out, \u201cBegone you Tige! you Spot! begone sah!\u201d and she fetched first one and then another of them a clip and sent them howling, and then the rest followed; and the next second half of them come back, wagging their tails around me, and making friends with me. There ain\u2019t no harm in a hound, nohow.\r\n\r\nAnd behind the woman comes a little nigger girl and two little nigger boys without anything on but tow-linen shirts, and they hung on to their mother\u2019s gown, and peeped out from behind her at me, bashful, the way they always do. And here comes the white woman running from the house, about forty-five or fifty year old, bareheaded, and her spinning-stick in her hand; and behind her comes her little white children, acting the same way the little niggers was doing. She was smiling all over so she could hardly stand\u2014and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s you, at last!\u2014ain\u2019t it?\u201d\r\n\r\nI out with a \u201cYes\u2019m\u201d before I thought.\r\n\r\nShe grabbed me and hugged me tight; and then gripped me by both hands and shook and shook; and the tears come in her eyes, and run down over; and she couldn\u2019t seem to hug and shake enough, and kept saying, \u201cYou don\u2019t look as much like your mother as I reckoned you would; but law sakes, I don\u2019t care for that, I\u2019m so glad to see you! Dear, dear, it does seem like I could eat you up! Children, it\u2019s your cousin Tom!\u2014tell him howdy.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut they ducked their heads, and put their fingers in their mouths, and hid behind her. So she run on:\r\n\r\n\u201cLize, hurry up and get him a hot breakfast right away\u2014or did you get your breakfast on the boat?\u201d\r\n\r\nI said I had got it on the boat. So then she started for the house, leading me by the hand, and the children tagging after. When we got there she set me down in a split-bottomed chair, and set herself down on a little low stool in front of me, holding both of my hands, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNow I can have a good look at you; and, laws-a-me, I\u2019ve been hungry for it a many and a many a time, all these long years, and it\u2019s come at last! We been expecting you a couple of days and more. What kep\u2019 you?\u2014boat get aground?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes\u2019m\u2014she\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t say yes\u2019m\u2014say Aunt Sally. Where\u2019d she get aground?\u201d\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t rightly know what to say, because I didn\u2019t know whether the boat would be coming up the river or down. But I go a good deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up\u2014from down towards Orleans. That didn\u2019t help me much, though; for I didn\u2019t know the names of bars down that way. I see I\u2019d got to invent a bar, or forget the name of the one we got aground on\u2014or\u2014Now I struck an idea, and fetched it out:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt warn\u2019t the grounding\u2014that didn\u2019t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood gracious! anybody hurt?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo\u2019m. Killed a nigger.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it\u2019s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. Two years ago last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from Newrleans on the old Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinder-head and crippled a man. And I think he died afterwards. He was a Baptist. Your uncle Silas knowed a family in Baton Rouge that knowed his people very well. Yes, I remember now, he did die. Mortification set in, and they had to amputate him. But it didn\u2019t save him. Yes, it was mortification\u2014that was it. He turned blue all over, and died in the hope of a glorious resurrection. They say he was a sight to look at. Your uncle\u2019s been up to the town every day to fetch you. And he\u2019s gone again, not more\u2019n an hour ago; he\u2019ll be back any minute now. You must a met him on the road, didn\u2019t you?\u2014oldish man, with a\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I didn\u2019t see nobody, Aunt Sally. The boat landed just at daylight, and I left my baggage on the wharf-boat and went looking around the town and out a piece in the country, to put in the time and not get here too soon; and so I come down the back way.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho\u2019d you give the baggage to?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNobody.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, child, it\u2019ll be stole!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot where I hid it I reckon it won\u2019t,\u201d I says.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow\u2019d you get your breakfast so early on the boat?\u201d\r\n\r\nIt was kinder thin ice, but I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cThe captain see me standing around, and told me I better have something to eat before I went ashore; so he took me in the texas to the officers\u2019 lunch, and give me all I wanted.\u201d\r\n\r\nI was getting so uneasy I couldn\u2019t listen good. I had my mind on the children all the time; I wanted to get them out to one side and pump them a little, and find out who I was. But I couldn\u2019t get no show, Mrs. Phelps kept it up and run on so. Pretty soon she made the cold chills streak all down my back, because she says:\r\n\r\n\u201cBut here we\u2019re a-running on this way, and you hain\u2019t told me a word about Sis, nor any of them. Now I\u2019ll rest my works a little, and you start up yourn; just tell me everything\u2014tell me all about \u2019m all every one of \u2019m; and how they are, and what they\u2019re doing, and what they told you to tell me; and every last thing you can think of.\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, I see I was up a stump\u2014and up it good. Providence had stood by me this fur all right, but I was hard and tight aground now. I see it warn\u2019t a bit of use to try to go ahead\u2014I\u2019d got to throw up my hand. So I says to myself, here\u2019s another place where I got to resk the truth. I opened my mouth to begin; but she grabbed me and hustled me in behind the bed, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHere he comes! Stick your head down lower\u2014there, that\u2019ll do; you can\u2019t be seen now. Don\u2019t you let on you\u2019re here. I\u2019ll play a joke on him. Children, don\u2019t you say a word.\u201d\r\n\r\nI see I was in a fix now. But it warn\u2019t no use to worry; there warn\u2019t nothing to do but just hold still, and try and be ready to stand from under when the lightning struck.\r\n\r\nI had just one little glimpse of the old gentleman when he come in; then the bed hid him. Mrs. Phelps she jumps for him, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHas he come?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo,\u201d says her husband.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood-ness gracious!\u201d she says, \u201cwhat in the warld can have become of him?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t imagine,\u201d says the old gentleman; \u201cand I must say it makes me dreadful uneasy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cUneasy!\u201d she says; \u201cI\u2019m ready to go distracted! He must a come; and you\u2019ve missed him along the road. I know it\u2019s so\u2014something tells me so.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Sally, I couldn\u2019t miss him along the road\u2014you know that.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut oh, dear, dear, what will Sis say! He must a come! You must a missed him. He\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, don\u2019t distress me any more\u2019n I\u2019m already distressed. I don\u2019t know what in the world to make of it. I\u2019m at my wit\u2019s end, and I don\u2019t mind acknowledging \u2019t I\u2019m right down scared. But there\u2019s no hope that he\u2019s come; for he couldn\u2019t come and me miss him. Sally, it\u2019s terrible\u2014just terrible\u2014something\u2019s happened to the boat, sure!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Silas! Look yonder!\u2014up the road!\u2014ain\u2019t that somebody coming?\u201d\r\n\r\nHe sprung to the window at the head of the bed, and that give Mrs. Phelps the chance she wanted. She stooped down quick at the foot of the bed and give me a pull, and out I come; and when he turned back from the window there she stood, a-beaming and a-smiling like a house afire, and I standing pretty meek and sweaty alongside. The old gentleman stared, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, who\u2019s that?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho do you reckon \u2019t is?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hain\u2019t no idea. Who is it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s Tom Sawyer!\u201d\r\n\r\nBy jings, I most slumped through the floor! But there warn\u2019t no time to swap knives; the old man grabbed me by the hand and shook, and kept on shaking; and all the time how the woman did dance around and laugh and cry; and then how they both did fire off questions about Sid, and Mary, and the rest of the tribe.\r\n\r\nBut if they was joyful, it warn\u2019t nothing to what I was; for it was like being born again, I was so glad to find out who I was. Well, they froze to me for two hours; and at last, when my chin was so tired it couldn\u2019t hardly go any more, I had told them more about my family\u2014I mean the Sawyer family\u2014than ever happened to any six Sawyer families. And I explained all about how we blowed out a cylinder-head at the mouth of White River, and it took us three days to fix it. Which was all right, and worked first-rate; because they didn\u2019t know but what it would take three days to fix it. If I\u2019d a called it a bolthead it would a done just as well.\r\n\r\nNow I was feeling pretty comfortable all down one side, and pretty uncomfortable all up the other. Being Tom Sawyer was easy and comfortable, and it stayed easy and comfortable till by-and-by I hear a steamboat coughing along down the river. Then I says to myself, s\u2019pose Tom Sawyer comes down on that boat? And s\u2019pose he steps in here any minute, and sings out my name before I can throw him a wink to keep quiet? Well, I couldn\u2019t have it that way; it wouldn\u2019t do at all. I must go up the road and waylay him. So I told the folks I reckoned I would go up to the town and fetch down my baggage. The old gentleman was for going along with me, but I said no, I could drive the horse myself, and I druther he wouldn\u2019t take no trouble about me.\r\nCHAPTER XXXIII.\r\n\r\nSo I started for town in the wagon, and when I was half-way I see a wagon coming, and sure enough it was Tom Sawyer, and I stopped and waited till he come along. I says \u201cHold on!\u201d and it stopped alongside, and his mouth opened up like a trunk, and stayed so; and he swallowed two or three times like a person that\u2019s got a dry throat, and then says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI hain\u2019t ever done you no harm. You know that. So, then, what you want to come back and ha\u2019nt me for?\u201d\r\n\r\nI says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI hain\u2019t come back\u2014I hain\u2019t been gone.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen he heard my voice it righted him up some, but he warn\u2019t quite satisfied yet. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you play nothing on me, because I wouldn\u2019t on you. Honest injun now, you ain\u2019t a ghost?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHonest injun, I ain\u2019t,\u201d I says.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell\u2014I\u2014I\u2014well, that ought to settle it, of course; but I can\u2019t somehow seem to understand it no way. Looky here, warn\u2019t you ever murdered at all?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo. I warn\u2019t ever murdered at all\u2014I played it on them. You come in here and feel of me if you don\u2019t believe me.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo he done it; and it satisfied him; and he was that glad to see me again he didn\u2019t know what to do. And he wanted to know all about it right off, because it was a grand adventure, and mysterious, and so it hit him where he lived. But I said, leave it alone till by-and-by; and told his driver to wait, and we drove off a little piece, and I told him the kind of a fix I was in, and what did he reckon we better do? He said, let him alone a minute, and don\u2019t disturb him. So he thought and thought, and pretty soon he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s all right; I\u2019ve got it. Take my trunk in your wagon, and let on it\u2019s your\u2019n; and you turn back and fool along slow, so as to get to the house about the time you ought to; and I\u2019ll go towards town a piece, and take a fresh start, and get there a quarter or a half an hour after you; and you needn\u2019t let on to know me at first.\u201d\r\n\r\nI says:\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right; but wait a minute. There\u2019s one more thing\u2014a thing that nobody don\u2019t know but me. And that is, there\u2019s a nigger here that I\u2019m a-trying to steal out of slavery, and his name is Jim\u2014old Miss Watson\u2019s Jim.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat! Why, Jim is\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\nHe stopped and went to studying. I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI know what you\u2019ll say. You\u2019ll say it\u2019s dirty, low-down business; but what if it is? I\u2019m low down; and I\u2019m a-going to steal him, and I want you keep mum and not let on. Will you?\u201d\r\n\r\nHis eye lit up, and he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll help you steal him!\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It was the most astonishing speech I ever heard\u2014and I\u2019m bound to say Tom Sawyer fell considerable in my estimation. Only I couldn\u2019t believe it. Tom Sawyer a nigger stealer!\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, shucks!\u201d I says; \u201cyou\u2019re joking.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI ain\u2019t joking, either.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then,\u201d I says, \u201cjoking or no joking, if you hear anything said about a runaway nigger, don\u2019t forget to remember that you don\u2019t know nothing about him, and I don\u2019t know nothing about him.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen we took the trunk and put it in my wagon, and he drove off his way and I drove mine. But of course I forgot all about driving slow on accounts of being glad and full of thinking; so I got home a heap too quick for that length of a trip. The old gentleman was at the door, and he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, this is wonderful! Whoever would a thought it was in that mare to do it? I wish we\u2019d a timed her. And she hain\u2019t sweated a hair\u2014not a hair. It\u2019s wonderful. Why, I wouldn\u2019t take a hundred dollars for that horse now\u2014I wouldn\u2019t, honest; and yet I\u2019d a sold her for fifteen before, and thought \u2019twas all she was worth.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat\u2019s all he said. He was the innocentest, best old soul I ever see. But it warn\u2019t surprising; because he warn\u2019t only just a farmer, he was a preacher, too, and had a little one-horse log church down back of the plantation, which he built it himself at his own expense, for a church and schoolhouse, and never charged nothing for his preaching, and it was worth it, too. There was plenty other farmer-preachers like that, and done the same way, down South.\r\n\r\nIn about half an hour Tom\u2019s wagon drove up to the front stile, and Aunt Sally she see it through the window, because it was only about fifty yards, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, there\u2019s somebody come! I wonder who \u2019tis? Why, I do believe it\u2019s a stranger. Jimmy\u201d (that\u2019s one of the children) \u201crun and tell Lize to put on another plate for dinner.\u201d\r\n\r\nEverybody made a rush for the front door, because, of course, a stranger don\u2019t come every year, and so he lays over the yaller-fever, for interest, when he does come. Tom was over the stile and starting for the house; the wagon was spinning up the road for the village, and we was all bunched in the front door. Tom had his store clothes on, and an audience\u2014and that was always nuts for Tom Sawyer. In them circumstances it warn\u2019t no trouble to him to throw in an amount of style that was suitable. He warn\u2019t a boy to meeky along up that yard like a sheep; no, he come ca\u2019m and important, like the ram. When he got a-front of us he lifts his hat ever so gracious and dainty, like it was the lid of a box that had butterflies asleep in it and he didn\u2019t want to disturb them, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMr. Archibald Nichols, I presume?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, my boy,\u201d says the old gentleman, \u201cI\u2019m sorry to say \u2019t your driver has deceived you; Nichols\u2019s place is down a matter of three mile more. Come in, come in.\u201d\r\n\r\nTom he took a look back over his shoulder, and says, \u201cToo late\u2014he\u2019s out of sight.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, he\u2019s gone, my son, and you must come in and eat your dinner with us; and then we\u2019ll hitch up and take you down to Nichols\u2019s.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, I can\u2019t make you so much trouble; I couldn\u2019t think of it. I\u2019ll walk\u2014I don\u2019t mind the distance.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut we won\u2019t let you walk\u2014it wouldn\u2019t be Southern hospitality to do it. Come right in.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, do,\u201d says Aunt Sally; \u201cit ain\u2019t a bit of trouble to us, not a bit in the world. You must stay. It\u2019s a long, dusty three mile, and we can\u2019t let you walk. And, besides, I\u2019ve already told \u2019em to put on another plate when I see you coming; so you mustn\u2019t disappoint us. Come right in and make yourself at home.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo Tom he thanked them very hearty and handsome, and let himself be persuaded, and come in; and when he was in he said he was a stranger from Hicksville, Ohio, and his name was William Thompson\u2014and he made another bow.\r\n\r\nWell, he run on, and on, and on, making up stuff about Hicksville and everybody in it he could invent, and I getting a little nervious, and wondering how this was going to help me out of my scrape; and at last, still talking along, he reached over and kissed Aunt Sally right on the mouth, and then settled back again in his chair comfortable, and was going on talking; but she jumped up and wiped it off with the back of her hand, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou owdacious puppy!\u201d\r\n\r\nHe looked kind of hurt, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m surprised at you, m\u2019am.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019re s\u2019rp\u2014Why, what do you reckon I am? I\u2019ve a good notion to take and\u2014Say, what do you mean by kissing me?\u201d\r\n\r\nHe looked kind of humble, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t mean nothing, m\u2019am. I didn\u2019t mean no harm. I\u2014I\u2014thought you\u2019d like it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, you born fool!\u201d She took up the spinning stick, and it looked like it was all she could do to keep from giving him a crack with it. \u201cWhat made you think I\u2019d like it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I don\u2019t know. Only, they\u2014they\u2014told me you would.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey told you I would. Whoever told you\u2019s another lunatic. I never heard the beat of it. Who\u2019s they?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, everybody. They all said so, m\u2019am.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt was all she could do to hold in; and her eyes snapped, and her fingers worked like she wanted to scratch him; and she says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWho\u2019s \u2018everybody\u2019? Out with their names, or ther\u2019ll be an idiot short.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe got up and looked distressed, and fumbled his hat, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m sorry, and I warn\u2019t expecting it. They told me to. They all told me to. They all said, kiss her; and said she\u2019d like it. They all said it\u2014every one of them. But I\u2019m sorry, m\u2019am, and I won\u2019t do it no more\u2014I won\u2019t, honest.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou won\u2019t, won\u2019t you? Well, I sh\u2019d reckon you won\u2019t!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo\u2019m, I\u2019m honest about it; I won\u2019t ever do it again\u2014till you ask me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTill I ask you! Well, I never see the beat of it in my born days! I lay you\u2019ll be the Methusalem-numskull of creation before ever I ask you\u2014or the likes of you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d he says, \u201cit does surprise me so. I can\u2019t make it out, somehow. They said you would, and I thought you would. But\u2014\u201d He stopped and looked around slow, like he wished he could run across a friendly eye somewheres, and fetched up on the old gentleman\u2019s, and says, \u201cDidn\u2019t you think she\u2019d like me to kiss her, sir?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, no; I\u2014I\u2014well, no, I b\u2019lieve I didn\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen he looks on around the same way to me, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cTom, didn\u2019t you think Aunt Sally \u2019d open out her arms and say, \u2018Sid Sawyer\u2014\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy land!\u201d she says, breaking in and jumping for him, \u201cyou impudent young rascal, to fool a body so\u2014\u201d and was going to hug him, but he fended her off, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, not till you\u2019ve asked me first.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo she didn\u2019t lose no time, but asked him; and hugged him and kissed him over and over again, and then turned him over to the old man, and he took what was left. And after they got a little quiet again she says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, dear me, I never see such a surprise. We warn\u2019t looking for you at all, but only Tom. Sis never wrote to me about anybody coming but him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s because it warn\u2019t intended for any of us to come but Tom,\u201d he says; \u201cbut I begged and begged, and at the last minute she let me come, too; so, coming down the river, me and Tom thought it would be a first-rate surprise for him to come here to the house first, and for me to by-and-by tag along and drop in, and let on to be a stranger. But it was a mistake, Aunt Sally. This ain\u2019t no healthy place for a stranger to come.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo\u2014not impudent whelps, Sid. You ought to had your jaws boxed; I hain\u2019t been so put out since I don\u2019t know when. But I don\u2019t care, I don\u2019t mind the terms\u2014I\u2019d be willing to stand a thousand such jokes to have you here. Well, to think of that performance! I don\u2019t deny it, I was most putrified with astonishment when you give me that smack.\u201d\r\n\r\nWe had dinner out in that broad open passage betwixt the house and the kitchen; and there was things enough on that table for seven families\u2014and all hot, too; none of your flabby, tough meat that\u2019s laid in a cupboard in a damp cellar all night and tastes like a hunk of old cold cannibal in the morning. Uncle Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and it didn\u2019t cool it a bit, neither, the way I\u2019ve seen them kind of interruptions do lots of times. There was a considerable good deal of talk all the afternoon, and me and Tom was on the lookout all the time; but it warn\u2019t no use, they didn\u2019t happen to say nothing about any runaway nigger, and we was afraid to try to work up to it. But at supper, at night, one of the little boys says:\r\n\r\n\u201cPa, mayn\u2019t Tom and Sid and me go to the show?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo,\u201d says the old man, \u201cI reckon there ain\u2019t going to be any; and you couldn\u2019t go if there was; because the runaway nigger told Burton and me all about that scandalous show, and Burton said he would tell the people; so I reckon they\u2019ve drove the owdacious loafers out of town before this time.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo there it was!\u2014but I couldn\u2019t help it. Tom and me was to sleep in the same room and bed; so, being tired, we bid good-night and went up to bed right after supper, and clumb out of the window and down the lightning-rod, and shoved for the town; for I didn\u2019t believe anybody was going to give the king and the duke a hint, and so if I didn\u2019t hurry up and give them one they\u2019d get into trouble sure.\r\n\r\nOn the road Tom he told me all about how it was reckoned I was murdered, and how pap disappeared pretty soon, and didn\u2019t come back no more, and what a stir there was when Jim run away; and I told Tom all about our Royal Nonesuch rapscallions, and as much of the raft voyage as I had time to; and as we struck into the town and up through the the middle of it\u2014it was as much as half-after eight, then\u2014here comes a raging rush of people with torches, and an awful whooping and yelling, and banging tin pans and blowing horns; and we jumped to one side to let them go by; and as they went by I see they had the king and the duke astraddle of a rail\u2014that is, I knowed it was the king and the duke, though they was all over tar and feathers, and didn\u2019t look like nothing in the world that was human\u2014just looked like a couple of monstrous big soldier-plumes. Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn\u2019t ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.\r\n\r\nWe see we was too late\u2014couldn\u2019t do no good. We asked some stragglers about it, and they said everybody went to the show looking very innocent; and laid low and kept dark till the poor old king was in the middle of his cavortings on the stage; then somebody give a signal, and the house rose up and went for them.\r\n\r\nSo we poked along back home, and I warn\u2019t feeling so brash as I was before, but kind of ornery, and humble, and to blame, somehow\u2014though I hadn\u2019t done nothing. But that\u2019s always the way; it don\u2019t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person\u2019s conscience ain\u2019t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn\u2019t know no more than a person\u2019s conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person\u2019s insides, and yet ain\u2019t no good, nohow. Tom Sawyer he says the same.\r\nCHAPTER XXXIV.\r\n\r\nWe stopped talking, and got to thinking. By-and-by Tom says:\r\n\r\n\u201cLooky here, Huck, what fools we are to not think of it before! I bet I know where Jim is.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo! Where?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIn that hut down by the ash-hopper. Why, looky here. When we was at dinner, didn\u2019t you see a nigger man go in there with some vittles?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat did you think the vittles was for?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFor a dog.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo\u2019d I. Well, it wasn\u2019t for a dog.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause part of it was watermelon.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo it was\u2014I noticed it. Well, it does beat all that I never thought about a dog not eating watermelon. It shows how a body can see and don\u2019t see at the same time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, the nigger unlocked the padlock when he went in, and he locked it again when he came out. He fetched uncle a key about the time we got up from table\u2014same key, I bet. Watermelon shows man, lock shows prisoner; and it ain\u2019t likely there\u2019s two prisoners on such a little plantation, and where the people\u2019s all so kind and good. Jim\u2019s the prisoner. All right\u2014I\u2019m glad we found it out detective fashion; I wouldn\u2019t give shucks for any other way. Now you work your mind, and study out a plan to steal Jim, and I will study out one, too; and we\u2019ll take the one we like the best.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhat a head for just a boy to have! If I had Tom Sawyer\u2019s head I wouldn\u2019t trade it off to be a duke, nor mate of a steamboat, nor clown in a circus, nor nothing I can think of. I went to thinking out a plan, but only just to be doing something; I knowed very well where the right plan was going to come from. Pretty soon Tom says:\r\n\r\n\u201cReady?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d I says.\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right\u2014bring it out.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy plan is this,\u201d I says. \u201cWe can easy find out if it\u2019s Jim in there. Then get up my canoe to-morrow night, and fetch my raft over from the island. Then the first dark night that comes steal the key out of the old man\u2019s britches after he goes to bed, and shove off down the river on the raft with Jim, hiding daytimes and running nights, the way me and Jim used to do before. Wouldn\u2019t that plan work?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWork? Why, cert\u2019nly it would work, like rats a-fighting. But it\u2019s too blame\u2019 simple; there ain\u2019t nothing to it. What\u2019s the good of a plan that ain\u2019t no more trouble than that? It\u2019s as mild as goose-milk. Why, Huck, it wouldn\u2019t make no more talk than breaking into a soap factory.\u201d\r\n\r\nI never said nothing, because I warn\u2019t expecting nothing different; but I knowed mighty well that whenever he got his plan ready it wouldn\u2019t have none of them objections to it.\r\n\r\nAnd it didn\u2019t. He told me what it was, and I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it. I needn\u2019t tell what it was here, because I knowed it wouldn\u2019t stay the way, it was. I knowed he would be changing it around every which way as we went along, and heaving in new bullinesses wherever he got a chance. And that is what he done.\r\n\r\nWell, one thing was dead sure, and that was that Tom Sawyer was in earnest, and was actuly going to help steal that nigger out of slavery. That was the thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy that was respectable and well brung up; and had a character to lose; and folks at home that had characters; and he was bright and not leather-headed; and knowing and not ignorant; and not mean, but kind; and yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling, than to stoop to this business, and make himself a shame, and his family a shame, before everybody. I couldn\u2019t understand it no way at all. It was outrageous, and I knowed I ought to just up and tell him so; and so be his true friend, and let him quit the thing right where he was and save himself. And I did start to tell him; but he shut me up, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you reckon I know what I\u2019m about? Don\u2019t I generly know what I\u2019m about?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDidn\u2019t I say I was going to help steal the nigger?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat\u2019s all he said, and that\u2019s all I said. It warn\u2019t no use to say any more; because when he said he\u2019d do a thing, he always done it. But I couldn\u2019t make out how he was willing to go into this thing; so I just let it go, and never bothered no more about it. If he was bound to have it so, I couldn\u2019t help it.\r\n\r\nWhen we got home the house was all dark and still; so we went on down to the hut by the ash-hopper for to examine it. We went through the yard so as to see what the hounds would do. They knowed us, and didn\u2019t make no more noise than country dogs is always doing when anything comes by in the night. When we got to the cabin we took a look at the front and the two sides; and on the side I warn\u2019t acquainted with\u2014which was the north side\u2014we found a square window-hole, up tolerable high, with just one stout board nailed across it. I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s the ticket. This hole\u2019s big enough for Jim to get through if we wrench off the board.\u201d\r\n\r\nTom says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s as simple as tit-tat-toe, three-in-a-row, and as easy as playing hooky. I should hope we can find a way that\u2019s a little more complicated than that, Huck Finn.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then,\u201d I says, \u201chow\u2019ll it do to saw him out, the way I done before I was murdered that time?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s more like,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s real mysterious, and troublesome, and good,\u201d he says; \u201cbut I bet we can find a way that\u2019s twice as long. There ain\u2019t no hurry; le\u2019s keep on looking around.\u201d\r\n\r\nBetwixt the hut and the fence, on the back side, was a lean-to that joined the hut at the eaves, and was made out of plank. It was as long as the hut, but narrow\u2014only about six foot wide. The door to it was at the south end, and was padlocked. Tom he went to the soap-kettle and searched around, and fetched back the iron thing they lift the lid with; so he took it and prized out one of the staples. The chain fell down, and we opened the door and went in, and shut it, and struck a match, and see the shed was only built against a cabin and hadn\u2019t no connection with it; and there warn\u2019t no floor to the shed, nor nothing in it but some old rusty played-out hoes and spades and picks and a crippled plow. The match went out, and so did we, and shoved in the staple again, and the door was locked as good as ever. Tom was joyful. He says;\r\n\r\n\u201cNow we\u2019re all right. We\u2019ll dig him out. It\u2019ll take about a week!\u201d\r\n\r\nThen we started for the house, and I went in the back door\u2014you only have to pull a buckskin latch-string, they don\u2019t fasten the doors\u2014but that warn\u2019t romantical enough for Tom Sawyer; no way would do him but he must climb up the lightning-rod. But after he got up half way about three times, and missed fire and fell every time, and the last time most busted his brains out, he thought he\u2019d got to give it up; but after he was rested he allowed he would give her one more turn for luck, and this time he made the trip.\r\n\r\nIn the morning we was up at break of day, and down to the nigger cabins to pet the dogs and make friends with the nigger that fed Jim\u2014if it was Jim that was being fed. The niggers was just getting through breakfast and starting for the fields; and Jim\u2019s nigger was piling up a tin pan with bread and meat and things; and whilst the others was leaving, the key come from the house.\r\n\r\nThis nigger had a good-natured, chuckle-headed face, and his wool was all tied up in little bunches with thread. That was to keep witches off. He said the witches was pestering him awful these nights, and making him see all kinds of strange things, and hear all kinds of strange words and noises, and he didn\u2019t believe he was ever witched so long before in his life. He got so worked up, and got to running on so about his troubles, he forgot all about what he\u2019d been a-going to do. So Tom says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the vittles for? Going to feed the dogs?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe nigger kind of smiled around gradually over his face, like when you heave a brickbat in a mud-puddle, and he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Mars Sid, a dog. Cur\u2019us dog, too. Does you want to go en look at \u2019im?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes.\u201d\r\n\r\nI hunched Tom, and whispers:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou going, right here in the daybreak? That warn\u2019t the plan.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, it warn\u2019t; but it\u2019s the plan now.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo, drat him, we went along, but I didn\u2019t like it much. When we got in we couldn\u2019t hardly see anything, it was so dark; but Jim was there, sure enough, and could see us; and he sings out:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Huck! En good lan\u2019! ain\u2019 dat Misto Tom?\u201d\r\n\r\nI just knowed how it would be; I just expected it. I didn\u2019t know nothing to do; and if I had I couldn\u2019t a done it, because that nigger busted in and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, de gracious sakes! do he know you genlmen?\u201d\r\n\r\nWe could see pretty well now. Tom he looked at the nigger, steady and kind of wondering, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDoes who know us?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, dis-yer runaway nigger.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t reckon he does; but what put that into your head?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat put it dar? Didn\u2019 he jis\u2019 dis minute sing out like he knowed you?\u201d\r\n\r\nTom says, in a puzzled-up kind of way:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, that\u2019s mighty curious. Who sung out? When did he sing out? what did he sing out?\u201d And turns to me, perfectly ca\u2019m, and says, \u201cDid you hear anybody sing out?\u201d\r\n\r\nOf course there warn\u2019t nothing to be said but the one thing; so I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNo; I ain\u2019t heard nobody say nothing.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen he turns to Jim, and looks him over like he never see him before, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDid you sing out?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, sah,\u201d says Jim; \u201cI hain\u2019t said nothing, sah.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a word?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, sah, I hain\u2019t said a word.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDid you ever see us before?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, sah; not as I knows on.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo Tom turns to the nigger, which was looking wild and distressed, and says, kind of severe:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you reckon\u2019s the matter with you, anyway? What made you think somebody sung out?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, it\u2019s de dad-blame\u2019 witches, sah, en I wisht I was dead, I do. Dey\u2019s awluz at it, sah, en dey do mos\u2019 kill me, dey sk\u2019yers me so. Please to don\u2019t tell nobody \u2019bout it sah, er ole Mars Silas he\u2019ll scole me; \u2019kase he say dey ain\u2019t no witches. I jis\u2019 wish to goodness he was heah now\u2014den what would he say! I jis\u2019 bet he couldn\u2019 fine no way to git aroun\u2019 it dis time. But it\u2019s awluz jis\u2019 so; people dat\u2019s sot, stays sot; dey won\u2019t look into noth\u2019n\u2019en fine it out f\u2019r deyselves, en when you fine it out en tell um \u2019bout it, dey doan\u2019 b\u2019lieve you.\u201d\r\n\r\nTom give him a dime, and said we wouldn\u2019t tell nobody; and told him to buy some more thread to tie up his wool with; and then looks at Jim, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI wonder if Uncle Silas is going to hang this nigger. If I was to catch a nigger that was ungrateful enough to run away, I wouldn\u2019t give him up, I\u2019d hang him.\u201d And whilst the nigger stepped to the door to look at the dime and bite it to see if it was good, he whispers to Jim and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t ever let on to know us. And if you hear any digging going on nights, it\u2019s us; we\u2019re going to set you free.\u201d\r\n\r\nJim only had time to grab us by the hand and squeeze it; then the nigger come back, and we said we\u2019d come again some time if the nigger wanted us to; and he said he would, more particular if it was dark, because the witches went for him mostly in the dark, and it was good to have folks around then.\r\nCHAPTER XXXV.\r\n\r\nIt would be most an hour yet till breakfast, so we left and struck down into the woods; because Tom said we got to have some light to see how to dig by, and a lantern makes too much, and might get us into trouble; what we must have was a lot of them rotten chunks that\u2019s called fox-fire, and just makes a soft kind of a glow when you lay them in a dark place. We fetched an armful and hid it in the weeds, and set down to rest, and Tom says, kind of dissatisfied:\r\n\r\n\u201cBlame it, this whole thing is just as easy and awkward as it can be. And so it makes it so rotten difficult to get up a difficult plan. There ain\u2019t no watchman to be drugged\u2014now there ought to be a watchman. There ain\u2019t even a dog to give a sleeping-mixture to. And there\u2019s Jim chained by one leg, with a ten-foot chain, to the leg of his bed: why, all you got to do is to lift up the bedstead and slip off the chain. And Uncle Silas he trusts everybody; sends the key to the punkin-headed nigger, and don\u2019t send nobody to watch the nigger. Jim could a got out of that window-hole before this, only there wouldn\u2019t be no use trying to travel with a ten-foot chain on his leg. Why, drat it, Huck, it\u2019s the stupidest arrangement I ever see. You got to invent all the difficulties. Well, we can\u2019t help it; we got to do the best we can with the materials we\u2019ve got. Anyhow, there\u2019s one thing\u2014there\u2019s more honor in getting him out through a lot of difficulties and dangers, where there warn\u2019t one of them furnished to you by the people who it was their duty to furnish them, and you had to contrive them all out of your own head. Now look at just that one thing of the lantern. When you come down to the cold facts, we simply got to let on that a lantern\u2019s resky. Why, we could work with a torchlight procession if we wanted to, I believe. Now, whilst I think of it, we got to hunt up something to make a saw out of the first chance we get.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do we want of a saw?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do we want of it? Hain\u2019t we got to saw the leg of Jim\u2019s bed off, so as to get the chain loose?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, you just said a body could lift up the bedstead and slip the chain off.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, if that ain\u2019t just like you, Huck Finn. You can get up the infant-schooliest ways of going at a thing. Why, hain\u2019t you ever read any books at all?\u2014Baron Trenck, nor Casanova, nor Benvenuto Chelleeny, nor Henri IV., nor none of them heroes? Who ever heard of getting a prisoner loose in such an old-maidy way as that? No; the way all the best authorities does is to saw the bed-leg in two, and leave it just so, and swallow the sawdust, so it can\u2019t be found, and put some dirt and grease around the sawed place so the very keenest seneskal can\u2019t see no sign of it\u2019s being sawed, and thinks the bed-leg is perfectly sound. Then, the night you\u2019re ready, fetch the leg a kick, down she goes; slip off your chain, and there you are. Nothing to do but hitch your rope ladder to the battlements, shin down it, break your leg in the moat\u2014because a rope ladder is nineteen foot too short, you know\u2014and there\u2019s your horses and your trusty vassles, and they scoop you up and fling you across a saddle, and away you go to your native Langudoc, or Navarre, or wherever it is. It\u2019s gaudy, Huck. I wish there was a moat to this cabin. If we get time, the night of the escape, we\u2019ll dig one.\u201d\r\n\r\nI says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do we want of a moat when we\u2019re going to snake him out from under the cabin?\u201d\r\n\r\nBut he never heard me. He had forgot me and everything else. He had his chin in his hand, thinking. Pretty soon he sighs and shakes his head; then sighs again, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, it wouldn\u2019t do\u2014there ain\u2019t necessity enough for it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFor what?\u201d I says.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, to saw Jim\u2019s leg off,\u201d he says.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood land!\u201d I says; \u201cwhy, there ain\u2019t no necessity for it. And what would you want to saw his leg off for, anyway?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, some of the best authorities has done it. They couldn\u2019t get the chain off, so they just cut their hand off and shoved. And a leg would be better still. But we got to let that go. There ain\u2019t necessity enough in this case; and, besides, Jim\u2019s a nigger, and wouldn\u2019t understand the reasons for it, and how it\u2019s the custom in Europe; so we\u2019ll let it go. But there\u2019s one thing\u2014he can have a rope ladder; we can tear up our sheets and make him a rope ladder easy enough. And we can send it to him in a pie; it\u2019s mostly done that way. And I\u2019ve et worse pies.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Tom Sawyer, how you talk,\u201d I says; \u201cJim ain\u2019t got no use for a rope ladder.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe has got use for it. How you talk, you better say; you don\u2019t know nothing about it. He\u2019s got to have a rope ladder; they all do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat in the nation can he do with it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo with it? He can hide it in his bed, can\u2019t he?\u201d That\u2019s what they all do; and he\u2019s got to, too. Huck, you don\u2019t ever seem to want to do anything that\u2019s regular; you want to be starting something fresh all the time. S\u2019pose he don\u2019t do nothing with it? ain\u2019t it there in his bed, for a clew, after he\u2019s gone? and don\u2019t you reckon they\u2019ll want clews? Of course they will. And you wouldn\u2019t leave them any? That would be a pretty howdy-do, wouldn\u2019t it! I never heard of such a thing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d I says, \u201cif it\u2019s in the regulations, and he\u2019s got to have it, all right, let him have it; because I don\u2019t wish to go back on no regulations; but there\u2019s one thing, Tom Sawyer\u2014if we go to tearing up our sheets to make Jim a rope ladder, we\u2019re going to get into trouble with Aunt Sally, just as sure as you\u2019re born. Now, the way I look at it, a hickry-bark ladder don\u2019t cost nothing, and don\u2019t waste nothing, and is just as good to load up a pie with, and hide in a straw tick, as any rag ladder you can start; and as for Jim, he ain\u2019t had no experience, and so he don\u2019t care what kind of a\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, shucks, Huck Finn, if I was as ignorant as you I\u2019d keep still\u2014that\u2019s what I\u2019d do. Who ever heard of a state prisoner escaping by a hickry-bark ladder? Why, it\u2019s perfectly ridiculous.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, all right, Tom, fix it your own way; but if you\u2019ll take my advice, you\u2019ll let me borrow a sheet off of the clothesline.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe said that would do. And that gave him another idea, and he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cBorrow a shirt, too.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do we want of a shirt, Tom?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWant it for Jim to keep a journal on.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJournal your granny\u2014Jim can\u2019t write.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cS\u2019pose he can\u2019t write\u2014he can make marks on the shirt, can\u2019t he, if we make him a pen out of an old pewter spoon or a piece of an old iron barrel-hoop?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Tom, we can pull a feather out of a goose and make him a better one; and quicker, too.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPrisoners don\u2019t have geese running around the donjon-keep to pull pens out of, you muggins. They always make their pens out of the hardest, toughest, troublesomest piece of old brass candlestick or something like that they can get their hands on; and it takes them weeks and weeks and months and months to file it out, too, because they\u2019ve got to do it by rubbing it on the wall. They wouldn\u2019t use a goose-quill if they had it. It ain\u2019t regular.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, what\u2019ll we make him the ink out of?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMany makes it out of iron-rust and tears; but that\u2019s the common sort and women; the best authorities uses their own blood. Jim can do that; and when he wants to send any little common ordinary mysterious message to let the world know where he\u2019s captivated, he can write it on the bottom of a tin plate with a fork and throw it out of the window. The Iron Mask always done that, and it\u2019s a blame\u2019 good way, too.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJim ain\u2019t got no tin plates. They feed him in a pan.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat ain\u2019t nothing; we can get him some.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCan\u2019t nobody read his plates.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat ain\u2019t got anything to do with it, Huck Finn. All he\u2019s got to do is to write on the plate and throw it out. You don\u2019t have to be able to read it. Why, half the time you can\u2019t read anything a prisoner writes on a tin plate, or anywhere else.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, what\u2019s the sense in wasting the plates?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, blame it all, it ain\u2019t the prisoner\u2019s plates.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut it\u2019s somebody\u2019s plates, ain\u2019t it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, spos\u2019n it is? What does the prisoner care whose\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\nHe broke off there, because we heard the breakfast-horn blowing. So we cleared out for the house.\r\n\r\nAlong during the morning I borrowed a sheet and a white shirt off of the clothes-line; and I found an old sack and put them in it, and we went down and got the fox-fire, and put that in too. I called it borrowing, because that was what pap always called it; but Tom said it warn\u2019t borrowing, it was stealing. He said we was representing prisoners; and prisoners don\u2019t care how they get a thing so they get it, and nobody don\u2019t blame them for it, either. It ain\u2019t no crime in a prisoner to steal the thing he needs to get away with, Tom said; it\u2019s his right; and so, as long as we was representing a prisoner, we had a perfect right to steal anything on this place we had the least use for to get ourselves out of prison with. He said if we warn\u2019t prisoners it would be a very different thing, and nobody but a mean, ornery person would steal when he warn\u2019t a prisoner. So we allowed we would steal everything there was that come handy. And yet he made a mighty fuss, one day, after that, when I stole a watermelon out of the nigger-patch and eat it; and he made me go and give the niggers a dime without telling them what it was for. Tom said that what he meant was, we could steal anything we needed. Well, I says, I needed the watermelon. But he said I didn\u2019t need it to get out of prison with; there\u2019s where the difference was. He said if I\u2019d a wanted it to hide a knife in, and smuggle it to Jim to kill the seneskal with, it would a been all right. So I let it go at that, though I couldn\u2019t see no advantage in my representing a prisoner if I got to set down and chaw over a lot of gold-leaf distinctions like that every time I see a chance to hog a watermelon.\r\n\r\nWell, as I was saying, we waited that morning till everybody was settled down to business, and nobody in sight around the yard; then Tom he carried the sack into the lean-to whilst I stood off a piece to keep watch. By-and-by he come out, and we went and set down on the woodpile to talk. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cEverything\u2019s all right now except tools; and that\u2019s easy fixed.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTools?\u201d I says.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTools for what?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, to dig with. We ain\u2019t a-going to gnaw him out, are we?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAin\u2019t them old crippled picks and things in there good enough to dig a nigger out with?\u201d I says.\r\n\r\nHe turns on me, looking pitying enough to make a body cry, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHuck Finn, did you ever hear of a prisoner having picks and shovels, and all the modern conveniences in his wardrobe to dig himself out with? Now I want to ask you\u2014if you got any reasonableness in you at all\u2014what kind of a show would that give him to be a hero? Why, they might as well lend him the key and done with it. Picks and shovels\u2014why, they wouldn\u2019t furnish \u2019em to a king.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then,\u201d I says, \u201cif we don\u2019t want the picks and shovels, what do we want?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA couple of case-knives.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTo dig the foundations out from under that cabin with?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cConfound it, it\u2019s foolish, Tom.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt don\u2019t make no difference how foolish it is, it\u2019s the right way\u2014and it\u2019s the regular way. And there ain\u2019t no other way, that ever I heard of, and I\u2019ve read all the books that gives any information about these things. They always dig out with a case-knife\u2014and not through dirt, mind you; generly it\u2019s through solid rock. And it takes them weeks and weeks and weeks, and for ever and ever. Why, look at one of them prisoners in the bottom dungeon of the Castle Deef, in the harbor of Marseilles, that dug himself out that way; how long was he at it, you reckon?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, guess.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know. A month and a half.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThirty-seven year\u2014and he come out in China. That\u2019s the kind. I wish the bottom of this fortress was solid rock.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJim don\u2019t know nobody in China.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s that got to do with it? Neither did that other fellow. But you\u2019re always a-wandering off on a side issue. Why can\u2019t you stick to the main point?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right\u2014I don\u2019t care where he comes out, so he comes out; and Jim don\u2019t, either, I reckon. But there\u2019s one thing, anyway\u2014Jim\u2019s too old to be dug out with a case-knife. He won\u2019t last.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes he will last, too. You don\u2019t reckon it\u2019s going to take thirty-seven years to dig out through a dirt foundation, do you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow long will it take, Tom?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, we can\u2019t resk being as long as we ought to, because it mayn\u2019t take very long for Uncle Silas to hear from down there by New Orleans. He\u2019ll hear Jim ain\u2019t from there. Then his next move will be to advertise Jim, or something like that. So we can\u2019t resk being as long digging him out as we ought to. By rights I reckon we ought to be a couple of years; but we can\u2019t. Things being so uncertain, what I recommend is this: that we really dig right in, as quick as we can; and after that, we can let on, to ourselves, that we was at it thirty-seven years. Then we can snatch him out and rush him away the first time there\u2019s an alarm. Yes, I reckon that\u2019ll be the best way.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, there\u2019s sense in that,\u201d I says. \u201cLetting on don\u2019t cost nothing; letting on ain\u2019t no trouble; and if it\u2019s any object, I don\u2019t mind letting on we was at it a hundred and fifty year. It wouldn\u2019t strain me none, after I got my hand in. So I\u2019ll mosey along now, and smouch a couple of case-knives.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSmouch three,\u201d he says; \u201cwe want one to make a saw out of.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTom, if it ain\u2019t unregular and irreligious to sejest it,\u201d I says, \u201cthere\u2019s an old rusty saw-blade around yonder sticking under the weather-boarding behind the smoke-house.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe looked kind of weary and discouraged-like, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt ain\u2019t no use to try to learn you nothing, Huck. Run along and smouch the knives\u2014three of them.\u201d So I done it.\r\nCHAPTER XXXVI.\r\n\r\nAs soon as we reckoned everybody was asleep that night we went down the lightning-rod, and shut ourselves up in the lean-to, and got out our pile of fox-fire, and went to work. We cleared everything out of the way, about four or five foot along the middle of the bottom log. Tom said he was right behind Jim\u2019s bed now, and we\u2019d dig in under it, and when we got through there couldn\u2019t nobody in the cabin ever know there was any hole there, because Jim\u2019s counter-pin hung down most to the ground, and you\u2019d have to raise it up and look under to see the hole. So we dug and dug with the case-knives till most midnight; and then we was dog-tired, and our hands was blistered, and yet you couldn\u2019t see we\u2019d done anything hardly. At last I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cThis ain\u2019t no thirty-seven year job; this is a thirty-eight year job, Tom Sawyer.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe never said nothing. But he sighed, and pretty soon he stopped digging, and then for a good little while I knowed that he was thinking. Then he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt ain\u2019t no use, Huck, it ain\u2019t a-going to work. If we was prisoners it would, because then we\u2019d have as many years as we wanted, and no hurry; and we wouldn\u2019t get but a few minutes to dig, every day, while they was changing watches, and so our hands wouldn\u2019t get blistered, and we could keep it up right along, year in and year out, and do it right, and the way it ought to be done. But we can\u2019t fool along; we got to rush; we ain\u2019t got no time to spare. If we was to put in another night this way we\u2019d have to knock off for a week to let our hands get well\u2014couldn\u2019t touch a case-knife with them sooner.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, what we going to do, Tom?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll tell you. It ain\u2019t right, and it ain\u2019t moral, and I wouldn\u2019t like it to get out; but there ain\u2019t only just the one way: we got to dig him out with the picks, and let on it\u2019s case-knives.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow you\u2019re talking!\u201d I says; \u201cyour head gets leveler and leveler all the time, Tom Sawyer,\u201d I says. \u201cPicks is the thing, moral or no moral; and as for me, I don\u2019t care shucks for the morality of it, nohow. When I start in to steal a nigger, or a watermelon, or a Sunday-school book, I ain\u2019t no ways particular how it\u2019s done so it\u2019s done. What I want is my nigger; or what I want is my watermelon; or what I want is my Sunday-school book; and if a pick\u2019s the handiest thing, that\u2019s the thing I\u2019m a-going to dig that nigger or that watermelon or that Sunday-school book out with; and I don\u2019t give a dead rat what the authorities thinks about it nuther.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d he says, \u201cthere\u2019s excuse for picks and letting-on in a case like this; if it warn\u2019t so, I wouldn\u2019t approve of it, nor I wouldn\u2019t stand by and see the rules broke\u2014because right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain\u2019t got no business doing wrong when he ain\u2019t ignorant and knows better. It might answer for you to dig Jim out with a pick, without any letting on, because you don\u2019t know no better; but it wouldn\u2019t for me, because I do know better. Gimme a case-knife.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe had his own by him, but I handed him mine. He flung it down, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cGimme a case-knife.\u201d\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t know just what to do\u2014but then I thought. I scratched around amongst the old tools, and got a pickaxe and give it to him, and he took it and went to work, and never said a word.\r\n\r\nHe was always just that particular. Full of principle.\r\n\r\nSo then I got a shovel, and then we picked and shoveled, turn about, and made the fur fly. We stuck to it about a half an hour, which was as long as we could stand up; but we had a good deal of a hole to show for it. When I got up stairs I looked out at the window and see Tom doing his level best with the lightning-rod, but he couldn\u2019t come it, his hands was so sore. At last he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt ain\u2019t no use, it can\u2019t be done. What you reckon I better do? Can\u2019t you think of no way?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d I says, \u201cbut I reckon it ain\u2019t regular. Come up the stairs, and let on it\u2019s a lightning-rod.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo he done it.\r\n\r\nNext day Tom stole a pewter spoon and a brass candlestick in the house, for to make some pens for Jim out of, and six tallow candles; and I hung around the nigger cabins and laid for a chance, and stole three tin plates. Tom says it wasn\u2019t enough; but I said nobody wouldn\u2019t ever see the plates that Jim throwed out, because they\u2019d fall in the dog-fennel and jimpson weeds under the window-hole\u2014then we could tote them back and he could use them over again. So Tom was satisfied. Then he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, the thing to study out is, how to get the things to Jim.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTake them in through the hole,\u201d I says, \u201cwhen we get it done.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe only just looked scornful, and said something about nobody ever heard of such an idiotic idea, and then he went to studying. By-and-by he said he had ciphered out two or three ways, but there warn\u2019t no need to decide on any of them yet. Said we\u2019d got to post Jim first.\r\n\r\nThat night we went down the lightning-rod a little after ten, and took one of the candles along, and listened under the window-hole, and heard Jim snoring; so we pitched it in, and it didn\u2019t wake him. Then we whirled in with the pick and shovel, and in about two hours and a half the job was done. We crept in under Jim\u2019s bed and into the cabin, and pawed around and found the candle and lit it, and stood over Jim awhile, and found him looking hearty and healthy, and then we woke him up gentle and gradual. He was so glad to see us he most cried; and called us honey, and all the pet names he could think of; and was for having us hunt up a cold-chisel to cut the chain off of his leg with right away, and clearing out without losing any time. But Tom he showed him how unregular it would be, and set down and told him all about our plans, and how we could alter them in a minute any time there was an alarm; and not to be the least afraid, because we would see he got away, sure. So Jim he said it was all right, and we set there and talked over old times awhile, and then Tom asked a lot of questions, and when Jim told him Uncle Silas come in every day or two to pray with him, and Aunt Sally come in to see if he was comfortable and had plenty to eat, and both of them was kind as they could be, Tom says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNow I know how to fix it. We\u2019ll send you some things by them.\u201d\r\n\r\nI said, \u201cDon\u2019t do nothing of the kind; it\u2019s one of the most jackass ideas I ever struck;\u201d but he never paid no attention to me; went right on. It was his way when he\u2019d got his plans set.\r\n\r\nSo he told Jim how we\u2019d have to smuggle in the rope-ladder pie and other large things by Nat, the nigger that fed him, and he must be on the lookout, and not be surprised, and not let Nat see him open them; and we would put small things in uncle\u2019s coat-pockets and he must steal them out; and we would tie things to aunt\u2019s apron-strings or put them in her apron-pocket, if we got a chance; and told him what they would be and what they was for. And told him how to keep a journal on the shirt with his blood, and all that. He told him everything. Jim he couldn\u2019t see no sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was white folks and knowed better than him; so he was satisfied, and said he would do it all just as Tom said.\r\n\r\nJim had plenty corn-cob pipes and tobacco; so we had a right down good sociable time; then we crawled out through the hole, and so home to bed, with hands that looked like they\u2019d been chawed. Tom was in high spirits. He said it was the best fun he ever had in his life, and the most intellectural; and said if he only could see his way to it we would keep it up all the rest of our lives and leave Jim to our children to get out; for he believed Jim would come to like it better and better the more he got used to it. He said that in that way it could be strung out to as much as eighty year, and would be the best time on record. And he said it would make us all celebrated that had a hand in it.\r\n\r\nIn the morning we went out to the woodpile and chopped up the brass candlestick into handy sizes, and Tom put them and the pewter spoon in his pocket. Then we went to the nigger cabins, and while I got Nat\u2019s notice off, Tom shoved a piece of candlestick into the middle of a corn-pone that was in Jim\u2019s pan, and we went along with Nat to see how it would work, and it just worked noble; when Jim bit into it it most mashed all his teeth out; and there warn\u2019t ever anything could a worked better. Tom said so himself. Jim he never let on but what it was only just a piece of rock or something like that that\u2019s always getting into bread, you know; but after that he never bit into nothing but what he jabbed his fork into it in three or four places first.\r\n\r\nAnd whilst we was a-standing there in the dimmish light, here comes a couple of the hounds bulging in from under Jim\u2019s bed; and they kept on piling in till there was eleven of them, and there warn\u2019t hardly room in there to get your breath. By jings, we forgot to fasten that lean-to door! The nigger Nat he only just hollered \u201cWitches\u201d once, and keeled over on to the floor amongst the dogs, and begun to groan like he was dying. Tom jerked the door open and flung out a slab of Jim\u2019s meat, and the dogs went for it, and in two seconds he was out himself and back again and shut the door, and I knowed he\u2019d fixed the other door too. Then he went to work on the nigger, coaxing him and petting him, and asking him if he\u2019d been imagining he saw something again. He raised up, and blinked his eyes around, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMars Sid, you\u2019ll say I\u2019s a fool, but if I didn\u2019t b\u2019lieve I see most a million dogs, er devils, er some\u2019n, I wisht I may die right heah in dese tracks. I did, mos\u2019 sholy. Mars Sid, I felt um\u2014I felt um, sah; dey was all over me. Dad fetch it, I jis\u2019 wisht I could git my han\u2019s on one er dem witches jis\u2019 wunst\u2014on\u2019y jis\u2019 wunst\u2014it\u2019s all I\u2019d ast. But mos\u2019ly I wisht dey\u2019d lemme \u2019lone, I does.\u201d\r\n\r\nTom says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I tell you what I think. What makes them come here just at this runaway nigger\u2019s breakfast-time? It\u2019s because they\u2019re hungry; that\u2019s the reason. You make them a witch pie; that\u2019s the thing for you to do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut my lan\u2019, Mars Sid, how\u2019s I gwyne to make \u2019m a witch pie? I doan\u2019 know how to make it. I hain\u2019t ever hearn er sich a thing b\u2019fo\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, I\u2019ll have to make it myself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWill you do it, honey?\u2014will you? I\u2019ll wusshup de groun\u2019 und\u2019 yo\u2019 foot, I will!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right, I\u2019ll do it, seeing it\u2019s you, and you\u2019ve been good to us and showed us the runaway nigger. But you got to be mighty careful. When we come around, you turn your back; and then whatever we\u2019ve put in the pan, don\u2019t you let on you see it at all. And don\u2019t you look when Jim unloads the pan\u2014something might happen, I don\u2019t know what. And above all, don\u2019t you handle the witch-things.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHannel \u2019m, Mars Sid? What is you a-talkin\u2019 \u2019bout? I wouldn\u2019 lay de weight er my finger on um, not f\u2019r ten hund\u2019d thous\u2019n billion dollars, I wouldn\u2019t.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER XXXVII.\r\n\r\nThat was all fixed. So then we went away and went to the rubbage-pile in the back yard, where they keep the old boots, and rags, and pieces of bottles, and wore-out tin things, and all such truck, and scratched around and found an old tin washpan, and stopped up the holes as well as we could, to bake the pie in, and took it down cellar and stole it full of flour and started for breakfast, and found a couple of shingle-nails that Tom said would be handy for a prisoner to scrabble his name and sorrows on the dungeon walls with, and dropped one of them in Aunt Sally\u2019s apron-pocket which was hanging on a chair, and t\u2019other we stuck in the band of Uncle Silas\u2019s hat, which was on the bureau, because we heard the children say their pa and ma was going to the runaway nigger\u2019s house this morning, and then went to breakfast, and Tom dropped the pewter spoon in Uncle Silas\u2019s coat-pocket, and Aunt Sally wasn\u2019t come yet, so we had to wait a little while.\r\n\r\nAnd when she come she was hot and red and cross, and couldn\u2019t hardly wait for the blessing; and then she went to sluicing out coffee with one hand and cracking the handiest child\u2019s head with her thimble with the other, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve hunted high and I\u2019ve hunted low, and it does beat all what has become of your other shirt.\u201d\r\n\r\nMy heart fell down amongst my lungs and livers and things, and a hard piece of corn-crust started down my throat after it and got met on the road with a cough, and was shot across the table, and took one of the children in the eye and curled him up like a fishing-worm, and let a cry out of him the size of a warwhoop, and Tom he turned kinder blue around the gills, and it all amounted to a considerable state of things for about a quarter of a minute or as much as that, and I would a sold out for half price if there was a bidder. But after that we was all right again\u2014it was the sudden surprise of it that knocked us so kind of cold. Uncle Silas he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s most uncommon curious, I can\u2019t understand it. I know perfectly well I took it off, because\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause you hain\u2019t got but one on. Just listen at the man! I know you took it off, and know it by a better way than your wool-gethering memory, too, because it was on the clo\u2019s-line yesterday\u2014I see it there myself. But it\u2019s gone, that\u2019s the long and the short of it, and you\u2019ll just have to change to a red flann\u2019l one till I can get time to make a new one. And it\u2019ll be the third I\u2019ve made in two years. It just keeps a body on the jump to keep you in shirts; and whatever you do manage to do with \u2019m all is more\u2019n I can make out. A body \u2019d think you would learn to take some sort of care of \u2019em at your time of life.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI know it, Sally, and I do try all I can. But it oughtn\u2019t to be altogether my fault, because, you know, I don\u2019t see them nor have nothing to do with them except when they\u2019re on me; and I don\u2019t believe I\u2019ve ever lost one of them off of me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it ain\u2019t your fault if you haven\u2019t, Silas; you\u2019d a done it if you could, I reckon. And the shirt ain\u2019t all that\u2019s gone, nuther. Ther\u2019s a spoon gone; and that ain\u2019t all. There was ten, and now ther\u2019s only nine. The calf got the shirt, I reckon, but the calf never took the spoon, that\u2019s certain.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, what else is gone, Sally?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTher\u2019s six candles gone\u2014that\u2019s what. The rats could a got the candles, and I reckon they did; I wonder they don\u2019t walk off with the whole place, the way you\u2019re always going to stop their holes and don\u2019t do it; and if they warn\u2019t fools they\u2019d sleep in your hair, Silas\u2014you\u2019d never find it out; but you can\u2019t lay the spoon on the rats, and that I know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, Sally, I\u2019m in fault, and I acknowledge it; I\u2019ve been remiss; but I won\u2019t let to-morrow go by without stopping up them holes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, I wouldn\u2019t hurry; next year\u2019ll do. Matilda Angelina Araminta Phelps!\u201d\r\n\r\nWhack comes the thimble, and the child snatches her claws out of the sugar-bowl without fooling around any. Just then the nigger woman steps on to the passage, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cMissus, dey\u2019s a sheet gone.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA sheet gone! Well, for the land\u2019s sake!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll stop up them holes to-day,\u201d says Uncle Silas, looking sorrowful.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, do shet up!\u2014s\u2019pose the rats took the sheet? Where\u2019s it gone, Lize?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cClah to goodness I hain\u2019t no notion, Miss\u2019 Sally. She wuz on de clo\u2019sline yistiddy, but she done gone: she ain\u2019 dah no mo\u2019 now.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI reckon the world is coming to an end. I never see the beat of it in all my born days. A shirt, and a sheet, and a spoon, and six can\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMissus,\u201d comes a young yaller wench, \u201cdey\u2019s a brass cannelstick miss\u2019n.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCler out from here, you hussy, er I\u2019ll take a skillet to ye!\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, she was just a-biling. I begun to lay for a chance; I reckoned I would sneak out and go for the woods till the weather moderated. She kept a-raging right along, running her insurrection all by herself, and everybody else mighty meek and quiet; and at last Uncle Silas, looking kind of foolish, fishes up that spoon out of his pocket. She stopped, with her mouth open and her hands up; and as for me, I wished I was in Jeruslem or somewheres. But not long, because she says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s just as I expected. So you had it in your pocket all the time; and like as not you\u2019ve got the other things there, too. How\u2019d it get there?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI reely don\u2019t know, Sally,\u201d he says, kind of apologizing, \u201cor you know I would tell. I was a-studying over my text in Acts Seventeen before breakfast, and I reckon I put it in there, not noticing, meaning to put my Testament in, and it must be so, because my Testament ain\u2019t in; but I\u2019ll go and see; and if the Testament is where I had it, I\u2019ll know I didn\u2019t put it in, and that will show that I laid the Testament down and took up the spoon, and\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, for the land\u2019s sake! Give a body a rest! Go \u2019long now, the whole kit and biling of ye; and don\u2019t come nigh me again till I\u2019ve got back my peace of mind.\u201d\r\n\r\nI\u2019d a heard her if she\u2019d a said it to herself, let alone speaking it out; and I\u2019d a got up and obeyed her if I\u2019d a been dead. As we was passing through the setting-room the old man he took up his hat, and the shingle-nail fell out on the floor, and he just merely picked it up and laid it on the mantel-shelf, and never said nothing, and went out. Tom see him do it, and remembered about the spoon, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it ain\u2019t no use to send things by him no more, he ain\u2019t reliable.\u201d Then he says: \u201cBut he done us a good turn with the spoon, anyway, without knowing it, and so we\u2019ll go and do him one without him knowing it\u2014stop up his rat-holes.\u201d\r\n\r\nThere was a noble good lot of them down cellar, and it took us a whole hour, but we done the job tight and good and shipshape. Then we heard steps on the stairs, and blowed out our light and hid; and here comes the old man, with a candle in one hand and a bundle of stuff in t\u2019other, looking as absent-minded as year before last. He went a mooning around, first to one rat-hole and then another, till he\u2019d been to them all. Then he stood about five minutes, picking tallow-drip off of his candle and thinking. Then he turns off slow and dreamy towards the stairs, saying:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, for the life of me I can\u2019t remember when I done it. I could show her now that I warn\u2019t to blame on account of the rats. But never mind\u2014let it go. I reckon it wouldn\u2019t do no good.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd so he went on a-mumbling up stairs, and then we left. He was a mighty nice old man. And always is.\r\n\r\nTom was a good deal bothered about what to do for a spoon, but he said we\u2019d got to have it; so he took a think. When he had ciphered it out he told me how we was to do; then we went and waited around the spoon-basket till we see Aunt Sally coming, and then Tom went to counting the spoons and laying them out to one side, and I slid one of them up my sleeve, and Tom says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Aunt Sally, there ain\u2019t but nine spoons yet.\u201d\r\n\r\nShe says:\r\n\r\n\u201cGo \u2019long to your play, and don\u2019t bother me. I know better, I counted \u2019m myself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I\u2019ve counted them twice, Aunty, and I can\u2019t make but nine.\u201d\r\n\r\nShe looked out of all patience, but of course she come to count\u2014anybody would.\r\n\r\n\u201cI declare to gracious ther\u2019 ain\u2019t but nine!\u201d she says. \u201cWhy, what in the world\u2014plague take the things, I\u2019ll count \u2019m again.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo I slipped back the one I had, and when she got done counting, she says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHang the troublesome rubbage, ther\u2019s ten now!\u201d and she looked huffy and bothered both. But Tom says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Aunty, I don\u2019t think there\u2019s ten.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou numskull, didn\u2019t you see me count \u2019m?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI know, but\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I\u2019ll count \u2019m again.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo I smouched one, and they come out nine, same as the other time. Well, she was in a tearing way\u2014just a-trembling all over, she was so mad. But she counted and counted till she got that addled she\u2019d start to count in the basket for a spoon sometimes; and so, three times they come out right, and three times they come out wrong. Then she grabbed up the basket and slammed it across the house and knocked the cat galley-west; and she said cle\u2019r out and let her have some peace, and if we come bothering around her again betwixt that and dinner she\u2019d skin us. So we had the odd spoon, and dropped it in her apron-pocket whilst she was a-giving us our sailing orders, and Jim got it all right, along with her shingle nail, before noon. We was very well satisfied with this business, and Tom allowed it was worth twice the trouble it took, because he said now she couldn\u2019t ever count them spoons twice alike again to save her life; and wouldn\u2019t believe she\u2019d counted them right if she did; and said that after she\u2019d about counted her head off for the next three days he judged she\u2019d give it up and offer to kill anybody that wanted her to ever count them any more.\r\n\r\nSo we put the sheet back on the line that night, and stole one out of her closet; and kept on putting it back and stealing it again for a couple of days till she didn\u2019t know how many sheets she had any more, and she didn\u2019t care, and warn\u2019t a-going to bullyrag the rest of her soul out about it, and wouldn\u2019t count them again not to save her life; she druther die first.\r\n\r\nSo we was all right now, as to the shirt and the sheet and the spoon and the candles, by the help of the calf and the rats and the mixed-up counting; and as to the candlestick, it warn\u2019t no consequence, it would blow over by-and-by.\r\n\r\nBut that pie was a job; we had no end of trouble with that pie. We fixed it up away down in the woods, and cooked it there; and we got it done at last, and very satisfactory, too; but not all in one day; and we had to use up three wash-pans full of flour before we got through, and we got burnt pretty much all over, in places, and eyes put out with the smoke; because, you see, we didn\u2019t want nothing but a crust, and we couldn\u2019t prop it up right, and she would always cave in. But of course we thought of the right way at last\u2014which was to cook the ladder, too, in the pie. So then we laid in with Jim the second night, and tore up the sheet all in little strings and twisted them together, and long before daylight we had a lovely rope that you could a hung a person with. We let on it took nine months to make it.\r\n\r\nAnd in the forenoon we took it down to the woods, but it wouldn\u2019t go into the pie. Being made of a whole sheet, that way, there was rope enough for forty pies if we\u2019d a wanted them, and plenty left over for soup, or sausage, or anything you choose. We could a had a whole dinner.\r\n\r\nBut we didn\u2019t need it. All we needed was just enough for the pie, and so we throwed the rest away. We didn\u2019t cook none of the pies in the wash-pan\u2014afraid the solder would melt; but Uncle Silas he had a noble brass warming-pan which he thought considerable of, because it belonged to one of his ancesters with a long wooden handle that come over from England with William the Conqueror in the Mayflower or one of them early ships and was hid away up garret with a lot of other old pots and things that was valuable, not on account of being any account, because they warn\u2019t, but on account of them being relicts, you know, and we snaked her out, private, and took her down there, but she failed on the first pies, because we didn\u2019t know how, but she come up smiling on the last one. We took and lined her with dough, and set her in the coals, and loaded her up with rag rope, and put on a dough roof, and shut down the lid, and put hot embers on top, and stood off five foot, with the long handle, cool and comfortable, and in fifteen minutes she turned out a pie that was a satisfaction to look at. But the person that et it would want to fetch a couple of kags of toothpicks along, for if that rope ladder wouldn\u2019t cramp him down to business I don\u2019t know nothing what I\u2019m talking about, and lay him in enough stomach-ache to last him till next time, too.\r\n\r\nNat didn\u2019t look when we put the witch pie in Jim\u2019s pan; and we put the three tin plates in the bottom of the pan under the vittles; and so Jim got everything all right, and as soon as he was by himself he busted into the pie and hid the rope ladder inside of his straw tick, and scratched some marks on a tin plate and throwed it out of the window-hole.\r\nCHAPTER XXXVIII.\r\n\r\nMaking them pens was a distressid tough job, and so was the saw; and Jim allowed the inscription was going to be the toughest of all. That\u2019s the one which the prisoner has to scrabble on the wall. But he had to have it; Tom said he\u2019d got to; there warn\u2019t no case of a state prisoner not scrabbling his inscription to leave behind, and his coat of arms.\r\n\r\n\u201cLook at Lady Jane Grey,\u201d he says; \u201clook at Gilford Dudley; look at old Northumberland! Why, Huck, s\u2019pose it is considerble trouble?\u2014what you going to do?\u2014how you going to get around it? Jim\u2019s got to do his inscription and coat of arms. They all do.\u201d\r\n\r\nJim says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Mars Tom, I hain\u2019t got no coat o\u2019 arm; I hain\u2019t got nuffn but dish yer ole shirt, en you knows I got to keep de journal on dat.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, you don\u2019t understand, Jim; a coat of arms is very different.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d I says, \u201cJim\u2019s right, anyway, when he says he ain\u2019t got no coat of arms, because he hain\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI reckon I knowed that,\u201d Tom says, \u201cbut you bet he\u2019ll have one before he goes out of this\u2014because he\u2019s going out right, and there ain\u2019t going to be no flaws in his record.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo whilst me and Jim filed away at the pens on a brickbat apiece, Jim a-making his\u2019n out of the brass and I making mine out of the spoon, Tom set to work to think out the coat of arms. By-and-by he said he\u2019d struck so many good ones he didn\u2019t hardly know which to take, but there was one which he reckoned he\u2019d decide on. He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cOn the scutcheon we\u2019ll have a bend or in the dexter base, a saltire murrey in the fess, with a dog, couchant, for common charge, and under his foot a chain embattled, for slavery, with a chevron vert in a chief engrailed, and three invected lines on a field azure, with the nombril points rampant on a dancette indented; crest, a runaway nigger, sable, with his bundle over his shoulder on a bar sinister; and a couple of gules for supporters, which is you and me; motto, Maggiore fretta, minore atto. Got it out of a book\u2014means the more haste, the less speed.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGeewhillikins,\u201d I says, \u201cbut what does the rest of it mean?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe ain\u2019t got no time to bother over that,\u201d he says; \u201cwe got to dig in like all git-out.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, anyway,\u201d I says, \u201cwhat\u2019s some of it? What\u2019s a fess?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA fess\u2014a fess is\u2014you don\u2019t need to know what a fess is. I\u2019ll show him how to make it when he gets to it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShucks, Tom,\u201d I says, \u201cI think you might tell a person. What\u2019s a bar sinister?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, I don\u2019t know. But he\u2019s got to have it. All the nobility does.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat was just his way. If it didn\u2019t suit him to explain a thing to you, he wouldn\u2019t do it. You might pump at him a week, it wouldn\u2019t make no difference.\r\n\r\nHe\u2019d got all that coat of arms business fixed, so now he started in to finish up the rest of that part of the work, which was to plan out a mournful inscription\u2014said Jim got to have one, like they all done. He made up a lot, and wrote them out on a paper, and read them off, so:\r\n\r\n1. Here a captive heart busted.\r\n\r\n2. Here a poor prisoner, forsook by the world and friends, fretted out his sorrowful life.\r\n\r\n3. Here a lonely heart broke, and a worn spirit went to its rest, after thirty-seven years of solitary captivity.\r\n\r\n4. Here, homeless and friendless, after thirty-seven years of bitter captivity, perished a noble stranger, natural son of Louis XIV.\r\n\r\nTom\u2019s voice trembled whilst he was reading them, and he most broke down. When he got done he couldn\u2019t no way make up his mind which one for Jim to scrabble on to the wall, they was all so good; but at last he allowed he would let him scrabble them all on. Jim said it would take him a year to scrabble such a lot of truck on to the logs with a nail, and he didn\u2019t know how to make letters, besides; but Tom said he would block them out for him, and then he wouldn\u2019t have nothing to do but just follow the lines. Then pretty soon he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cCome to think, the logs ain\u2019t a-going to do; they don\u2019t have log walls in a dungeon: we got to dig the inscriptions into a rock. We\u2019ll fetch a rock.\u201d\r\n\r\nJim said the rock was worse than the logs; he said it would take him such a pison long time to dig them into a rock he wouldn\u2019t ever get out. But Tom said he would let me help him do it. Then he took a look to see how me and Jim was getting along with the pens. It was most pesky tedious hard work and slow, and didn\u2019t give my hands no show to get well of the sores, and we didn\u2019t seem to make no headway, hardly; so Tom says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI know how to fix it. We got to have a rock for the coat of arms and mournful inscriptions, and we can kill two birds with that same rock. There\u2019s a gaudy big grindstone down at the mill, and we\u2019ll smouch it, and carve the things on it, and file out the pens and the saw on it, too.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt warn\u2019t no slouch of an idea; and it warn\u2019t no slouch of a grindstone nuther; but we allowed we\u2019d tackle it. It warn\u2019t quite midnight yet, so we cleared out for the mill, leaving Jim at work. We smouched the grindstone, and set out to roll her home, but it was a most nation tough job. Sometimes, do what we could, we couldn\u2019t keep her from falling over, and she come mighty near mashing us every time. Tom said she was going to get one of us, sure, before we got through. We got her half way; and then we was plumb played out, and most drownded with sweat. We see it warn\u2019t no use; we got to go and fetch Jim. So he raised up his bed and slid the chain off of the bed-leg, and wrapt it round and round his neck, and we crawled out through our hole and down there, and Jim and me laid into that grindstone and walked her along like nothing; and Tom superintended. He could out-superintend any boy I ever see. He knowed how to do everything.\r\n\r\nOur hole was pretty big, but it warn\u2019t big enough to get the grindstone through; but Jim he took the pick and soon made it big enough. Then Tom marked out them things on it with the nail, and set Jim to work on them, with the nail for a chisel and an iron bolt from the rubbage in the lean-to for a hammer, and told him to work till the rest of his candle quit on him, and then he could go to bed, and hide the grindstone under his straw tick and sleep on it. Then we helped him fix his chain back on the bed-leg, and was ready for bed ourselves. But Tom thought of something, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou got any spiders in here, Jim?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, sah, thanks to goodness I hain\u2019t, Mars Tom.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right, we\u2019ll get you some.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut bless you, honey, I doan\u2019 want none. I\u2019s afeard un um. I jis\u2019 \u2019s soon have rattlesnakes aroun\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\nTom thought a minute or two, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a good idea. And I reckon it\u2019s been done. It must a been done; it stands to reason. Yes, it\u2019s a prime good idea. Where could you keep it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cKeep what, Mars Tom?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, a rattlesnake.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDe goodness gracious alive, Mars Tom! Why, if dey was a rattlesnake to come in heah I\u2019d take en bust right out thoo dat log wall, I would, wid my head.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Jim, you wouldn\u2019t be afraid of it after a little. You could tame it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTame it!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes\u2014easy enough. Every animal is grateful for kindness and petting, and they wouldn\u2019t think of hurting a person that pets them. Any book will tell you that. You try\u2014that\u2019s all I ask; just try for two or three days. Why, you can get him so, in a little while, that he\u2019ll love you; and sleep with you; and won\u2019t stay away from you a minute; and will let you wrap him round your neck and put his head in your mouth.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease, Mars Tom\u2014doan\u2019 talk so! I can\u2019t stan\u2019 it! He\u2019d let me shove his head in my mouf\u2014fer a favor, hain\u2019t it? I lay he\u2019d wait a pow\u2019ful long time \u2019fo\u2019 I ast him. En mo\u2019 en dat, I doan\u2019 want him to sleep wid me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJim, don\u2019t act so foolish. A prisoner\u2019s got to have some kind of a dumb pet, and if a rattlesnake hain\u2019t ever been tried, why, there\u2019s more glory to be gained in your being the first to ever try it than any other way you could ever think of to save your life.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Mars Tom, I doan\u2019 want no sich glory. Snake take \u2019n bite Jim\u2019s chin off, den whah is de glory? No, sah, I doan\u2019 want no sich doin\u2019s.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBlame it, can\u2019t you try? I only want you to try\u2014you needn\u2019t keep it up if it don\u2019t work.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut de trouble all done ef de snake bite me while I\u2019s a tryin\u2019 him. Mars Tom, I\u2019s willin\u2019 to tackle mos\u2019 anything \u2019at ain\u2019t onreasonable, but ef you en Huck fetches a rattlesnake in heah for me to tame, I\u2019s gwyne to leave, dat\u2019s shore.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, let it go, let it go, if you\u2019re so bull-headed about it. We can get you some garter-snakes, and you can tie some buttons on their tails, and let on they\u2019re rattlesnakes, and I reckon that\u2019ll have to do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI k\u2019n stan\u2019 dem, Mars Tom, but blame\u2019 \u2019f I couldn\u2019 get along widout um, I tell you dat. I never knowed b\u2019fo\u2019 \u2019t was so much bother and trouble to be a prisoner.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it always is when it\u2019s done right. You got any rats around here?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, sah, I hain\u2019t seed none.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, we\u2019ll get you some rats.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Mars Tom, I doan\u2019 want no rats. Dey\u2019s de dadblamedest creturs to \u2019sturb a body, en rustle roun\u2019 over \u2019im, en bite his feet, when he\u2019s tryin\u2019 to sleep, I ever see. No, sah, gimme g\u2019yarter-snakes, \u2019f I\u2019s got to have \u2019m, but doan\u2019 gimme no rats; I hain\u2019 got no use f\u2019r um, skasely.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut, Jim, you got to have \u2019em\u2014they all do. So don\u2019t make no more fuss about it. Prisoners ain\u2019t ever without rats. There ain\u2019t no instance of it. And they train them, and pet them, and learn them tricks, and they get to be as sociable as flies. But you got to play music to them. You got anything to play music on?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI ain\u2019 got nuffn but a coase comb en a piece o\u2019 paper, en a juice-harp; but I reck\u2019n dey wouldn\u2019 take no stock in a juice-harp.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes they would. They don\u2019t care what kind of music \u2019tis. A jews-harp\u2019s plenty good enough for a rat. All animals like music\u2014in a prison they dote on it. Specially, painful music; and you can\u2019t get no other kind out of a jews-harp. It always interests them; they come out to see what\u2019s the matter with you. Yes, you\u2019re all right; you\u2019re fixed very well. You want to set on your bed nights before you go to sleep, and early in the mornings, and play your jews-harp; play \u2018The Last Link is Broken\u2019\u2014that\u2019s the thing that\u2019ll scoop a rat quicker \u2019n anything else; and when you\u2019ve played about two minutes you\u2019ll see all the rats, and the snakes, and spiders, and things begin to feel worried about you, and come. And they\u2019ll just fairly swarm over you, and have a noble good time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, dey will, I reck\u2019n, Mars Tom, but what kine er time is Jim havin\u2019? Blest if I kin see de pint. But I\u2019ll do it ef I got to. I reck\u2019n I better keep de animals satisfied, en not have no trouble in de house.\u201d\r\n\r\nTom waited to think it over, and see if there wasn\u2019t nothing else; and pretty soon he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, there\u2019s one thing I forgot. Could you raise a flower here, do you reckon?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI doan know but maybe I could, Mars Tom; but it\u2019s tolable dark in heah, en I ain\u2019 got no use f\u2019r no flower, nohow, en she\u2019d be a pow\u2019ful sight o\u2019 trouble.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, you try it, anyway. Some other prisoners has done it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOne er dem big cat-tail-lookin\u2019 mullen-stalks would grow in heah, Mars Tom, I reck\u2019n, but she wouldn\u2019t be wuth half de trouble she\u2019d coss.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you believe it. We\u2019ll fetch you a little one and you plant it in the corner over there, and raise it. And don\u2019t call it mullen, call it Pitchiola\u2014that\u2019s its right name when it\u2019s in a prison. And you want to water it with your tears.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, I got plenty spring water, Mars Tom.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t want spring water; you want to water it with your tears. It\u2019s the way they always do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Mars Tom, I lay I kin raise one er dem mullen-stalks twyste wid spring water whiles another man\u2019s a start\u2019n one wid tears.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat ain\u2019t the idea. You got to do it with tears.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShe\u2019ll die on my han\u2019s, Mars Tom, she sholy will; kase I doan\u2019 skasely ever cry.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo Tom was stumped. But he studied it over, and then said Jim would have to worry along the best he could with an onion. He promised he would go to the nigger cabins and drop one, private, in Jim\u2019s coffee-pot, in the morning. Jim said he would \u201cjis\u2019 \u2019s soon have tobacker in his coffee;\u201d and found so much fault with it, and with the work and bother of raising the mullen, and jews-harping the rats, and petting and flattering up the snakes and spiders and things, on top of all the other work he had to do on pens, and inscriptions, and journals, and things, which made it more trouble and worry and responsibility to be a prisoner than anything he ever undertook, that Tom most lost all patience with him; and said he was just loadened down with more gaudier chances than a prisoner ever had in the world to make a name for himself, and yet he didn\u2019t know enough to appreciate them, and they was just about wasted on him. So Jim he was sorry, and said he wouldn\u2019t behave so no more, and then me and Tom shoved for bed.\r\nCHAPTER XXXIX.\r\n\r\nIn the morning we went up to the village and bought a wire rat-trap and fetched it down, and unstopped the best rat-hole, and in about an hour we had fifteen of the bulliest kind of ones; and then we took it and put it in a safe place under Aunt Sally\u2019s bed. But while we was gone for spiders little Thomas Franklin Benjamin Jefferson Elexander Phelps found it there, and opened the door of it to see if the rats would come out, and they did; and Aunt Sally she come in, and when we got back she was a-standing on top of the bed raising Cain, and the rats was doing what they could to keep off the dull times for her. So she took and dusted us both with the hickry, and we was as much as two hours catching another fifteen or sixteen, drat that meddlesome cub, and they warn\u2019t the likeliest, nuther, because the first haul was the pick of the flock. I never see a likelier lot of rats than what that first haul was.\r\n\r\nWe got a splendid stock of sorted spiders, and bugs, and frogs, and caterpillars, and one thing or another; and we like to got a hornet\u2019s nest, but we didn\u2019t. The family was at home. We didn\u2019t give it right up, but stayed with them as long as we could; because we allowed we\u2019d tire them out or they\u2019d got to tire us out, and they done it. Then we got allycumpain and rubbed on the places, and was pretty near all right again, but couldn\u2019t set down convenient. And so we went for the snakes, and grabbed a couple of dozen garters and house-snakes, and put them in a bag, and put it in our room, and by that time it was supper-time, and a rattling good honest day\u2019s work: and hungry?\u2014oh, no, I reckon not! And there warn\u2019t a blessed snake up there when we went back\u2014we didn\u2019t half tie the sack, and they worked out somehow, and left. But it didn\u2019t matter much, because they was still on the premises somewheres. So we judged we could get some of them again. No, there warn\u2019t no real scarcity of snakes about the house for a considerable spell. You\u2019d see them dripping from the rafters and places every now and then; and they generly landed in your plate, or down the back of your neck, and most of the time where you didn\u2019t want them. Well, they was handsome and striped, and there warn\u2019t no harm in a million of them; but that never made no difference to Aunt Sally; she despised snakes, be the breed what they might, and she couldn\u2019t stand them no way you could fix it; and every time one of them flopped down on her, it didn\u2019t make no difference what she was doing, she would just lay that work down and light out. I never see such a woman. And you could hear her whoop to Jericho. You couldn\u2019t get her to take a-holt of one of them with the tongs. And if she turned over and found one in bed she would scramble out and lift a howl that you would think the house was afire. She disturbed the old man so that he said he could most wish there hadn\u2019t ever been no snakes created. Why, after every last snake had been gone clear out of the house for as much as a week Aunt Sally warn\u2019t over it yet; she warn\u2019t near over it; when she was setting thinking about something you could touch her on the back of her neck with a feather and she would jump right out of her stockings. It was very curious. But Tom said all women was just so. He said they was made that way for some reason or other.\r\n\r\nWe got a licking every time one of our snakes come in her way, and she allowed these lickings warn\u2019t nothing to what she would do if we ever loaded up the place again with them. I didn\u2019t mind the lickings, because they didn\u2019t amount to nothing; but I minded the trouble we had to lay in another lot. But we got them laid in, and all the other things; and you never see a cabin as blithesome as Jim\u2019s was when they\u2019d all swarm out for music and go for him. Jim didn\u2019t like the spiders, and the spiders didn\u2019t like Jim; and so they\u2019d lay for him, and make it mighty warm for him. And he said that between the rats and the snakes and the grindstone there warn\u2019t no room in bed for him, skasely; and when there was, a body couldn\u2019t sleep, it was so lively, and it was always lively, he said, because they never all slept at one time, but took turn about, so when the snakes was asleep the rats was on deck, and when the rats turned in the snakes come on watch, so he always had one gang under him, in his way, and t\u2019other gang having a circus over him, and if he got up to hunt a new place the spiders would take a chance at him as he crossed over. He said if he ever got out this time he wouldn\u2019t ever be a prisoner again, not for a salary.\r\n\r\nWell, by the end of three weeks everything was in pretty good shape. The shirt was sent in early, in a pie, and every time a rat bit Jim he would get up and write a little in his journal whilst the ink was fresh; the pens was made, the inscriptions and so on was all carved on the grindstone; the bed-leg was sawed in two, and we had et up the sawdust, and it give us a most amazing stomach-ache. We reckoned we was all going to die, but didn\u2019t. It was the most undigestible sawdust I ever see; and Tom said the same.\r\n\r\nBut as I was saying, we\u2019d got all the work done now, at last; and we was all pretty much fagged out, too, but mainly Jim. The old man had wrote a couple of times to the plantation below Orleans to come and get their runaway nigger, but hadn\u2019t got no answer, because there warn\u2019t no such plantation; so he allowed he would advertise Jim in the St. Louis and New Orleans papers; and when he mentioned the St. Louis ones it give me the cold shivers, and I see we hadn\u2019t no time to lose. So Tom said, now for the nonnamous letters.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s them?\u201d I says.\r\n\r\n\u201cWarnings to the people that something is up. Sometimes it\u2019s done one way, sometimes another. But there\u2019s always somebody spying around that gives notice to the governor of the castle. When Louis XVI. was going to light out of the Tooleries, a servant-girl done it. It\u2019s a very good way, and so is the nonnamous letters. We\u2019ll use them both. And it\u2019s usual for the prisoner\u2019s mother to change clothes with him, and she stays in, and he slides out in her clothes. We\u2019ll do that, too.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut looky here, Tom, what do we want to warn anybody for that something\u2019s up? Let them find it out for themselves\u2014it\u2019s their lookout.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I know; but you can\u2019t depend on them. It\u2019s the way they\u2019ve acted from the very start\u2014left us to do everything. They\u2019re so confiding and mullet-headed they don\u2019t take notice of nothing at all. So if we don\u2019t give them notice there won\u2019t be nobody nor nothing to interfere with us, and so after all our hard work and trouble this escape \u2019ll go off perfectly flat; won\u2019t amount to nothing\u2014won\u2019t be nothing to it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, as for me, Tom, that\u2019s the way I\u2019d like.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShucks!\u201d he says, and looked disgusted. So I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I ain\u2019t going to make no complaint. Any way that suits you suits me. What you going to do about the servant-girl?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ll be her. You slide in, in the middle of the night, and hook that yaller girl\u2019s frock.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Tom, that\u2019ll make trouble next morning; because, of course, she prob\u2019bly hain\u2019t got any but that one.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI know; but you don\u2019t want it but fifteen minutes, to carry the nonnamous letter and shove it under the front door.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right, then, I\u2019ll do it; but I could carry it just as handy in my own togs.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou wouldn\u2019t look like a servant-girl then, would you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, but there won\u2019t be nobody to see what I look like, anyway.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat ain\u2019t got nothing to do with it. The thing for us to do is just to do our duty, and not worry about whether anybody sees us do it or not. Hain\u2019t you got no principle at all?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right, I ain\u2019t saying nothing; I\u2019m the servant-girl. Who\u2019s Jim\u2019s mother?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m his mother. I\u2019ll hook a gown from Aunt Sally.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, you\u2019ll have to stay in the cabin when me and Jim leaves.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot much. I\u2019ll stuff Jim\u2019s clothes full of straw and lay it on his bed to represent his mother in disguise, and Jim \u2019ll take the nigger woman\u2019s gown off of me and wear it, and we\u2019ll all evade together. When a prisoner of style escapes it\u2019s called an evasion. It\u2019s always called so when a king escapes, f\u2019rinstance. And the same with a king\u2019s son; it don\u2019t make no difference whether he\u2019s a natural one or an unnatural one.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo Tom he wrote the nonnamous letter, and I smouched the yaller wench\u2019s frock that night, and put it on, and shoved it under the front door, the way Tom told me to. It said:\r\n\r\nBeware. Trouble is brewing. Keep a sharp lookout. UNKNOWN FRIEND.\r\n\r\nNext night we stuck a picture, which Tom drawed in blood, of a skull and crossbones on the front door; and next night another one of a coffin on the back door. I never see a family in such a sweat. They couldn\u2019t a been worse scared if the place had a been full of ghosts laying for them behind everything and under the beds and shivering through the air. If a door banged, Aunt Sally she jumped and said \u201couch!\u201d if anything fell, she jumped and said \u201couch!\u201d if you happened to touch her, when she warn\u2019t noticing, she done the same; she couldn\u2019t face noway and be satisfied, because she allowed there was something behind her every time\u2014so she was always a-whirling around sudden, and saying \u201couch,\u201d and before she\u2019d got two-thirds around she\u2019d whirl back again, and say it again; and she was afraid to go to bed, but she dasn\u2019t set up. So the thing was working very well, Tom said; he said he never see a thing work more satisfactory. He said it showed it was done right.\r\n\r\nSo he said, now for the grand bulge! So the very next morning at the streak of dawn we got another letter ready, and was wondering what we better do with it, because we heard them say at supper they was going to have a nigger on watch at both doors all night. Tom he went down the lightning-rod to spy around; and the nigger at the back door was asleep, and he stuck it in the back of his neck and come back. This letter said:\r\n\r\nDon\u2019t betray me, I wish to be your friend. There is a desprate gang of cutthroats from over in the Indian Territory going to steal your runaway nigger to-night, and they have been trying to scare you so as you will stay in the house and not bother them. I am one of the gang, but have got religgion and wish to quit it and lead an honest life again, and will betray the helish design. They will sneak down from northards, along the fence, at midnight exact, with a false key, and go in the nigger\u2019s cabin to get him. I am to be off a piece and blow a tin horn if I see any danger; but stead of that I will BA like a sheep soon as they get in and not blow at all; then whilst they are getting his chains loose, you slip there and lock them in, and can kill them at your leasure. Don\u2019t do anything but just the way I am telling you, if you do they will suspicion something and raise whoop-jamboreehoo. I do not wish any reward but to know I have done the right thing.\r\n\r\nUNKNOWN FRIEND\r\nCHAPTER XL.\r\n\r\nWe was feeling pretty good after breakfast, and took my canoe and went over the river a-fishing, with a lunch, and had a good time, and took a look at the raft and found her all right, and got home late to supper, and found them in such a sweat and worry they didn\u2019t know which end they was standing on, and made us go right off to bed the minute we was done supper, and wouldn\u2019t tell us what the trouble was, and never let on a word about the new letter, but didn\u2019t need to, because we knowed as much about it as anybody did, and as soon as we was half up stairs and her back was turned we slid for the cellar cupboard and loaded up a good lunch and took it up to our room and went to bed, and got up about half-past eleven, and Tom put on Aunt Sally\u2019s dress that he stole and was going to start with the lunch, but says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere\u2019s the butter?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI laid out a hunk of it,\u201d I says, \u201con a piece of a corn-pone.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, you left it laid out, then\u2014it ain\u2019t here.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe can get along without it,\u201d I says.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe can get along with it, too,\u201d he says; \u201cjust you slide down cellar and fetch it. And then mosey right down the lightning-rod and come along. I\u2019ll go and stuff the straw into Jim\u2019s clothes to represent his mother in disguise, and be ready to ba like a sheep and shove soon as you get there.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo out he went, and down cellar went I. The hunk of butter, big as a person\u2019s fist, was where I had left it, so I took up the slab of corn-pone with it on, and blowed out my light, and started up stairs very stealthy, and got up to the main floor all right, but here comes Aunt Sally with a candle, and I clapped the truck in my hat, and clapped my hat on my head, and the next second she see me; and she says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou been down cellar?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes\u2019m.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat you been doing down there?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNoth\u2019n.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNoth\u2019n!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo\u2019m.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, what possessed you to go down there this time of night?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know \u2019m.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t know? Don\u2019t answer me that way. Tom, I want to know what you been doing down there.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hain\u2019t been doing a single thing, Aunt Sally, I hope to gracious if I have.\u201d\r\n\r\nI reckoned she\u2019d let me go now, and as a generl thing she would; but I s\u2019pose there was so many strange things going on she was just in a sweat about every little thing that warn\u2019t yard-stick straight; so she says, very decided:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou just march into that setting-room and stay there till I come. You been up to something you no business to, and I lay I\u2019ll find out what it is before I\u2019m done with you.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo she went away as I opened the door and walked into the setting-room. My, but there was a crowd there! Fifteen farmers, and every one of them had a gun. I was most powerful sick, and slunk to a chair and set down. They was setting around, some of them talking a little, in a low voice, and all of them fidgety and uneasy, but trying to look like they warn\u2019t; but I knowed they was, because they was always taking off their hats, and putting them on, and scratching their heads, and changing their seats, and fumbling with their buttons. I warn\u2019t easy myself, but I didn\u2019t take my hat off, all the same.\r\n\r\nI did wish Aunt Sally would come, and get done with me, and lick me, if she wanted to, and let me get away and tell Tom how we\u2019d overdone this thing, and what a thundering hornet\u2019s-nest we\u2019d got ourselves into, so we could stop fooling around straight off, and clear out with Jim before these rips got out of patience and come for us.\r\n\r\nAt last she come and begun to ask me questions, but I couldn\u2019t answer them straight, I didn\u2019t know which end of me was up; because these men was in such a fidget now that some was wanting to start right now and lay for them desperadoes, and saying it warn\u2019t but a few minutes to midnight; and others was trying to get them to hold on and wait for the sheep-signal; and here was Aunty pegging away at the questions, and me a-shaking all over and ready to sink down in my tracks I was that scared; and the place getting hotter and hotter, and the butter beginning to melt and run down my neck and behind my ears; and pretty soon, when one of them says, \u201cI\u2019m for going and getting in the cabin first and right now, and catching them when they come,\u201d I most dropped; and a streak of butter come a-trickling down my forehead, and Aunt Sally she see it, and turns white as a sheet, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cFor the land\u2019s sake, what is the matter with the child? He\u2019s got the brain-fever as shore as you\u2019re born, and they\u2019re oozing out!\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd everybody runs to see, and she snatches off my hat, and out comes the bread and what was left of the butter, and she grabbed me, and hugged me, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, what a turn you did give me! and how glad and grateful I am it ain\u2019t no worse; for luck\u2019s against us, and it never rains but it pours, and when I see that truck I thought we\u2019d lost you, for I knowed by the color and all it was just like your brains would be if\u2014Dear, dear, whyd\u2019nt you tell me that was what you\u2019d been down there for, I wouldn\u2019t a cared. Now cler out to bed, and don\u2019t lemme see no more of you till morning!\u201d\r\n\r\nI was up stairs in a second, and down the lightning-rod in another one, and shinning through the dark for the lean-to. I couldn\u2019t hardly get my words out, I was so anxious; but I told Tom as quick as I could we must jump for it now, and not a minute to lose\u2014the house full of men, yonder, with guns!\r\n\r\nHis eyes just blazed; and he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNo!\u2014is that so? Ain\u2019t it bully! Why, Huck, if it was to do over again, I bet I could fetch two hundred! If we could put it off till\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHurry! hurry!\u201d I says. \u201cWhere\u2019s Jim?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cRight at your elbow; if you reach out your arm you can touch him. He\u2019s dressed, and everything\u2019s ready. Now we\u2019ll slide out and give the sheep-signal.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut then we heard the tramp of men coming to the door, and heard them begin to fumble with the pad-lock, and heard a man say:\r\n\r\n\u201cI told you we\u2019d be too soon; they haven\u2019t come\u2014the door is locked. Here, I\u2019ll lock some of you into the cabin, and you lay for \u2019em in the dark and kill \u2019em when they come; and the rest scatter around a piece, and listen if you can hear \u2019em coming.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo in they come, but couldn\u2019t see us in the dark, and most trod on us whilst we was hustling to get under the bed. But we got under all right, and out through the hole, swift but soft\u2014Jim first, me next, and Tom last, which was according to Tom\u2019s orders. Now we was in the lean-to, and heard trampings close by outside. So we crept to the door, and Tom stopped us there and put his eye to the crack, but couldn\u2019t make out nothing, it was so dark; and whispered and said he would listen for the steps to get further, and when he nudged us Jim must glide out first, and him last. So he set his ear to the crack and listened, and listened, and listened, and the steps a-scraping around out there all the time; and at last he nudged us, and we slid out, and stooped down, not breathing, and not making the least noise, and slipped stealthy towards the fence in Injun file, and got to it all right, and me and Jim over it; but Tom\u2019s britches catched fast on a splinter on the top rail, and then he hear the steps coming, so he had to pull loose, which snapped the splinter and made a noise; and as he dropped in our tracks and started somebody sings out:\r\n\r\n\u201cWho\u2019s that? Answer, or I\u2019ll shoot!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut we didn\u2019t answer; we just unfurled our heels and shoved. Then there was a rush, and a bang, bang, bang! and the bullets fairly whizzed around us! We heard them sing out:\r\n\r\n\u201cHere they are! They\u2019ve broke for the river! After \u2019em, boys, and turn loose the dogs!\u201d\r\n\r\nSo here they come, full tilt. We could hear them because they wore boots and yelled, but we didn\u2019t wear no boots and didn\u2019t yell. We was in the path to the mill; and when they got pretty close on to us we dodged into the bush and let them go by, and then dropped in behind them. They\u2019d had all the dogs shut up, so they wouldn\u2019t scare off the robbers; but by this time somebody had let them loose, and here they come, making powwow enough for a million; but they was our dogs; so we stopped in our tracks till they catched up; and when they see it warn\u2019t nobody but us, and no excitement to offer them, they only just said howdy, and tore right ahead towards the shouting and clattering; and then we up-steam again, and whizzed along after them till we was nearly to the mill, and then struck up through the bush to where my canoe was tied, and hopped in and pulled for dear life towards the middle of the river, but didn\u2019t make no more noise than we was obleeged to. Then we struck out, easy and comfortable, for the island where my raft was; and we could hear them yelling and barking at each other all up and down the bank, till we was so far away the sounds got dim and died out. And when we stepped onto the raft I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, old Jim, you\u2019re a free man again, and I bet you won\u2019t ever be a slave no more.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cEn a mighty good job it wuz, too, Huck. It \u2019uz planned beautiful, en it \u2019uz done beautiful; en dey ain\u2019t nobody kin git up a plan dat\u2019s mo\u2019 mixed-up en splendid den what dat one wuz.\u201d\r\n\r\nWe was all glad as we could be, but Tom was the gladdest of all because he had a bullet in the calf of his leg.\r\n\r\nWhen me and Jim heard that we didn\u2019t feel so brash as what we did before. It was hurting him considerable, and bleeding; so we laid him in the wigwam and tore up one of the duke\u2019s shirts for to bandage him, but he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cGimme the rags; I can do it myself. Don\u2019t stop now; don\u2019t fool around here, and the evasion booming along so handsome; man the sweeps, and set her loose! Boys, we done it elegant!\u2014\u2019deed we did. I wish we\u2019d a had the handling of Louis XVI., there wouldn\u2019t a been no \u2018Son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven!\u2019 wrote down in his biography; no, sir, we\u2019d a whooped him over the border\u2014that\u2019s what we\u2019d a done with him\u2014and done it just as slick as nothing at all, too. Man the sweeps\u2014man the sweeps!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut me and Jim was consulting\u2014and thinking. And after we\u2019d thought a minute, I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cSay it, Jim.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, den, dis is de way it look to me, Huck. Ef it wuz him dat \u2019uz bein\u2019 sot free, en one er de boys wuz to git shot, would he say, \u2018Go on en save me, nemmine \u2019bout a doctor f\u2019r to save dis one?\u2019 Is dat like Mars Tom Sawyer? Would he say dat? You bet he wouldn\u2019t! Well, den, is Jim gywne to say it? No, sah\u2014I doan\u2019 budge a step out\u2019n dis place \u2019dout a doctor; not if it\u2019s forty year!\u201d\r\n\r\nI knowed he was white inside, and I reckoned he\u2019d say what he did say\u2014so it was all right now, and I told Tom I was a-going for a doctor. He raised considerable row about it, but me and Jim stuck to it and wouldn\u2019t budge; so he was for crawling out and setting the raft loose himself; but we wouldn\u2019t let him. Then he give us a piece of his mind, but it didn\u2019t do no good.\r\n\r\nSo when he sees me getting the canoe ready, he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, if you\u2019re bound to go, I\u2019ll tell you the way to do when you get to the village. Shut the door and blindfold the doctor tight and fast, and make him swear to be silent as the grave, and put a purse full of gold in his hand, and then take and lead him all around the back alleys and everywheres in the dark, and then fetch him here in the canoe, in a roundabout way amongst the islands, and search him and take his chalk away from him, and don\u2019t give it back to him till you get him back to the village, or else he will chalk this raft so he can find it again. It\u2019s the way they all do.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo I said I would, and left, and Jim was to hide in the woods when he see the doctor coming till he was gone again.\r\nCHAPTER XLI.\r\n\r\nThe doctor was an old man; a very nice, kind-looking old man when I got him up. I told him me and my brother was over on Spanish Island hunting yesterday afternoon, and camped on a piece of a raft we found, and about midnight he must a kicked his gun in his dreams, for it went off and shot him in the leg, and we wanted him to go over there and fix it and not say nothing about it, nor let anybody know, because we wanted to come home this evening and surprise the folks.\r\n\r\n\u201cWho is your folks?\u201d he says.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Phelpses, down yonder.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh,\u201d he says. And after a minute, he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHow\u2019d you say he got shot?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe had a dream,\u201d I says, \u201cand it shot him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSingular dream,\u201d he says.\r\n\r\nSo he lit up his lantern, and got his saddle-bags, and we started. But when he sees the canoe he didn\u2019t like the look of her\u2014said she was big enough for one, but didn\u2019t look pretty safe for two. I says:\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, you needn\u2019t be afeard, sir, she carried the three of us easy enough.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat three?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, me and Sid, and\u2014and\u2014and the guns; that\u2019s what I mean.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh,\u201d he says.\r\n\r\nBut he put his foot on the gunnel and rocked her, and shook his head, and said he reckoned he\u2019d look around for a bigger one. But they was all locked and chained; so he took my canoe, and said for me to wait till he come back, or I could hunt around further, or maybe I better go down home and get them ready for the surprise if I wanted to. But I said I didn\u2019t; so I told him just how to find the raft, and then he started.\r\n\r\nI struck an idea pretty soon. I says to myself, spos\u2019n he can\u2019t fix that leg just in three shakes of a sheep\u2019s tail, as the saying is? spos\u2019n it takes him three or four days? What are we going to do?\u2014lay around there till he lets the cat out of the bag? No, sir; I know what I\u2019ll do. I\u2019ll wait, and when he comes back if he says he\u2019s got to go any more I\u2019ll get down there, too, if I swim; and we\u2019ll take and tie him, and keep him, and shove out down the river; and when Tom\u2019s done with him we\u2019ll give him what it\u2019s worth, or all we got, and then let him get ashore.\r\n\r\nSo then I crept into a lumber-pile to get some sleep; and next time I waked up the sun was away up over my head! I shot out and went for the doctor\u2019s house, but they told me he\u2019d gone away in the night some time or other, and warn\u2019t back yet. Well, thinks I, that looks powerful bad for Tom, and I\u2019ll dig out for the island right off. So away I shoved, and turned the corner, and nearly rammed my head into Uncle Silas\u2019s stomach! He says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Tom! Where you been all this time, you rascal?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hain\u2019t been nowheres,\u201d I says, \u201conly just hunting for the runaway nigger\u2014me and Sid.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, where ever did you go?\u201d he says. \u201cYour aunt\u2019s been mighty uneasy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShe needn\u2019t,\u201d I says, \u201cbecause we was all right. We followed the men and the dogs, but they outrun us, and we lost them; but we thought we heard them on the water, so we got a canoe and took out after them and crossed over, but couldn\u2019t find nothing of them; so we cruised along up-shore till we got kind of tired and beat out; and tied up the canoe and went to sleep, and never waked up till about an hour ago; then we paddled over here to hear the news, and Sid\u2019s at the post-office to see what he can hear, and I\u2019m a-branching out to get something to eat for us, and then we\u2019re going home.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo then we went to the post-office to get \u201cSid\u201d; but just as I suspicioned, he warn\u2019t there; so the old man he got a letter out of the office, and we waited a while longer, but Sid didn\u2019t come; so the old man said, come along, let Sid foot it home, or canoe it, when he got done fooling around\u2014but we would ride. I couldn\u2019t get him to let me stay and wait for Sid; and he said there warn\u2019t no use in it, and I must come along, and let Aunt Sally see we was all right.\r\n\r\nWhen we got home Aunt Sally was that glad to see me she laughed and cried both, and hugged me, and give me one of them lickings of hern that don\u2019t amount to shucks, and said she\u2019d serve Sid the same when he come.\r\n\r\nAnd the place was plum full of farmers and farmers\u2019 wives, to dinner; and such another clack a body never heard. Old Mrs. Hotchkiss was the worst; her tongue was a-going all the time. She says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, Sister Phelps, I\u2019ve ransacked that-air cabin over, an\u2019 I b\u2019lieve the nigger was crazy. I says to Sister Damrell\u2014didn\u2019t I, Sister Damrell?\u2014s\u2019I, he\u2019s crazy, s\u2019I\u2014them\u2019s the very words I said. You all hearn me: he\u2019s crazy, s\u2019I; everything shows it, s\u2019I. Look at that-air grindstone, s\u2019I; want to tell me\u2019t any cretur \u2019t\u2019s in his right mind \u2019s a goin\u2019 to scrabble all them crazy things onto a grindstone, s\u2019I? Here sich \u2019n\u2019 sich a person busted his heart; \u2019n\u2019 here so \u2019n\u2019 so pegged along for thirty-seven year, \u2019n\u2019 all that\u2014natcherl son o\u2019 Louis somebody, \u2019n\u2019 sich everlast\u2019n rubbage. He\u2019s plumb crazy, s\u2019I; it\u2019s what I says in the fust place, it\u2019s what I says in the middle, \u2019n\u2019 it\u2019s what I says last \u2019n\u2019 all the time\u2014the nigger\u2019s crazy\u2014crazy \u2019s Nebokoodneezer, s\u2019I.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAn\u2019 look at that-air ladder made out\u2019n rags, Sister Hotchkiss,\u201d says old Mrs. Damrell; \u201cwhat in the name o\u2019 goodness could he ever want of\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe very words I was a-sayin\u2019 no longer ago th\u2019n this minute to Sister Utterback, \u2019n\u2019 she\u2019ll tell you so herself. Sh-she, look at that-air rag ladder, sh-she; \u2019n\u2019 s\u2019I, yes, look at it, s\u2019I\u2014what could he a-wanted of it, s\u2019I. Sh-she, Sister Hotchkiss, sh-she\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut how in the nation\u2019d they ever git that grindstone in there, anyway? \u2019n\u2019 who dug that-air hole? \u2019n\u2019 who\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy very words, Brer Penrod! I was a-sayin\u2019\u2014pass that-air sasser o\u2019 m\u2019lasses, won\u2019t ye?\u2014I was a-sayin\u2019 to Sister Dunlap, jist this minute, how did they git that grindstone in there, s\u2019I. Without help, mind you\u2014\u2019thout help! Thar\u2019s wher \u2019tis. Don\u2019t tell me, s\u2019I; there wuz help, s\u2019I; \u2019n\u2019 ther\u2019 wuz a plenty help, too, s\u2019I; ther\u2019s ben a dozen a-helpin\u2019 that nigger, \u2019n\u2019 I lay I\u2019d skin every last nigger on this place but I\u2019d find out who done it, s\u2019I; \u2019n\u2019 moreover, s\u2019I\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA dozen says you!\u2014forty couldn\u2019t a done every thing that\u2019s been done. Look at them case-knife saws and things, how tedious they\u2019ve been made; look at that bed-leg sawed off with \u2019m, a week\u2019s work for six men; look at that nigger made out\u2019n straw on the bed; and look at\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou may well say it, Brer Hightower! It\u2019s jist as I was a-sayin\u2019 to Brer Phelps, his own self. S\u2019e, what do you think of it, Sister Hotchkiss, s\u2019e? Think o\u2019 what, Brer Phelps, s\u2019I? Think o\u2019 that bed-leg sawed off that a way, s\u2019e? think of it, s\u2019I? I lay it never sawed itself off, s\u2019I\u2014somebody sawed it, s\u2019I; that\u2019s my opinion, take it or leave it, it mayn\u2019t be no \u2019count, s\u2019I, but sich as \u2019t is, it\u2019s my opinion, s\u2019I, \u2019n\u2019 if any body k\u2019n start a better one, s\u2019I, let him do it, s\u2019I, that\u2019s all. I says to Sister Dunlap, s\u2019I\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, dog my cats, they must a ben a house-full o\u2019 niggers in there every night for four weeks to a done all that work, Sister Phelps. Look at that shirt\u2014every last inch of it kivered over with secret African writ\u2019n done with blood! Must a ben a raft uv \u2019m at it right along, all the time, amost. Why, I\u2019d give two dollars to have it read to me; \u2019n\u2019 as for the niggers that wrote it, I \u2019low I\u2019d take \u2019n\u2019 lash \u2019m t\u2019ll\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPeople to help him, Brother Marples! Well, I reckon you\u2019d think so if you\u2019d a been in this house for a while back. Why, they\u2019ve stole everything they could lay their hands on\u2014and we a-watching all the time, mind you. They stole that shirt right off o\u2019 the line! and as for that sheet they made the rag ladder out of, ther\u2019 ain\u2019t no telling how many times they didn\u2019t steal that; and flour, and candles, and candlesticks, and spoons, and the old warming-pan, and most a thousand things that I disremember now, and my new calico dress; and me and Silas and my Sid and Tom on the constant watch day and night, as I was a-telling you, and not a one of us could catch hide nor hair nor sight nor sound of them; and here at the last minute, lo and behold you, they slides right in under our noses and fools us, and not only fools us but the Injun Territory robbers too, and actuly gets away with that nigger safe and sound, and that with sixteen men and twenty-two dogs right on their very heels at that very time! I tell you, it just bangs anything I ever heard of. Why, sperits couldn\u2019t a done better and been no smarter. And I reckon they must a been sperits\u2014because, you know our dogs, and ther\u2019 ain\u2019t no better; well, them dogs never even got on the track of \u2019m once! You explain that to me if you can!\u2014any of you!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it does beat\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLaws alive, I never\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo help me, I wouldn\u2019t a be\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHouse-thieves as well as\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGoodnessgracioussakes, I\u2019d a ben afeard to live in sich a\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2019Fraid to live!\u2014why, I was that scared I dasn\u2019t hardly go to bed, or get up, or lay down, or set down, Sister Ridgeway. Why, they\u2019d steal the very\u2014why, goodness sakes, you can guess what kind of a fluster I was in by the time midnight come last night. I hope to gracious if I warn\u2019t afraid they\u2019d steal some o\u2019 the family! I was just to that pass I didn\u2019t have no reasoning faculties no more. It looks foolish enough now, in the daytime; but I says to myself, there\u2019s my two poor boys asleep, \u2019way up stairs in that lonesome room, and I declare to goodness I was that uneasy \u2019t I crep\u2019 up there and locked \u2019em in! I did. And anybody would. Because, you know, when you get scared that way, and it keeps running on, and getting worse and worse all the time, and your wits gets to addling, and you get to doing all sorts o\u2019 wild things, and by-and-by you think to yourself, spos\u2019n I was a boy, and was away up there, and the door ain\u2019t locked, and you\u2014\u201d She stopped, looking kind of wondering, and then she turned her head around slow, and when her eye lit on me\u2014I got up and took a walk.\r\n\r\nSays I to myself, I can explain better how we come to not be in that room this morning if I go out to one side and study over it a little. So I done it. But I dasn\u2019t go fur, or she\u2019d a sent for me. And when it was late in the day the people all went, and then I come in and told her the noise and shooting waked up me and \u201cSid,\u201d and the door was locked, and we wanted to see the fun, so we went down the lightning-rod, and both of us got hurt a little, and we didn\u2019t never want to try that no more. And then I went on and told her all what I told Uncle Silas before; and then she said she\u2019d forgive us, and maybe it was all right enough anyway, and about what a body might expect of boys, for all boys was a pretty harum-scarum lot as fur as she could see; and so, as long as no harm hadn\u2019t come of it, she judged she better put in her time being grateful we was alive and well and she had us still, stead of fretting over what was past and done. So then she kissed me, and patted me on the head, and dropped into a kind of a brown study; and pretty soon jumps up, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, lawsamercy, it\u2019s most night, and Sid not come yet! What has become of that boy?\u201d\r\n\r\nI see my chance; so I skips up and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll run right up to town and get him,\u201d I says.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo you won\u2019t,\u201d she says. \u201cYou\u2019ll stay right wher\u2019 you are; one\u2019s enough to be lost at a time. If he ain\u2019t here to supper, your uncle \u2019ll go.\u201d\r\n\r\nWell, he warn\u2019t there to supper; so right after supper uncle went.\r\n\r\nHe come back about ten a little bit uneasy; hadn\u2019t run across Tom\u2019s track. Aunt Sally was a good deal uneasy; but Uncle Silas he said there warn\u2019t no occasion to be\u2014boys will be boys, he said, and you\u2019ll see this one turn up in the morning all sound and right. So she had to be satisfied. But she said she\u2019d set up for him a while anyway, and keep a light burning so he could see it.\r\n\r\nAnd then when I went up to bed she come up with me and fetched her candle, and tucked me in, and mothered me so good I felt mean, and like I couldn\u2019t look her in the face; and she set down on the bed and talked with me a long time, and said what a splendid boy Sid was, and didn\u2019t seem to want to ever stop talking about him; and kept asking me every now and then if I reckoned he could a got lost, or hurt, or maybe drownded, and might be laying at this minute somewheres suffering or dead, and she not by him to help him, and so the tears would drip down silent, and I would tell her that Sid was all right, and would be home in the morning, sure; and she would squeeze my hand, or maybe kiss me, and tell me to say it again, and keep on saying it, because it done her good, and she was in so much trouble. And when she was going away she looked down in my eyes so steady and gentle, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cThe door ain\u2019t going to be locked, Tom, and there\u2019s the window and the rod; but you\u2019ll be good, won\u2019t you? And you won\u2019t go? For my sake.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaws knows I wanted to go bad enough to see about Tom, and was all intending to go; but after that I wouldn\u2019t a went, not for kingdoms.\r\n\r\nBut she was on my mind and Tom was on my mind, so I slept very restless. And twice I went down the rod away in the night, and slipped around front, and see her setting there by her candle in the window with her eyes towards the road and the tears in them; and I wished I could do something for her, but I couldn\u2019t, only to swear that I wouldn\u2019t never do nothing to grieve her any more. And the third time I waked up at dawn, and slid down, and she was there yet, and her candle was most out, and her old gray head was resting on her hand, and she was asleep.\r\nCHAPTER XLII.\r\n\r\nThe old man was uptown again before breakfast, but couldn\u2019t get no track of Tom; and both of them set at the table thinking, and not saying nothing, and looking mournful, and their coffee getting cold, and not eating anything. And by-and-by the old man says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDid I give you the letter?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat letter?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe one I got yesterday out of the post-office.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, you didn\u2019t give me no letter.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I must a forgot it.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo he rummaged his pockets, and then went off somewheres where he had laid it down, and fetched it, and give it to her. She says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, it\u2019s from St. Petersburg\u2014it\u2019s from Sis.\u201d\r\n\r\nI allowed another walk would do me good; but I couldn\u2019t stir. But before she could break it open she dropped it and run\u2014for she see something. And so did I. It was Tom Sawyer on a mattress; and that old doctor; and Jim, in her calico dress, with his hands tied behind him; and a lot of people. I hid the letter behind the first thing that come handy, and rushed. She flung herself at Tom, crying, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, he\u2019s dead, he\u2019s dead, I know he\u2019s dead!\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd Tom he turned his head a little, and muttered something or other, which showed he warn\u2019t in his right mind; then she flung up her hands, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s alive, thank God! And that\u2019s enough!\u201d and she snatched a kiss of him, and flew for the house to get the bed ready, and scattering orders right and left at the niggers and everybody else, as fast as her tongue could go, every jump of the way.\r\n\r\nI followed the men to see what they was going to do with Jim; and the old doctor and Uncle Silas followed after Tom into the house. The men was very huffy, and some of them wanted to hang Jim for an example to all the other niggers around there, so they wouldn\u2019t be trying to run away like Jim done, and making such a raft of trouble, and keeping a whole family scared most to death for days and nights. But the others said, don\u2019t do it, it wouldn\u2019t answer at all; he ain\u2019t our nigger, and his owner would turn up and make us pay for him, sure. So that cooled them down a little, because the people that\u2019s always the most anxious for to hang a nigger that hain\u2019t done just right is always the very ones that ain\u2019t the most anxious to pay for him when they\u2019ve got their satisfaction out of him.\r\n\r\nThey cussed Jim considerble, though, and give him a cuff or two side the head once in a while, but Jim never said nothing, and he never let on to know me, and they took him to the same cabin, and put his own clothes on him, and chained him again, and not to no bed-leg this time, but to a big staple drove into the bottom log, and chained his hands, too, and both legs, and said he warn\u2019t to have nothing but bread and water to eat after this till his owner come, or he was sold at auction because he didn\u2019t come in a certain length of time, and filled up our hole, and said a couple of farmers with guns must stand watch around about the cabin every night, and a bulldog tied to the door in the daytime; and about this time they was through with the job and was tapering off with a kind of generl good-bye cussing, and then the old doctor comes and takes a look, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t be no rougher on him than you\u2019re obleeged to, because he ain\u2019t a bad nigger. When I got to where I found the boy I see I couldn\u2019t cut the bullet out without some help, and he warn\u2019t in no condition for me to leave to go and get help; and he got a little worse and a little worse, and after a long time he went out of his head, and wouldn\u2019t let me come a-nigh him any more, and said if I chalked his raft he\u2019d kill me, and no end of wild foolishness like that, and I see I couldn\u2019t do anything at all with him; so I says, I got to have help somehow; and the minute I says it out crawls this nigger from somewheres and says he\u2019ll help, and he done it, too, and done it very well. Of course I judged he must be a runaway nigger, and there I was! and there I had to stick right straight along all the rest of the day and all night. It was a fix, I tell you! I had a couple of patients with the chills, and of course I\u2019d of liked to run up to town and see them, but I dasn\u2019t, because the nigger might get away, and then I\u2019d be to blame; and yet never a skiff come close enough for me to hail. So there I had to stick plumb until daylight this morning; and I never see a nigger that was a better nuss or faithfuller, and yet he was risking his freedom to do it, and was all tired out, too, and I see plain enough he\u2019d been worked main hard lately. I liked the nigger for that; I tell you, gentlemen, a nigger like that is worth a thousand dollars\u2014and kind treatment, too. I had everything I needed, and the boy was doing as well there as he would a done at home\u2014better, maybe, because it was so quiet; but there I was, with both of \u2019m on my hands, and there I had to stick till about dawn this morning; then some men in a skiff come by, and as good luck would have it the nigger was setting by the pallet with his head propped on his knees sound asleep; so I motioned them in quiet, and they slipped up on him and grabbed him and tied him before he knowed what he was about, and we never had no trouble. And the boy being in a kind of a flighty sleep, too, we muffled the oars and hitched the raft on, and towed her over very nice and quiet, and the nigger never made the least row nor said a word from the start. He ain\u2019t no bad nigger, gentlemen; that\u2019s what I think about him.\u201d\r\n\r\nSomebody says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it sounds very good, doctor, I\u2019m obleeged to say.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen the others softened up a little, too, and I was mighty thankful to that old doctor for doing Jim that good turn; and I was glad it was according to my judgment of him, too; because I thought he had a good heart in him and was a good man the first time I see him. Then they all agreed that Jim had acted very well, and was deserving to have some notice took of it, and reward. So every one of them promised, right out and hearty, that they wouldn\u2019t cuss him no more.\r\n\r\nThen they come out and locked him up. I hoped they was going to say he could have one or two of the chains took off, because they was rotten heavy, or could have meat and greens with his bread and water; but they didn\u2019t think of it, and I reckoned it warn\u2019t best for me to mix in, but I judged I\u2019d get the doctor\u2019s yarn to Aunt Sally somehow or other as soon as I\u2019d got through the breakers that was laying just ahead of me\u2014explanations, I mean, of how I forgot to mention about Sid being shot when I was telling how him and me put in that dratted night paddling around hunting the runaway nigger.\r\n\r\nBut I had plenty time. Aunt Sally she stuck to the sick-room all day and all night, and every time I see Uncle Silas mooning around I dodged him.\r\n\r\nNext morning I heard Tom was a good deal better, and they said Aunt Sally was gone to get a nap. So I slips to the sick-room, and if I found him awake I reckoned we could put up a yarn for the family that would wash. But he was sleeping, and sleeping very peaceful, too; and pale, not fire-faced the way he was when he come. So I set down and laid for him to wake. In about half an hour Aunt Sally comes gliding in, and there I was, up a stump again! She motioned me to be still, and set down by me, and begun to whisper, and said we could all be joyful now, because all the symptoms was first-rate, and he\u2019d been sleeping like that for ever so long, and looking better and peacefuller all the time, and ten to one he\u2019d wake up in his right mind.\r\n\r\nSo we set there watching, and by-and-by he stirs a bit, and opened his eyes very natural, and takes a look, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cHello!\u2014why, I\u2019m at home! How\u2019s that? Where\u2019s the raft?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s all right,\u201d I says.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd Jim?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe same,\u201d I says, but couldn\u2019t say it pretty brash. But he never noticed, but says:\r\n\r\n\u201cGood! Splendid! Now we\u2019re all right and safe! Did you tell Aunty?\u201d\r\n\r\nI was going to say yes; but she chipped in and says: \u201cAbout what, Sid?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, about the way the whole thing was done.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat whole thing?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, the whole thing. There ain\u2019t but one; how we set the runaway nigger free\u2014me and Tom.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood land! Set the run\u2014 What is the child talking about! Dear, dear, out of his head again!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I ain\u2019t out of my HEAD; I know all what I\u2019m talking about. We did set him free\u2014me and Tom. We laid out to do it, and we done it. And we done it elegant, too.\u201d He\u2019d got a start, and she never checked him up, just set and stared and stared, and let him clip along, and I see it warn\u2019t no use for me to put in. \u201cWhy, Aunty, it cost us a power of work\u2014weeks of it\u2014hours and hours, every night, whilst you was all asleep. And we had to steal candles, and the sheet, and the shirt, and your dress, and spoons, and tin plates, and case-knives, and the warming-pan, and the grindstone, and flour, and just no end of things, and you can\u2019t think what work it was to make the saws, and pens, and inscriptions, and one thing or another, and you can\u2019t think half the fun it was. And we had to make up the pictures of coffins and things, and nonnamous letters from the robbers, and get up and down the lightning-rod, and dig the hole into the cabin, and made the rope ladder and send it in cooked up in a pie, and send in spoons and things to work with in your apron pocket\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMercy sakes!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2014and load up the cabin with rats and snakes and so on, for company for Jim; and then you kept Tom here so long with the butter in his hat that you come near spiling the whole business, because the men come before we was out of the cabin, and we had to rush, and they heard us and let drive at us, and I got my share, and we dodged out of the path and let them go by, and when the dogs come they warn\u2019t interested in us, but went for the most noise, and we got our canoe, and made for the raft, and was all safe, and Jim was a free man, and we done it all by ourselves, and wasn\u2019t it bully, Aunty!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I never heard the likes of it in all my born days! So it was you, you little rapscallions, that\u2019s been making all this trouble, and turned everybody\u2019s wits clean inside out and scared us all most to death. I\u2019ve as good a notion as ever I had in my life to take it out o\u2019 you this very minute. To think, here I\u2019ve been, night after night, a\u2014you just get well once, you young scamp, and I lay I\u2019ll tan the Old Harry out o\u2019 both o\u2019 ye!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut Tom, he was so proud and joyful, he just couldn\u2019t hold in, and his tongue just went it\u2014she a-chipping in, and spitting fire all along, and both of them going it at once, like a cat convention; and she says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, you get all the enjoyment you can out of it now, for mind I tell you if I catch you meddling with him again\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMeddling with who?\u201d Tom says, dropping his smile and looking surprised.\r\n\r\n\u201cWith who? Why, the runaway nigger, of course. Who\u2019d you reckon?\u201d\r\n\r\nTom looks at me very grave, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cTom, didn\u2019t you just tell me he was all right? Hasn\u2019t he got away?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHim?\u201d says Aunt Sally; \u201cthe runaway nigger? \u2019Deed he hasn\u2019t. They\u2019ve got him back, safe and sound, and he\u2019s in that cabin again, on bread and water, and loaded down with chains, till he\u2019s claimed or sold!\u201d\r\n\r\nTom rose square up in bed, with his eye hot, and his nostrils opening and shutting like gills, and sings out to me:\r\n\r\n\u201cThey hain\u2019t no right to shut him up! Shove!\u2014and don\u2019t you lose a minute. Turn him loose! he ain\u2019t no slave; he\u2019s as free as any cretur that walks this earth!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat does the child mean?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI mean every word I say, Aunt Sally, and if somebody don\u2019t go, I\u2019ll go. I\u2019ve knowed him all his life, and so has Tom, there. Old Miss Watson died two months ago, and she was ashamed she ever was going to sell him down the river, and said so; and she set him free in her will.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen what on earth did you want to set him free for, seeing he was already free?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, that is a question, I must say; and just like women! Why, I wanted the adventure of it; and I\u2019d a waded neck-deep in blood to\u2014goodness alive, AUNT POLLY!\u201d\r\n\r\nIf she warn\u2019t standing right there, just inside the door, looking as sweet and contented as an angel half full of pie, I wish I may never!\r\n\r\nAunt Sally jumped for her, and most hugged the head off of her, and cried over her, and I found a good enough place for me under the bed, for it was getting pretty sultry for us, seemed to me. And I peeped out, and in a little while Tom\u2019s Aunt Polly shook herself loose and stood there looking across at Tom over her spectacles\u2014kind of grinding him into the earth, you know. And then she says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, you better turn y\u2019r head away\u2014I would if I was you, Tom.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, deary me!\u201d says Aunt Sally; \u201cis he changed so? Why, that ain\u2019t Tom, it\u2019s Sid; Tom\u2019s\u2014Tom\u2019s\u2014why, where is Tom? He was here a minute ago.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou mean where\u2019s Huck Finn\u2014that\u2019s what you mean! I reckon I hain\u2019t raised such a scamp as my Tom all these years not to know him when I see him. That would be a pretty howdy-do. Come out from under that bed, Huck Finn.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo I done it. But not feeling brash.\r\n\r\nAunt Sally she was one of the mixed-upest-looking persons I ever see\u2014except one, and that was Uncle Silas, when he come in and they told it all to him. It kind of made him drunk, as you may say, and he didn\u2019t know nothing at all the rest of the day, and preached a prayer-meeting sermon that night that gave him a rattling ruputation, because the oldest man in the world couldn\u2019t a understood it. So Tom\u2019s Aunt Polly, she told all about who I was, and what; and I had to up and tell how I was in such a tight place that when Mrs. Phelps took me for Tom Sawyer\u2014she chipped in and says, \u201cOh, go on and call me Aunt Sally, I\u2019m used to it now, and \u2019tain\u2019t no need to change\u201d\u2014that when Aunt Sally took me for Tom Sawyer I had to stand it\u2014there warn\u2019t no other way, and I knowed he wouldn\u2019t mind, because it would be nuts for him, being a mystery, and he\u2019d make an adventure out of it, and be perfectly satisfied. And so it turned out, and he let on to be Sid, and made things as soft as he could for me.\r\n\r\nAnd his Aunt Polly she said Tom was right about old Miss Watson setting Jim free in her will; and so, sure enough, Tom Sawyer had gone and took all that trouble and bother to set a free nigger free! and I couldn\u2019t ever understand before, until that minute and that talk, how he could help a body set a nigger free with his bringing-up.\r\n\r\nWell, Aunt Polly she said that when Aunt Sally wrote to her that Tom and Sid had come all right and safe, she says to herself:\r\n\r\n\u201cLook at that, now! I might have expected it, letting him go off that way without anybody to watch him. So now I got to go and trapse all the way down the river, eleven hundred mile, and find out what that creetur\u2019s up to this time; as long as I couldn\u2019t seem to get any answer out of you about it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, I never heard nothing from you,\u201d says Aunt Sally.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I wonder! Why, I wrote you twice to ask you what you could mean by Sid being here.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I never got \u2019em, Sis.\u201d\r\n\r\nAunt Polly she turns around slow and severe, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cYou, Tom!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell\u2014what?\u201d he says, kind of pettish.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you what me, you impudent thing\u2014hand out them letters.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat letters?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThem letters. I be bound, if I have to take aholt of you I\u2019ll\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey\u2019re in the trunk. There, now. And they\u2019re just the same as they was when I got them out of the office. I hain\u2019t looked into them, I hain\u2019t touched them. But I knowed they\u2019d make trouble, and I thought if you warn\u2019t in no hurry, I\u2019d\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, you do need skinning, there ain\u2019t no mistake about it. And I wrote another one to tell you I was coming; and I s\u2019pose he\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, it come yesterday; I hain\u2019t read it yet, but it\u2019s all right, I\u2019ve got that one.\u201d\r\n\r\nI wanted to offer to bet two dollars she hadn\u2019t, but I reckoned maybe it was just as safe to not to. So I never said nothing.\r\nCHAPTER THE LAST\r\n\r\nThe first time I catched Tom private I asked him what was his idea, time of the evasion?\u2014what it was he\u2019d planned to do if the evasion worked all right and he managed to set a nigger free that was already free before? And he said, what he had planned in his head from the start, if we got Jim out all safe, was for us to run him down the river on the raft, and have adventures plumb to the mouth of the river, and then tell him about his being free, and take him back up home on a steamboat, in style, and pay him for his lost time, and write word ahead and get out all the niggers around, and have them waltz him into town with a torchlight procession and a brass-band, and then he would be a hero, and so would we. But I reckoned it was about as well the way it was.\r\n\r\nWe had Jim out of the chains in no time, and when Aunt Polly and Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally found out how good he helped the doctor nurse Tom, they made a heap of fuss over him, and fixed him up prime, and give him all he wanted to eat, and a good time, and nothing to do. And we had him up to the sick-room, and had a high talk; and Tom give Jim forty dollars for being prisoner for us so patient, and doing it up so good, and Jim was pleased most to death, and busted out, and says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDah, now, Huck, what I tell you?\u2014what I tell you up dah on Jackson islan\u2019? I tole you I got a hairy breas\u2019, en what\u2019s de sign un it; en I tole you I ben rich wunst, en gwineter to be rich agin; en it\u2019s come true; en heah she is! Dah, now! doan\u2019 talk to me\u2014signs is signs, mine I tell you; en I knowed jis\u2019 \u2019s well \u2019at I \u2019uz gwineter be rich agin as I\u2019s a-stannin\u2019 heah dis minute!\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le\u2019s all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory, for a couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me, but I ain\u2019t got no money for to buy the outfit, and I reckon I couldn\u2019t get none from home, because it\u2019s likely pap\u2019s been back before now, and got it all away from Judge Thatcher and drunk it up.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, he hain\u2019t,\u201d Tom says; \u201cit\u2019s all there yet\u2014six thousand dollars and more; and your pap hain\u2019t ever been back since. Hadn\u2019t when I come away, anyhow.\u201d\r\n\r\nJim says, kind of solemn:\r\n\r\n\u201cHe ain\u2019t a-comin\u2019 back no mo\u2019, Huck.\u201d\r\n\r\nI says:\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Jim?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNemmine why, Huck\u2014but he ain\u2019t comin\u2019 back no mo.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut I kept at him; so at last he says:\r\n\r\n\u201cDoan\u2019 you \u2019member de house dat was float\u2019n down de river, en dey wuz a man in dah, kivered up, en I went in en unkivered him and didn\u2019 let you come in? Well, den, you kin git yo\u2019 money when you wants it, kase dat wuz him.\u201d\r\n\r\nTom\u2019s most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain\u2019t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I\u2019d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn\u2019t a tackled it, and ain\u2019t a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she\u2019s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can\u2019t stand it. I been there before.\r\n\r\nTHE END. YOURS TRULY, HUCK FINN.\r\n*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN ***\r\nUpdated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed.\r\nCreating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. 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        "text": "The Project Gutenberg eBook of Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott",
        "text2": "The Project Gutenberg eBook of Little Women\r\nThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.\r\n\r\nTitle: Little Women\r\n\r\nAuthor: Louisa May Alcott\r\n\r\nRelease date: May 1, 1996 [eBook #514]\r\nMost recently updated: November 4, 2022\r\n\r\nLanguage: English\r\n*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE WOMEN ***\r\nLittle Women\r\nby Louisa May Alcott\r\nContents\r\nPART 1\r\nCHAPTER ONE PLAYING PILGRIMS\r\nCHAPTER TWO A MERRY CHRISTMAS\r\nCHAPTER THREE THE LAURENCE BOY\r\nCHAPTER FOUR BURDENS\r\nCHAPTER FIVE BEING NEIGHBORLY\r\nCHAPTER SIX BETH FINDS THE PALACE BEAUTIFUL\r\nCHAPTER SEVEN AMY\u2019S VALLEY OF HUMILIATION\r\nCHAPTER EIGHT JO MEETS APOLLYON\r\nCHAPTER NINE MEG GOES TO VANITY FAIR\r\nCHAPTER TEN THE P.C. AND P.O.\r\nCHAPTER ELEVEN EXPERIMENTS\r\nCHAPTER TWELVE CAMP LAURENCE\r\nCHAPTER THIRTEEN CASTLES IN THE AIR\r\nCHAPTER FOURTEEN SECRETS\r\nCHAPTER FIFTEEN A TELEGRAM\r\nCHAPTER SIXTEEN LETTERS\r\nCHAPTER SEVENTEEN LITTLE FAITHFUL\r\nCHAPTER EIGHTEEN DARK DAYS\r\nCHAPTER NINETEEN AMY\u2019S WILL\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY CONFIDENTIAL\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-ONE LAURIE MAKES MISCHIEF, AND JO MAKES PEACE\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-TWO PLEASANT MEADOWS\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-THREE AUNT MARCH SETTLES THE QUESTION\r\n\r\nPART 2\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR GOSSIP\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE THE FIRST WEDDING\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-SIX ARTISTIC ATTEMPTS\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN LITERARY LESSONS\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT DOMESTIC EXPERIENCES\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-NINE CALLS\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY CONSEQUENCES\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-ONE OUR FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-TWO TENDER TROUBLES\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-THREE JO\u2019S JOURNAL\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR FRIEND\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE HEARTACHE\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-SIX BETH\u2019S SECRET\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN NEW IMPRESSIONS\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT ON THE SHELF\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-NINE LAZY LAURENCE\r\nCHAPTER FORTY THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-ONE LEARNING TO FORGET\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-TWO ALL ALONE\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-THREE SURPRISES\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-FOUR MY LORD AND LADY\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-FIVE DAISY AND DEMI\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-SIX UNDER THE UMBRELLA\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN HARVEST TIME\r\nPART 1\r\nCHAPTER ONE\r\nPLAYING PILGRIMS\r\n\r\n\u201cChristmas won\u2019t be Christmas without any presents,\u201d grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s so dreadful to be poor!\u201d sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,\u201d added little Amy, with an injured sniff.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe\u2019ve got Father and Mother, and each other,\u201d said Beth contentedly from her corner.\r\n\r\nThe four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again as Jo said sadly, \u201cWe haven\u2019t got Father, and shall not have him for a long time.\u201d She didn\u2019t say \u201cperhaps never,\u201d but each silently added it, thinking of Father far away, where the fighting was.\r\n\r\nNobody spoke for a minute; then Meg said in an altered tone, \u201cYou know the reason Mother proposed not having any presents this Christmas was because it is going to be a hard winter for everyone; and she thinks we ought not to spend money for pleasure, when our men are suffering so in the army. We can\u2019t do much, but we can make our little sacrifices, and ought to do it gladly. But I am afraid I don\u2019t,\u201d and Meg shook her head, as she thought regretfully of all the pretty things she wanted.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I don\u2019t think the little we should spend would do any good. We\u2019ve each got a dollar, and the army wouldn\u2019t be much helped by our giving that. I agree not to expect anything from Mother or you, but I do want to buy Undine and Sintran for myself. I\u2019ve wanted it so long,\u201d said Jo, who was a bookworm.\r\n\r\n\u201cI planned to spend mine in new music,\u201d said Beth, with a little sigh, which no one heard but the hearth brush and kettle-holder.\r\n\r\n\u201cI shall get a nice box of Faber\u2019s drawing pencils; I really need them,\u201d said Amy decidedly.\r\n\r\n\u201cMother didn\u2019t say anything about our money, and she won\u2019t wish us to give up everything. Let\u2019s each buy what we want, and have a little fun; I\u2019m sure we work hard enough to earn it,\u201d cried Jo, examining the heels of her shoes in a gentlemanly manner.\r\n\r\n\u201cI know I do\u2014teaching those tiresome children nearly all day, when I\u2019m longing to enjoy myself at home,\u201d began Meg, in the complaining tone again.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t have half such a hard time as I do,\u201d said Jo. \u201cHow would you like to be shut up for hours with a nervous, fussy old lady, who keeps you trotting, is never satisfied, and worries you till you\u2019re ready to fly out the window or cry?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s naughty to fret, but I do think washing dishes and keeping things tidy is the worst work in the world. It makes me cross, and my hands get so stiff, I can\u2019t practice well at all.\u201d And Beth looked at her rough hands with a sigh that any one could hear that time.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t believe any of you suffer as I do,\u201d cried Amy, \u201cfor you don\u2019t have to go to school with impertinent girls, who plague you if you don\u2019t know your lessons, and laugh at your dresses, and label your father if he isn\u2019t rich, and insult you when your nose isn\u2019t nice.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you mean libel, I\u2019d say so, and not talk about labels, as if Papa was a pickle bottle,\u201d advised Jo, laughing.\r\n\r\n\u201cI know what I mean, and you needn\u2019t be statirical about it. It\u2019s proper to use good words, and improve your vocabilary,\u201d returned Amy, with dignity.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t peck at one another, children. Don\u2019t you wish we had the money Papa lost when we were little, Jo? Dear me! How happy and good we\u2019d be, if we had no worries!\u201d said Meg, who could remember better times.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou said the other day you thought we were a deal happier than the King children, for they were fighting and fretting all the time, in spite of their money.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo I did, Beth. Well, I think we are. For though we do have to work, we make fun of ourselves, and are a pretty jolly set, as Jo would say.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJo does use such slang words!\u201d observed Amy, with a reproving look at the long figure stretched on the rug.\r\n\r\nJo immediately sat up, put her hands in her pockets, and began to whistle.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t, Jo. It\u2019s so boyish!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s why I do it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI detest rude, unladylike girls!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hate affected, niminy-piminy chits!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBirds in their little nests agree,\u201d sang Beth, the peacemaker, with such a funny face that both sharp voices softened to a laugh, and the \u201cpecking\u201d ended for that time.\r\n\r\n\u201cReally, girls, you are both to be blamed,\u201d said Meg, beginning to lecture in her elder-sisterly fashion. \u201cYou are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and to behave better, Josephine. It didn\u2019t matter so much when you were a little girl, but now you are so tall, and turn up your hair, you should remember that you are a young lady.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m not! And if turning up my hair makes me one, I\u2019ll wear it in two tails till I\u2019m twenty,\u201d cried Jo, pulling off her net, and shaking down a chestnut mane. \u201cI hate to think I\u2019ve got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China Aster! It\u2019s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy\u2019s games and work and manners! I can\u2019t get over my disappointment in not being a boy. And it\u2019s worse than ever now, for I\u2019m dying to go and fight with Papa. And I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd Jo shook the blue army sock till the needles rattled like castanets, and her ball bounded across the room.\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor Jo! It\u2019s too bad, but it can\u2019t be helped. So you must try to be contented with making your name boyish, and playing brother to us girls,\u201d said Beth, stroking the rough head with a hand that all the dish washing and dusting in the world could not make ungentle in its touch.\r\n\r\n\u201cAs for you, Amy,\u201d continued Meg, \u201cyou are altogether too particular and prim. Your airs are funny now, but you\u2019ll grow up an affected little goose, if you don\u2019t take care. I like your nice manners and refined ways of speaking, when you don\u2019t try to be elegant. But your absurd words are as bad as Jo\u2019s slang.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf Jo is a tomboy and Amy a goose, what am I, please?\u201d asked Beth, ready to share the lecture.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019re a dear, and nothing else,\u201d answered Meg warmly, and no one contradicted her, for the \u2018Mouse\u2019 was the pet of the family.\r\n\r\nAs young readers like to know \u2018how people look\u2019, we will take this moment to give them a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight, while the December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled cheerfully within. It was a comfortable room, though the carpet was faded and the furniture very plain, for a good picture or two hung on the walls, books filled the recesses, chrysanthemums and Christmas roses bloomed in the windows, and a pleasant atmosphere of home peace pervaded it.\r\n\r\nMargaret, the eldest of the four, was sixteen, and very pretty, being plump and fair, with large eyes, plenty of soft brown hair, a sweet mouth, and white hands, of which she was rather vain. Fifteen-year-old Jo was very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt, for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way. She had a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp, gray eyes, which appeared to see everything, and were by turns fierce, funny, or thoughtful. Her long, thick hair was her one beauty, but it was usually bundled into a net, to be out of her way. Round shoulders had Jo, big hands and feet, a flyaway look to her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman and didn\u2019t like it. Elizabeth, or Beth, as everyone called her, was a rosy, smooth-haired, bright-eyed girl of thirteen, with a shy manner, a timid voice, and a peaceful expression which was seldom disturbed. Her father called her \u2018Little Miss Tranquility\u2019, and the name suited her excellently, for she seemed to live in a happy world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusted and loved. Amy, though the youngest, was a most important person, in her own opinion at least. A regular snow maiden, with blue eyes, and yellow hair curling on her shoulders, pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners. What the characters of the four sisters were we will leave to be found out.\r\n\r\nThe clock struck six and, having swept up the hearth, Beth put a pair of slippers down to warm. Somehow the sight of the old shoes had a good effect upon the girls, for Mother was coming, and everyone brightened to welcome her. Meg stopped lecturing, and lighted the lamp, Amy got out of the easy chair without being asked, and Jo forgot how tired she was as she sat up to hold the slippers nearer to the blaze.\r\n\r\n\u201cThey are quite worn out. Marmee must have a new pair.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought I\u2019d get her some with my dollar,\u201d said Beth.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I shall!\u201d cried Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m the oldest,\u201d began Meg, but Jo cut in with a decided, \u201cI\u2019m the man of the family now Papa is away, and I shall provide the slippers, for he told me to take special care of Mother while he was gone.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll tell you what we\u2019ll do,\u201d said Beth, \u201clet\u2019s each get her something for Christmas, and not get anything for ourselves.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s like you, dear! What will we get?\u201d exclaimed Jo.\r\n\r\nEveryone thought soberly for a minute, then Meg announced, as if the idea was suggested by the sight of her own pretty hands, \u201cI shall give her a nice pair of gloves.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cArmy shoes, best to be had,\u201d cried Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cSome handkerchiefs, all hemmed,\u201d said Beth.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll get a little bottle of cologne. She likes it, and it won\u2019t cost much, so I\u2019ll have some left to buy my pencils,\u201d added Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow will we give the things?\u201d asked Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cPut them on the table, and bring her in and see her open the bundles. Don\u2019t you remember how we used to do on our birthdays?\u201d answered Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cI used to be so frightened when it was my turn to sit in the chair with the crown on, and see you all come marching round to give the presents, with a kiss. I liked the things and the kisses, but it was dreadful to have you sit looking at me while I opened the bundles,\u201d said Beth, who was toasting her face and the bread for tea at the same time.\r\n\r\n\u201cLet Marmee think we are getting things for ourselves, and then surprise her. We must go shopping tomorrow afternoon, Meg. There is so much to do about the play for Christmas night,\u201d said Jo, marching up and down, with her hands behind her back, and her nose in the air.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t mean to act any more after this time. I\u2019m getting too old for such things,\u201d observed Meg, who was as much a child as ever about \u2018dressing-up\u2019 frolics.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou won\u2019t stop, I know, as long as you can trail round in a white gown with your hair down, and wear gold-paper jewelry. You are the best actress we\u2019ve got, and there\u2019ll be an end of everything if you quit the boards,\u201d said Jo. \u201cWe ought to rehearse tonight. Come here, Amy, and do the fainting scene, for you are as stiff as a poker in that.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t help it. I never saw anyone faint, and I don\u2019t choose to make myself all black and blue, tumbling flat as you do. If I can go down easily, I\u2019ll drop. If I can\u2019t, I shall fall into a chair and be graceful. I don\u2019t care if Hugo does come at me with a pistol,\u201d returned Amy, who was not gifted with dramatic power, but was chosen because she was small enough to be borne out shrieking by the villain of the piece.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo it this way. Clasp your hands so, and stagger across the room, crying frantically, \u2018Roderigo! Save me! Save me!\u2019\u201d and away went Jo, with a melodramatic scream which was truly thrilling.\r\n\r\nAmy followed, but she poked her hands out stiffly before her, and jerked herself along as if she went by machinery, and her \u201cOw!\u201d was more suggestive of pins being run into her than of fear and anguish. Jo gave a despairing groan, and Meg laughed outright, while Beth let her bread burn as she watched the fun with interest. \u201cIt\u2019s no use! Do the best you can when the time comes, and if the audience laughs, don\u2019t blame me. Come on, Meg.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen things went smoothly, for Don Pedro defied the world in a speech of two pages without a single break. Hagar, the witch, chanted an awful incantation over her kettleful of simmering toads, with weird effect. Roderigo rent his chains asunder manfully, and Hugo died in agonies of remorse and arsenic, with a wild, \u201cHa! Ha!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s the best we\u2019ve had yet,\u201d said Meg, as the dead villain sat up and rubbed his elbows.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t see how you can write and act such splendid things, Jo. You\u2019re a regular Shakespeare!\u201d exclaimed Beth, who firmly believed that her sisters were gifted with wonderful genius in all things.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot quite,\u201d replied Jo modestly. \u201cI do think The Witches Curse, an Operatic Tragedy is rather a nice thing, but I\u2019d like to try Macbeth, if we only had a trapdoor for Banquo. I always wanted to do the killing part. \u2018Is that a dagger that I see before me?\u201d muttered Jo, rolling her eyes and clutching at the air, as she had seen a famous tragedian do.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, it\u2019s the toasting fork, with Mother\u2019s shoe on it instead of the bread. Beth\u2019s stage-struck!\u201d cried Meg, and the rehearsal ended in a general burst of laughter.\r\n\r\n\u201cGlad to find you so merry, my girls,\u201d said a cheery voice at the door, and actors and audience turned to welcome a tall, motherly lady with a \u2018can I help you\u2019 look about her which was truly delightful. She was not elegantly dressed, but a noble-looking woman, and the girls thought the gray cloak and unfashionable bonnet covered the most splendid mother in the world.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, dearies, how have you got on today? There was so much to do, getting the boxes ready to go tomorrow, that I didn\u2019t come home to dinner. Has anyone called, Beth? How is your cold, Meg? Jo, you look tired to death. Come and kiss me, baby.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhile making these maternal inquiries Mrs. March got her wet things off, her warm slippers on, and sitting down in the easy chair, drew Amy to her lap, preparing to enjoy the happiest hour of her busy day. The girls flew about, trying to make things comfortable, each in her own way. Meg arranged the tea table, Jo brought wood and set chairs, dropping, over-turning, and clattering everything she touched. Beth trotted to and fro between parlor kitchen, quiet and busy, while Amy gave directions to everyone, as she sat with her hands folded.\r\n\r\nAs they gathered about the table, Mrs. March said, with a particularly happy face, \u201cI\u2019ve got a treat for you after supper.\u201d\r\n\r\nA quick, bright smile went round like a streak of sunshine. Beth clapped her hands, regardless of the biscuit she held, and Jo tossed up her napkin, crying, \u201cA letter! A letter! Three cheers for Father!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, a nice long letter. He is well, and thinks he shall get through the cold season better than we feared. He sends all sorts of loving wishes for Christmas, and an especial message to you girls,\u201d said Mrs. March, patting her pocket as if she had got a treasure there.\r\n\r\n\u201cHurry and get done! Don\u2019t stop to quirk your little finger and simper over your plate, Amy,\u201d cried Jo, choking on her tea and dropping her bread, butter side down, on the carpet in her haste to get at the treat.\r\n\r\nBeth ate no more, but crept away to sit in her shadowy corner and brood over the delight to come, till the others were ready.\r\n\r\n\u201cI think it was so splendid in Father to go as chaplain when he was too old to be drafted, and not strong enough for a soldier,\u201d said Meg warmly.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t I wish I could go as a drummer, a vivan\u2014what\u2019s its name? Or a nurse, so I could be near him and help him,\u201d exclaimed Jo, with a groan.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt must be very disagreeable to sleep in a tent, and eat all sorts of bad-tasting things, and drink out of a tin mug,\u201d sighed Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen will he come home, Marmee?\u201d asked Beth, with a little quiver in her voice.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot for many months, dear, unless he is sick. He will stay and do his work faithfully as long as he can, and we won\u2019t ask for him back a minute sooner than he can be spared. Now come and hear the letter.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey all drew to the fire, Mother in the big chair with Beth at her feet, Meg and Amy perched on either arm of the chair, and Jo leaning on the back, where no one would see any sign of emotion if the letter should happen to be touching. Very few letters were written in those hard times that were not touching, especially those which fathers sent home. In this one little was said of the hardships endured, the dangers faced, or the homesickness conquered. It was a cheerful, hopeful letter, full of lively descriptions of camp life, marches, and military news, and only at the end did the writer\u2019s heart over-flow with fatherly love and longing for the little girls at home.\r\n\r\n\u201cGive them all of my dear love and a kiss. Tell them I think of them by day, pray for them by night, and find my best comfort in their affection at all times. A year seems very long to wait before I see them, but remind them that while we wait we may all work, so that these hard days need not be wasted. I know they will remember all I said to them, that they will be loving children to you, will do their duty faithfully, fight their bosom enemies bravely, and conquer themselves so beautifully that when I come back to them I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women.\u201d Everybody sniffed when they came to that part. Jo wasn\u2019t ashamed of the great tear that dropped off the end of her nose, and Amy never minded the rumpling of her curls as she hid her face on her mother\u2019s shoulder and sobbed out, \u201cI am a selfish girl! But I\u2019ll truly try to be better, so he mayn\u2019t be disappointed in me by-and-by.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe all will,\u201d cried Meg. \u201cI think too much of my looks and hate to work, but won\u2019t any more, if I can help it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll try and be what he loves to call me, \u2018a little woman\u2019 and not be rough and wild, but do my duty here instead of wanting to be somewhere else,\u201d said Jo, thinking that keeping her temper at home was a much harder task than facing a rebel or two down South.\r\n\r\nBeth said nothing, but wiped away her tears with the blue army sock and began to knit with all her might, losing no time in doing the duty that lay nearest her, while she resolved in her quiet little soul to be all that Father hoped to find her when the year brought round the happy coming home.\r\n\r\nMrs. March broke the silence that followed Jo\u2019s words, by saying in her cheery voice, \u201cDo you remember how you used to play Pilgrims Progress when you were little things? Nothing delighted you more than to have me tie my piece bags on your backs for burdens, give you hats and sticks and rolls of paper, and let you travel through the house from the cellar, which was the City of Destruction, up, up, to the housetop, where you had all the lovely things you could collect to make a Celestial City.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat fun it was, especially going by the lions, fighting Apollyon, and passing through the valley where the hob-goblins were,\u201d said Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cI liked the place where the bundles fell off and tumbled downstairs,\u201d said Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t remember much about it, except that I was afraid of the cellar and the dark entry, and always liked the cake and milk we had up at the top. If I wasn\u2019t too old for such things, I\u2019d rather like to play it over again,\u201d said Amy, who began to talk of renouncing childish things at the mature age of twelve.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe never are too old for this, my dear, because it is a play we are playing all the time in one way or another. Our burdens are here, our road is before us, and the longing for goodness and happiness is the guide that leads us through many troubles and mistakes to the peace which is a true Celestial City. Now, my little pilgrims, suppose you begin again, not in play, but in earnest, and see how far on you can get before Father comes home.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cReally, Mother? Where are our bundles?\u201d asked Amy, who was a very literal young lady.\r\n\r\n\u201cEach of you told what your burden was just now, except Beth. I rather think she hasn\u2019t got any,\u201d said her mother.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I have. Mine is dishes and dusters, and envying girls with nice pianos, and being afraid of people.\u201d\r\n\r\nBeth\u2019s bundle was such a funny one that everybody wanted to laugh, but nobody did, for it would have hurt her feelings very much.\r\n\r\n\u201cLet us do it,\u201d said Meg thoughtfully. \u201cIt is only another name for trying to be good, and the story may help us, for though we do want to be good, it\u2019s hard work and we forget, and don\u2019t do our best.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe were in the Slough of Despond tonight, and Mother came and pulled us out as Help did in the book. We ought to have our roll of directions, like Christian. What shall we do about that?\u201d asked Jo, delighted with the fancy which lent a little romance to the very dull task of doing her duty.\r\n\r\n\u201cLook under your pillows Christmas morning, and you will find your guidebook,\u201d replied Mrs. March.\r\n\r\nThey talked over the new plan while old Hannah cleared the table, then out came the four little work baskets, and the needles flew as the girls made sheets for Aunt March. It was uninteresting sewing, but tonight no one grumbled. They adopted Jo\u2019s plan of dividing the long seams into four parts, and calling the quarters Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and in that way got on capitally, especially when they talked about the different countries as they stitched their way through them.\r\n\r\nAt nine they stopped work, and sang, as usual, before they went to bed. No one but Beth could get much music out of the old piano, but she had a way of softly touching the yellow keys and making a pleasant accompaniment to the simple songs they sang. Meg had a voice like a flute, and she and her mother led the little choir. Amy chirped like a cricket, and Jo wandered through the airs at her own sweet will, always coming out at the wrong place with a croak or a quaver that spoiled the most pensive tune. They had always done this from the time they could lisp...\r\n\r\nCrinkle, crinkle, \u2019ittle \u2019tar,\r\n\r\nand it had become a household custom, for the mother was a born singer. The first sound in the morning was her voice as she went about the house singing like a lark, and the last sound at night was the same cheery sound, for the girls never grew too old for that familiar lullaby.\r\nCHAPTER TWO\r\nA MERRY CHRISTMAS\r\n\r\nJo was the first to wake in the gray dawn of Christmas morning. No stockings hung at the fireplace, and for a moment she felt as much disappointed as she did long ago, when her little sock fell down because it was crammed so full of goodies. Then she remembered her mother\u2019s promise and, slipping her hand under her pillow, drew out a little crimson-covered book. She knew it very well, for it was that beautiful old story of the best life ever lived, and Jo felt that it was a true guidebook for any pilgrim going on a long journey. She woke Meg with a \u201cMerry Christmas,\u201d and bade her see what was under her pillow. A green-covered book appeared, with the same picture inside, and a few words written by their mother, which made their one present very precious in their eyes. Presently Beth and Amy woke to rummage and find their little books also, one dove-colored, the other blue, and all sat looking at and talking about them, while the east grew rosy with the coming day.\r\n\r\nIn spite of her small vanities, Margaret had a sweet and pious nature, which unconsciously influenced her sisters, especially Jo, who loved her very tenderly, and obeyed her because her advice was so gently given.\r\n\r\n\u201cGirls,\u201d said Meg seriously, looking from the tumbled head beside her to the two little night-capped ones in the room beyond, \u201cMother wants us to read and love and mind these books, and we must begin at once. We used to be faithful about it, but since Father went away and all this war trouble unsettled us, we have neglected many things. You can do as you please, but I shall keep my book on the table here and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do me good and help me through the day.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen she opened her new book and began to read. Jo put her arm round her and, leaning cheek to cheek, read also, with the quiet expression so seldom seen on her restless face.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow good Meg is! Come, Amy, let\u2019s do as they do. I\u2019ll help you with the hard words, and they\u2019ll explain things if we don\u2019t understand,\u201d whispered Beth, very much impressed by the pretty books and her sisters\u2019 example.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad mine is blue,\u201d said Amy. and then the rooms were very still while the pages were softly turned, and the winter sunshine crept in to touch the bright heads and serious faces with a Christmas greeting.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere is Mother?\u201d asked Meg, as she and Jo ran down to thank her for their gifts, half an hour later.\r\n\r\n\u201cGoodness only knows. Some poor creeter came a-beggin\u2019, and your ma went straight off to see what was needed. There never was such a woman for givin\u2019 away vittles and drink, clothes and firin\u2019,\u201d replied Hannah, who had lived with the family since Meg was born, and was considered by them all more as a friend than a servant.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe will be back soon, I think, so fry your cakes, and have everything ready,\u201d said Meg, looking over the presents which were collected in a basket and kept under the sofa, ready to be produced at the proper time. \u201cWhy, where is Amy\u2019s bottle of cologne?\u201d she added, as the little flask did not appear.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe took it out a minute ago, and went off with it to put a ribbon on it, or some such notion,\u201d replied Jo, dancing about the room to take the first stiffness off the new army slippers.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow nice my handkerchiefs look, don\u2019t they? Hannah washed and ironed them for me, and I marked them all myself,\u201d said Beth, looking proudly at the somewhat uneven letters which had cost her such labor.\r\n\r\n\u201cBless the child! She\u2019s gone and put \u2018Mother\u2019 on them instead of \u2018M. March\u2019. How funny!\u201d cried Jo, taking one up.\r\n\r\n\u201cIsn\u2019t that right? I thought it was better to do it so, because Meg\u2019s initials are M.M., and I don\u2019t want anyone to use these but Marmee,\u201d said Beth, looking troubled.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s all right, dear, and a very pretty idea, quite sensible too, for no one can ever mistake now. It will please her very much, I know,\u201d said Meg, with a frown for Jo and a smile for Beth.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s Mother. Hide the basket, quick!\u201d cried Jo, as a door slammed and steps sounded in the hall.\r\n\r\nAmy came in hastily, and looked rather abashed when she saw her sisters all waiting for her.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere have you been, and what are you hiding behind you?\u201d asked Meg, surprised to see, by her hood and cloak, that lazy Amy had been out so early.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t laugh at me, Jo! I didn\u2019t mean anyone should know till the time came. I only meant to change the little bottle for a big one, and I gave all my money to get it, and I\u2019m truly trying not to be selfish any more.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs she spoke, Amy showed the handsome flask which replaced the cheap one, and looked so earnest and humble in her little effort to forget herself that Meg hugged her on the spot, and Jo pronounced her \u2018a trump\u2019, while Beth ran to the window, and picked her finest rose to ornament the stately bottle.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou see I felt ashamed of my present, after reading and talking about being good this morning, so I ran round the corner and changed it the minute I was up, and I\u2019m so glad, for mine is the handsomest now.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnother bang of the street door sent the basket under the sofa, and the girls to the table, eager for breakfast.\r\n\r\n\u201cMerry Christmas, Marmee! Many of them! Thank you for our books. We read some, and mean to every day,\u201d they all cried in chorus.\r\n\r\n\u201cMerry Christmas, little daughters! I\u2019m glad you began at once, and hope you will keep on. But I want to say one word before we sit down. Not far away from here lies a poor woman with a little newborn baby. Six children are huddled into one bed to keep from freezing, for they have no fire. There is nothing to eat over there, and the oldest boy came to tell me they were suffering hunger and cold. My girls, will you give them your breakfast as a Christmas present?\u201d\r\n\r\nThey were all unusually hungry, having waited nearly an hour, and for a minute no one spoke, only a minute, for Jo exclaimed impetuously, \u201cI\u2019m so glad you came before we began!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMay I go and help carry the things to the poor little children?\u201d asked Beth eagerly.\r\n\r\n\u201cI shall take the cream and the muffings,\u201d added Amy, heroically giving up the article she most liked.\r\n\r\nMeg was already covering the buckwheats, and piling the bread into one big plate.\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought you\u2019d do it,\u201d said Mrs. March, smiling as if satisfied. \u201cYou shall all go and help me, and when we come back we will have bread and milk for breakfast, and make it up at dinnertime.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey were soon ready, and the procession set out. Fortunately it was early, and they went through back streets, so few people saw them, and no one laughed at the queer party.\r\n\r\nA poor, bare, miserable room it was, with broken windows, no fire, ragged bedclothes, a sick mother, wailing baby, and a group of pale, hungry children cuddled under one old quilt, trying to keep warm.\r\n\r\nHow the big eyes stared and the blue lips smiled as the girls went in.\r\n\r\n\u201cAch, mein Gott! It is good angels come to us!\u201d said the poor woman, crying for joy.\r\n\r\n\u201cFunny angels in hoods and mittens,\u201d said Jo, and set them to laughing.\r\n\r\nIn a few minutes it really did seem as if kind spirits had been at work there. Hannah, who had carried wood, made a fire, and stopped up the broken panes with old hats and her own cloak. Mrs. March gave the mother tea and gruel, and comforted her with promises of help, while she dressed the little baby as tenderly as if it had been her own. The girls meantime spread the table, set the children round the fire, and fed them like so many hungry birds, laughing, talking, and trying to understand the funny broken English.\r\n\r\n\u201cDas ist gut!\u201d \u201cDie Engel-kinder!\u201d cried the poor things as they ate and warmed their purple hands at the comfortable blaze. The girls had never been called angel children before, and thought it very agreeable, especially Jo, who had been considered a \u2018Sancho\u2019 ever since she was born. That was a very happy breakfast, though they didn\u2019t get any of it. And when they went away, leaving comfort behind, I think there were not in all the city four merrier people than the hungry little girls who gave away their breakfasts and contented themselves with bread and milk on Christmas morning.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s loving our neighbor better than ourselves, and I like it,\u201d said Meg, as they set out their presents while their mother was upstairs collecting clothes for the poor Hummels.\r\n\r\nNot a very splendid show, but there was a great deal of love done up in the few little bundles, and the tall vase of red roses, white chrysanthemums, and trailing vines, which stood in the middle, gave quite an elegant air to the table.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe\u2019s coming! Strike up, Beth! Open the door, Amy! Three cheers for Marmee!\u201d cried Jo, prancing about while Meg went to conduct Mother to the seat of honor.\r\n\r\nBeth played her gayest march, Amy threw open the door, and Meg enacted escort with great dignity. Mrs. March was both surprised and touched, and smiled with her eyes full as she examined her presents and read the little notes which accompanied them. The slippers went on at once, a new handkerchief was slipped into her pocket, well scented with Amy\u2019s cologne, the rose was fastened in her bosom, and the nice gloves were pronounced a perfect fit.\r\n\r\nThere was a good deal of laughing and kissing and explaining, in the simple, loving fashion which makes these home festivals so pleasant at the time, so sweet to remember long afterward, and then all fell to work.\r\n\r\nThe morning charities and ceremonies took so much time that the rest of the day was devoted to preparations for the evening festivities. Being still too young to go often to the theater, and not rich enough to afford any great outlay for private performances, the girls put their wits to work, and necessity being the mother of invention, made whatever they needed. Very clever were some of their productions, pasteboard guitars, antique lamps made of old-fashioned butter boats covered with silver paper, gorgeous robes of old cotton, glittering with tin spangles from a pickle factory, and armor covered with the same useful diamond shaped bits left in sheets when the lids of preserve pots were cut out. The big chamber was the scene of many innocent revels.\r\n\r\nNo gentleman were admitted, so Jo played male parts to her heart\u2019s content and took immense satisfaction in a pair of russet leather boots given her by a friend, who knew a lady who knew an actor. These boots, an old foil, and a slashed doublet once used by an artist for some picture, were Jo\u2019s chief treasures and appeared on all occasions. The smallness of the company made it necessary for the two principal actors to take several parts apiece, and they certainly deserved some credit for the hard work they did in learning three or four different parts, whisking in and out of various costumes, and managing the stage besides. It was excellent drill for their memories, a harmless amusement, and employed many hours which otherwise would have been idle, lonely, or spent in less profitable society.\r\n\r\nOn Christmas night, a dozen girls piled onto the bed which was the dress circle, and sat before the blue and yellow chintz curtains in a most flattering state of expectancy. There was a good deal of rustling and whispering behind the curtain, a trifle of lamp smoke, and an occasional giggle from Amy, who was apt to get hysterical in the excitement of the moment. Presently a bell sounded, the curtains flew apart, and the operatic tragedy began.\r\n\r\n\u201cA gloomy wood,\u201d according to the one playbill, was represented by a few shrubs in pots, green baize on the floor, and a cave in the distance. This cave was made with a clothes horse for a roof, bureaus for walls, and in it was a small furnace in full blast, with a black pot on it and an old witch bending over it. The stage was dark and the glow of the furnace had a fine effect, especially as real steam issued from the kettle when the witch took off the cover. A moment was allowed for the first thrill to subside, then Hugo, the villain, stalked in with a clanking sword at his side, a slouching hat, black beard, mysterious cloak, and the boots. After pacing to and fro in much agitation, he struck his forehead, and burst out in a wild strain, singing of his hatred for Roderigo, his love for Zara, and his pleasing resolution to kill the one and win the other. The gruff tones of Hugo\u2019s voice, with an occasional shout when his feelings overcame him, were very impressive, and the audience applauded the moment he paused for breath. Bowing with the air of one accustomed to public praise, he stole to the cavern and ordered Hagar to come forth with a commanding, \u201cWhat ho, minion! I need thee!\u201d\r\n\r\nOut came Meg, with gray horsehair hanging about her face, a red and black robe, a staff, and cabalistic signs upon her cloak. Hugo demanded a potion to make Zara adore him, and one to destroy Roderigo. Hagar, in a fine dramatic melody, promised both, and proceeded to call up the spirit who would bring the love philter.\r\n\r\nHither, hither, from thy home,\r\nAiry sprite, I bid thee come!\r\nBorn of roses, fed on dew,\r\nCharms and potions canst thou brew?\r\nBring me here, with elfin speed,\r\nThe fragrant philter which I need.\r\nMake it sweet and swift and strong,\r\nSpirit, answer now my song!\r\n\r\nA soft strain of music sounded, and then at the back of the cave appeared a little figure in cloudy white, with glittering wings, golden hair, and a garland of roses on its head. Waving a wand, it sang...\r\n\r\nHither I come,\r\nFrom my airy home,\r\nAfar in the silver moon.\r\nTake the magic spell,\r\nAnd use it well,\r\nOr its power will vanish soon!\r\n\r\nAnd dropping a small, gilded bottle at the witch\u2019s feet, the spirit vanished. Another chant from Hagar produced another apparition, not a lovely one, for with a bang an ugly black imp appeared and, having croaked a reply, tossed a dark bottle at Hugo and disappeared with a mocking laugh. Having warbled his thanks and put the potions in his boots, Hugo departed, and Hagar informed the audience that as he had killed a few of her friends in times past, she had cursed him, and intends to thwart his plans, and be revenged on him. Then the curtain fell, and the audience reposed and ate candy while discussing the merits of the play.\r\n\r\nA good deal of hammering went on before the curtain rose again, but when it became evident what a masterpiece of stage carpentery had been got up, no one murmured at the delay. It was truly superb. A tower rose to the ceiling, halfway up appeared a window with a lamp burning in it, and behind the white curtain appeared Zara in a lovely blue and silver dress, waiting for Roderigo. He came in gorgeous array, with plumed cap, red cloak, chestnut lovelocks, a guitar, and the boots, of course. Kneeling at the foot of the tower, he sang a serenade in melting tones. Zara replied and, after a musical dialogue, consented to fly. Then came the grand effect of the play. Roderigo produced a rope ladder, with five steps to it, threw up one end, and invited Zara to descend. Timidly she crept from her lattice, put her hand on Roderigo\u2019s shoulder, and was about to leap gracefully down when \u201cAlas! Alas for Zara!\u201d she forgot her train. It caught in the window, the tower tottered, leaned forward, fell with a crash, and buried the unhappy lovers in the ruins.\r\n\r\nA universal shriek arose as the russet boots waved wildly from the wreck and a golden head emerged, exclaiming, \u201cI told you so! I told you so!\u201d With wonderful presence of mind, Don Pedro, the cruel sire, rushed in, dragged out his daughter, with a hasty aside...\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t laugh! Act as if it was all right!\u201d and, ordering Roderigo up, banished him from the kingdom with wrath and scorn. Though decidedly shaken by the fall from the tower upon him, Roderigo defied the old gentleman and refused to stir. This dauntless example fired Zara. She also defied her sire, and he ordered them both to the deepest dungeons of the castle. A stout little retainer came in with chains and led them away, looking very much frightened and evidently forgetting the speech he ought to have made.\r\n\r\nAct third was the castle hall, and here Hagar appeared, having come to free the lovers and finish Hugo. She hears him coming and hides, sees him put the potions into two cups of wine and bid the timid little servant, \u201cBear them to the captives in their cells, and tell them I shall come anon.\u201d The servant takes Hugo aside to tell him something, and Hagar changes the cups for two others which are harmless. Ferdinando, the \u2018minion\u2019, carries them away, and Hagar puts back the cup which holds the poison meant for Roderigo. Hugo, getting thirsty after a long warble, drinks it, loses his wits, and after a good deal of clutching and stamping, falls flat and dies, while Hagar informs him what she has done in a song of exquisite power and melody.\r\n\r\nThis was a truly thrilling scene, though some persons might have thought that the sudden tumbling down of a quantity of long red hair rather marred the effect of the villain\u2019s death. He was called before the curtain, and with great propriety appeared, leading Hagar, whose singing was considered more wonderful than all the rest of the performance put together.\r\n\r\nAct fourth displayed the despairing Roderigo on the point of stabbing himself because he has been told that Zara has deserted him. Just as the dagger is at his heart, a lovely song is sung under his window, informing him that Zara is true but in danger, and he can save her if he will. A key is thrown in, which unlocks the door, and in a spasm of rapture he tears off his chains and rushes away to find and rescue his lady love.\r\n\r\nAct fifth opened with a stormy scene between Zara and Don Pedro. He wishes her to go into a convent, but she won\u2019t hear of it, and after a touching appeal, is about to faint when Roderigo dashes in and demands her hand. Don Pedro refuses, because he is not rich. They shout and gesticulate tremendously but cannot agree, and Rodrigo is about to bear away the exhausted Zara, when the timid servant enters with a letter and a bag from Hagar, who has mysteriously disappeared. The latter informs the party that she bequeaths untold wealth to the young pair and an awful doom to Don Pedro, if he doesn\u2019t make them happy. The bag is opened, and several quarts of tin money shower down upon the stage till it is quite glorified with the glitter. This entirely softens the stern sire. He consents without a murmur, all join in a joyful chorus, and the curtain falls upon the lovers kneeling to receive Don Pedro\u2019s blessing in attitudes of the most romantic grace.\r\n\r\nTumultuous applause followed but received an unexpected check, for the cot bed, on which the dress circle was built, suddenly shut up and extinguished the enthusiastic audience. Roderigo and Don Pedro flew to the rescue, and all were taken out unhurt, though many were speechless with laughter. The excitement had hardly subsided when Hannah appeared, with \u201cMrs. March\u2019s compliments, and would the ladies walk down to supper.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis was a surprise even to the actors, and when they saw the table, they looked at one another in rapturous amazement. It was like Marmee to get up a little treat for them, but anything so fine as this was unheard of since the departed days of plenty. There was ice cream, actually two dishes of it, pink and white, and cake and fruit and distracting French bonbons and, in the middle of the table, four great bouquets of hot house flowers.\r\n\r\nIt quite took their breath away, and they stared first at the table and then at their mother, who looked as if she enjoyed it immensely.\r\n\r\n\u201cIs it fairies?\u201d asked Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cSanta Claus,\u201d said Beth.\r\n\r\n\u201cMother did it.\u201d And Meg smiled her sweetest, in spite of her gray beard and white eyebrows.\r\n\r\n\u201cAunt March had a good fit and sent the supper,\u201d cried Jo, with a sudden inspiration.\r\n\r\n\u201cAll wrong. Old Mr. Laurence sent it,\u201d replied Mrs. March.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Laurence boy\u2019s grandfather! What in the world put such a thing into his head? We don\u2019t know him!\u201d exclaimed Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cHannah told one of his servants about your breakfast party. He is an odd old gentleman, but that pleased him. He knew my father years ago, and he sent me a polite note this afternoon, saying he hoped I would allow him to express his friendly feeling toward my children by sending them a few trifles in honor of the day. I could not refuse, and so you have a little feast at night to make up for the bread-and-milk breakfast.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat boy put it into his head, I know he did! He\u2019s a capital fellow, and I wish we could get acquainted. He looks as if he\u2019d like to know us but he\u2019s bashful, and Meg is so prim she won\u2019t let me speak to him when we pass,\u201d said Jo, as the plates went round, and the ice began to melt out of sight, with ohs and ahs of satisfaction.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou mean the people who live in the big house next door, don\u2019t you?\u201d asked one of the girls. \u201cMy mother knows old Mr. Laurence, but says he\u2019s very proud and doesn\u2019t like to mix with his neighbors. He keeps his grandson shut up, when he isn\u2019t riding or walking with his tutor, and makes him study very hard. We invited him to our party, but he didn\u2019t come. Mother says he\u2019s very nice, though he never speaks to us girls.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOur cat ran away once, and he brought her back, and we talked over the fence, and were getting on capitally, all about cricket, and so on, when he saw Meg coming, and walked off. I mean to know him some day, for he needs fun, I\u2019m sure he does,\u201d said Jo decidedly.\r\n\r\n\u201cI like his manners, and he looks like a little gentleman, so I\u2019ve no objection to your knowing him, if a proper opportunity comes. He brought the flowers himself, and I should have asked him in, if I had been sure what was going on upstairs. He looked so wistful as he went away, hearing the frolic and evidently having none of his own.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a mercy you didn\u2019t, Mother!\u201d laughed Jo, looking at her boots. \u201cBut we\u2019ll have another play sometime that he can see. Perhaps he\u2019ll help act. Wouldn\u2019t that be jolly?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI never had such a fine bouquet before! How pretty it is!\u201d And Meg examined her flowers with great interest.\r\n\r\n\u201cThey are lovely. But Beth\u2019s roses are sweeter to me,\u201d said Mrs. March, smelling the half-dead posy in her belt.\r\n\r\nBeth nestled up to her, and whispered softly, \u201cI wish I could send my bunch to Father. I\u2019m afraid he isn\u2019t having such a merry Christmas as we are.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER THREE\r\nTHE LAURENCE BOY\r\n\r\n\u201cJo! Jo! Where are you?\u201d cried Meg at the foot of the garret stairs.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere!\u201d answered a husky voice from above, and, running up, Meg found her sister eating apples and crying over the Heir of Redclyffe, wrapped up in a comforter on an old three-legged sofa by the sunny window. This was Jo\u2019s favorite refuge, and here she loved to retire with half a dozen russets and a nice book, to enjoy the quiet and the society of a pet rat who lived near by and didn\u2019t mind her a particle. As Meg appeared, Scrabble whisked into his hole. Jo shook the tears off her cheeks and waited to hear the news.\r\n\r\n\u201cSuch fun! Only see! A regular note of invitation from Mrs. Gardiner for tomorrow night!\u201d cried Meg, waving the precious paper and then proceeding to read it with girlish delight.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Mrs. Gardiner would be happy to see Miss March and Miss Josephine at a little dance on New Year\u2019s Eve.\u2019 Marmee is willing we should go, now what shall we wear?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the use of asking that, when you know we shall wear our poplins, because we haven\u2019t got anything else?\u201d answered Jo with her mouth full.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf I only had a silk!\u201d sighed Meg. \u201cMother says I may when I\u2019m eighteen perhaps, but two years is an everlasting time to wait.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m sure our pops look like silk, and they are nice enough for us. Yours is as good as new, but I forgot the burn and the tear in mine. Whatever shall I do? The burn shows badly, and I can\u2019t take any out.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou must sit still all you can and keep your back out of sight. The front is all right. I shall have a new ribbon for my hair, and Marmee will lend me her little pearl pin, and my new slippers are lovely, and my gloves will do, though they aren\u2019t as nice as I\u2019d like.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMine are spoiled with lemonade, and I can\u2019t get any new ones, so I shall have to go without,\u201d said Jo, who never troubled herself much about dress.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou must have gloves, or I won\u2019t go,\u201d cried Meg decidedly. \u201cGloves are more important than anything else. You can\u2019t dance without them, and if you don\u2019t I should be so mortified.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen I\u2019ll stay still. I don\u2019t care much for company dancing. It\u2019s no fun to go sailing round. I like to fly about and cut capers.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou can\u2019t ask Mother for new ones, they are so expensive, and you are so careless. She said when you spoiled the others that she shouldn\u2019t get you any more this winter. Can\u2019t you make them do?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can hold them crumpled up in my hand, so no one will know how stained they are. That\u2019s all I can do. No! I\u2019ll tell you how we can manage, each wear one good one and carry a bad one. Don\u2019t you see?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYour hands are bigger than mine, and you will stretch my glove dreadfully,\u201d began Meg, whose gloves were a tender point with her.\r\n\r\n\u201cThen I\u2019ll go without. I don\u2019t care what people say!\u201d cried Jo, taking up her book.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou may have it, you may! Only don\u2019t stain it, and do behave nicely. Don\u2019t put your hands behind you, or stare, or say \u2018Christopher Columbus!\u2019 will you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t worry about me. I\u2019ll be as prim as I can and not get into any scrapes, if I can help it. Now go and answer your note, and let me finish this splendid story.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo Meg went away to \u2018accept with thanks\u2019, look over her dress, and sing blithely as she did up her one real lace frill, while Jo finished her story, her four apples, and had a game of romps with Scrabble.\r\n\r\nOn New Year\u2019s Eve the parlor was deserted, for the two younger girls played dressing maids and the two elder were absorbed in the all-important business of \u2018getting ready for the party\u2019. Simple as the toilets were, there was a great deal of running up and down, laughing and talking, and at one time a strong smell of burned hair pervaded the house. Meg wanted a few curls about her face, and Jo undertook to pinch the papered locks with a pair of hot tongs.\r\n\r\n\u201cOught they to smoke like that?\u201d asked Beth from her perch on the bed.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s the dampness drying,\u201d replied Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat a queer smell! It\u2019s like burned feathers,\u201d observed Amy, smoothing her own pretty curls with a superior air.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere, now I\u2019ll take off the papers and you\u2019ll see a cloud of little ringlets,\u201d said Jo, putting down the tongs.\r\n\r\nShe did take off the papers, but no cloud of ringlets appeared, for the hair came with the papers, and the horrified hairdresser laid a row of little scorched bundles on the bureau before her victim.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, oh, oh! What have you done? I\u2019m spoiled! I can\u2019t go! My hair, oh, my hair!\u201d wailed Meg, looking with despair at the uneven frizzle on her forehead.\r\n\r\n\u201cJust my luck! You shouldn\u2019t have asked me to do it. I always spoil everything. I\u2019m so sorry, but the tongs were too hot, and so I\u2019ve made a mess,\u201d groaned poor Jo, regarding the little black pancakes with tears of regret.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt isn\u2019t spoiled. Just frizzle it, and tie your ribbon so the ends come on your forehead a bit, and it will look like the last fashion. I\u2019ve seen many girls do it so,\u201d said Amy consolingly.\r\n\r\n\u201cServes me right for trying to be fine. I wish I\u2019d let my hair alone,\u201d cried Meg petulantly.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo do I, it was so smooth and pretty. But it will soon grow out again,\u201d said Beth, coming to kiss and comfort the shorn sheep.\r\n\r\nAfter various lesser mishaps, Meg was finished at last, and by the united exertions of the entire family Jo\u2019s hair was got up and her dress on. They looked very well in their simple suits, Meg\u2019s in silvery drab, with a blue velvet snood, lace frills, and the pearl pin. Jo in maroon, with a stiff, gentlemanly linen collar, and a white chrysanthemum or two for her only ornament. Each put on one nice light glove, and carried one soiled one, and all pronounced the effect \u201cquite easy and fine\u201d. Meg\u2019s high-heeled slippers were very tight and hurt her, though she would not own it, and Jo\u2019s nineteen hairpins all seemed stuck straight into her head, which was not exactly comfortable, but, dear me, let us be elegant or die.\r\n\r\n\u201cHave a good time, dearies!\u201d said Mrs. March, as the sisters went daintily down the walk. \u201cDon\u2019t eat much supper, and come away at eleven when I send Hannah for you.\u201d As the gate clashed behind them, a voice cried from a window...\r\n\r\n\u201cGirls, girls! Have you you both got nice pocket handkerchiefs?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, yes, spandy nice, and Meg has cologne on hers,\u201d cried Jo, adding with a laugh as they went on, \u201cI do believe Marmee would ask that if we were all running away from an earthquake.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is one of her aristocratic tastes, and quite proper, for a real lady is always known by neat boots, gloves, and handkerchief,\u201d replied Meg, who had a good many little \u2018aristocratic tastes\u2019 of her own.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow don\u2019t forget to keep the bad breadth out of sight, Jo. Is my sash right? And does my hair look very bad?\u201d said Meg, as she turned from the glass in Mrs. Gardiner\u2019s dressing room after a prolonged prink.\r\n\r\n\u201cI know I shall forget. If you see me doing anything wrong, just remind me by a wink, will you?\u201d returned Jo, giving her collar a twitch and her head a hasty brush.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, winking isn\u2019t ladylike. I\u2019ll lift my eyebrows if any thing is wrong, and nod if you are all right. Now hold your shoulder straight, and take short steps, and don\u2019t shake hands if you are introduced to anyone. It isn\u2019t the thing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow do you learn all the proper ways? I never can. Isn\u2019t that music gay?\u201d\r\n\r\nDown they went, feeling a trifle timid, for they seldom went to parties, and informal as this little gathering was, it was an event to them. Mrs. Gardiner, a stately old lady, greeted them kindly and handed them over to the eldest of her six daughters. Meg knew Sallie and was at her ease very soon, but Jo, who didn\u2019t care much for girls or girlish gossip, stood about, with her back carefully against the wall, and felt as much out of place as a colt in a flower garden. Half a dozen jovial lads were talking about skates in another part of the room, and she longed to go and join them, for skating was one of the joys of her life. She telegraphed her wish to Meg, but the eyebrows went up so alarmingly that she dared not stir. No one came to talk to her, and one by one the group dwindled away till she was left alone. She could not roam about and amuse herself, for the burned breadth would show, so she stared at people rather forlornly till the dancing began. Meg was asked at once, and the tight slippers tripped about so briskly that none would have guessed the pain their wearer suffered smilingly. Jo saw a big red headed youth approaching her corner, and fearing he meant to engage her, she slipped into a curtained recess, intending to peep and enjoy herself in peace. Unfortunately, another bashful person had chosen the same refuge, for, as the curtain fell behind her, she found herself face to face with the \u2018Laurence boy\u2019.\r\n\r\n\u201cDear me, I didn\u2019t know anyone was here!\u201d stammered Jo, preparing to back out as speedily as she had bounced in.\r\n\r\nBut the boy laughed and said pleasantly, though he looked a little startled, \u201cDon\u2019t mind me, stay if you like.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShan\u2019t I disturb you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a bit. I only came here because I don\u2019t know many people and felt rather strange at first, you know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo did I. Don\u2019t go away, please, unless you\u2019d rather.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe boy sat down again and looked at his pumps, till Jo said, trying to be polite and easy, \u201cI think I\u2019ve had the pleasure of seeing you before. You live near us, don\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNext door.\u201d And he looked up and laughed outright, for Jo\u2019s prim manner was rather funny when he remembered how they had chatted about cricket when he brought the cat home.\r\n\r\nThat put Jo at her ease and she laughed too, as she said, in her heartiest way, \u201cWe did have such a good time over your nice Christmas present.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGrandpa sent it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut you put it into his head, didn\u2019t you, now?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow is your cat, Miss March?\u201d asked the boy, trying to look sober while his black eyes shone with fun.\r\n\r\n\u201cNicely, thank you, Mr. Laurence. But I am not Miss March, I\u2019m only Jo,\u201d returned the young lady.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m not Mr. Laurence, I\u2019m only Laurie.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLaurie Laurence, what an odd name.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy first name is Theodore, but I don\u2019t like it, for the fellows called me Dora, so I made them say Laurie instead.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hate my name, too, so sentimental! I wish every one would say Jo instead of Josephine. How did you make the boys stop calling you Dora?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thrashed \u2019em.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t thrash Aunt March, so I suppose I shall have to bear it.\u201d And Jo resigned herself with a sigh.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you like to dance, Miss Jo?\u201d asked Laurie, looking as if he thought the name suited her.\r\n\r\n\u201cI like it well enough if there is plenty of room, and everyone is lively. In a place like this I\u2019m sure to upset something, tread on people\u2019s toes, or do something dreadful, so I keep out of mischief and let Meg sail about. Don\u2019t you dance?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSometimes. You see I\u2019ve been abroad a good many years, and haven\u2019t been into company enough yet to know how you do things here.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAbroad!\u201d cried Jo. \u201cOh, tell me about it! I love dearly to hear people describe their travels.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie didn\u2019t seem to know where to begin, but Jo\u2019s eager questions soon set him going, and he told her how he had been at school in Vevay, where the boys never wore hats and had a fleet of boats on the lake, and for holiday fun went on walking trips about Switzerland with their teachers.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t I wish I\u2019d been there!\u201d cried Jo. \u201cDid you go to Paris?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe spent last winter there.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCan you talk French?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe were not allowed to speak anything else at Vevay.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo say some! I can read it, but can\u2019t pronounce.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cQuel nom a cette jeune demoiselle en les pantoufles jolis?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow nicely you do it! Let me see ... you said, \u2018Who is the young lady in the pretty slippers\u2019, didn\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOui, mademoiselle.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s my sister Margaret, and you knew it was! Do you think she is pretty?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, she makes me think of the German girls, she looks so fresh and quiet, and dances like a lady.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo quite glowed with pleasure at this boyish praise of her sister, and stored it up to repeat to Meg. Both peeped and criticized and chatted till they felt like old acquaintances. Laurie\u2019s bashfulness soon wore off, for Jo\u2019s gentlemanly demeanor amused and set him at his ease, and Jo was her merry self again, because her dress was forgotten and nobody lifted their eyebrows at her. She liked the \u2018Laurence boy\u2019 better than ever and took several good looks at him, so that she might describe him to the girls, for they had no brothers, very few male cousins, and boys were almost unknown creatures to them.\r\n\r\n\u201cCurly black hair, brown skin, big black eyes, handsome nose, fine teeth, small hands and feet, taller than I am, very polite, for a boy, and altogether jolly. Wonder how old he is?\u201d\r\n\r\nIt was on the tip of Jo\u2019s tongue to ask, but she checked herself in time and, with unusual tact, tried to find out in a round-about way.\r\n\r\n\u201cI suppose you are going to college soon? I see you pegging away at your books, no, I mean studying hard.\u201d And Jo blushed at the dreadful \u2018pegging\u2019 which had escaped her.\r\n\r\nLaurie smiled but didn\u2019t seem shocked, and answered with a shrug. \u201cNot for a year or two. I won\u2019t go before seventeen, anyway.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAren\u2019t you but fifteen?\u201d asked Jo, looking at the tall lad, whom she had imagined seventeen already.\r\n\r\n\u201cSixteen, next month.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow I wish I was going to college! You don\u2019t look as if you liked it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hate it! Nothing but grinding or skylarking. And I don\u2019t like the way fellows do either, in this country.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you like?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTo live in Italy, and to enjoy myself in my own way.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo wanted very much to ask what his own way was, but his black brows looked rather threatening as he knit them, so she changed the subject by saying, as her foot kept time, \u201cThat\u2019s a splendid polka! Why don\u2019t you go and try it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you will come too,\u201d he answered, with a gallant little bow.\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t, for I told Meg I wouldn\u2019t, because...\u201d There Jo stopped, and looked undecided whether to tell or to laugh.\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause, what?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou won\u2019t tell?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNever!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I have a bad trick of standing before the fire, and so I burn my frocks, and I scorched this one, and though it\u2019s nicely mended, it shows, and Meg told me to keep still so no one would see it. You may laugh, if you want to. It is funny, I know.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut Laurie didn\u2019t laugh. He only looked down a minute, and the expression of his face puzzled Jo when he said very gently, \u201cNever mind that. I\u2019ll tell you how we can manage. There\u2019s a long hall out there, and we can dance grandly, and no one will see us. Please come.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo thanked him and gladly went, wishing she had two neat gloves when she saw the nice, pearl-colored ones her partner wore. The hall was empty, and they had a grand polka, for Laurie danced well, and taught her the German step, which delighted Jo, being full of swing and spring. When the music stopped, they sat down on the stairs to get their breath, and Laurie was in the midst of an account of a students\u2019 festival at Heidelberg when Meg appeared in search of her sister. She beckoned, and Jo reluctantly followed her into a side room, where she found her on a sofa, holding her foot, and looking pale.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve sprained my ankle. That stupid high heel turned and gave me a sad wrench. It aches so, I can hardly stand, and I don\u2019t know how I\u2019m ever going to get home,\u201d she said, rocking to and fro in pain.\r\n\r\n\u201cI knew you\u2019d hurt your feet with those silly shoes. I\u2019m sorry. But I don\u2019t see what you can do, except get a carriage, or stay here all night,\u201d answered Jo, softly rubbing the poor ankle as she spoke.\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t have a carriage without its costing ever so much. I dare say I can\u2019t get one at all, for most people come in their own, and it\u2019s a long way to the stable, and no one to send.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll go.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, indeed! It\u2019s past nine, and dark as Egypt. I can\u2019t stop here, for the house is full. Sallie has some girls staying with her. I\u2019ll rest till Hannah comes, and then do the best I can.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll ask Laurie. He will go,\u201d said Jo, looking relieved as the idea occurred to her.\r\n\r\n\u201cMercy, no! Don\u2019t ask or tell anyone. Get me my rubbers, and put these slippers with our things. I can\u2019t dance anymore, but as soon as supper is over, watch for Hannah and tell me the minute she comes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey are going out to supper now. I\u2019ll stay with you. I\u2019d rather.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, dear, run along, and bring me some coffee. I\u2019m so tired I can\u2019t stir.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo Meg reclined, with rubbers well hidden, and Jo went blundering away to the dining room, which she found after going into a china closet, and opening the door of a room where old Mr. Gardiner was taking a little private refreshment. Making a dart at the table, she secured the coffee, which she immediately spilled, thereby making the front of her dress as bad as the back.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, dear, what a blunderbuss I am!\u201d exclaimed Jo, finishing Meg\u2019s glove by scrubbing her gown with it.\r\n\r\n\u201cCan I help you?\u201d said a friendly voice. And there was Laurie, with a full cup in one hand and a plate of ice in the other.\r\n\r\n\u201cI was trying to get something for Meg, who is very tired, and someone shook me, and here I am in a nice state,\u201d answered Jo, glancing dismally from the stained skirt to the coffee-colored glove.\r\n\r\n\u201cToo bad! I was looking for someone to give this to. May I take it to your sister?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, thank you! I\u2019ll show you where she is. I don\u2019t offer to take it myself, for I should only get into another scrape if I did.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo led the way, and as if used to waiting on ladies, Laurie drew up a little table, brought a second installment of coffee and ice for Jo, and was so obliging that even particular Meg pronounced him a \u2018nice boy\u2019. They had a merry time over the bonbons and mottoes, and were in the midst of a quiet game of Buzz, with two or three other young people who had strayed in, when Hannah appeared. Meg forgot her foot and rose so quickly that she was forced to catch hold of Jo, with an exclamation of pain.\r\n\r\n\u201cHush! Don\u2019t say anything,\u201d she whispered, adding aloud, \u201cIt\u2019s nothing. I turned my foot a little, that\u2019s all,\u201d and limped upstairs to put her things on.\r\n\r\nHannah scolded, Meg cried, and Jo was at her wits\u2019 end, till she decided to take things into her own hands. Slipping out, she ran down and, finding a servant, asked if he could get her a carriage. It happened to be a hired waiter who knew nothing about the neighborhood and Jo was looking round for help when Laurie, who had heard what she said, came up and offered his grandfather\u2019s carriage, which had just come for him, he said.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s so early! You can\u2019t mean to go yet?\u201d began Jo, looking relieved but hesitating to accept the offer.\r\n\r\n\u201cI always go early, I do, truly! Please let me take you home. It\u2019s all on my way, you know, and it rains, they say.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat settled it, and telling him of Meg\u2019s mishap, Jo gratefully accepted and rushed up to bring down the rest of the party. Hannah hated rain as much as a cat does so she made no trouble, and they rolled away in the luxurious close carriage, feeling very festive and elegant. Laurie went on the box so Meg could keep her foot up, and the girls talked over their party in freedom.\r\n\r\n\u201cI had a capital time. Did you?\u201d asked Jo, rumpling up her hair, and making herself comfortable.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, till I hurt myself. Sallie\u2019s friend, Annie Moffat, took a fancy to me, and asked me to come and spend a week with her when Sallie does. She is going in the spring when the opera comes, and it will be perfectly splendid, if Mother only lets me go,\u201d answered Meg, cheering up at the thought.\r\n\r\n\u201cI saw you dancing with the red headed man I ran away from. Was he nice?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, very! His hair is auburn, not red, and he was very polite, and I had a delicious redowa with him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe looked like a grasshopper in a fit when he did the new step. Laurie and I couldn\u2019t help laughing. Did you hear us?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, but it was very rude. What were you about all that time, hidden away there?\u201d\r\n\r\nJo told her adventures, and by the time she had finished they were at home. With many thanks, they said good night and crept in, hoping to disturb no one, but the instant their door creaked, two little nightcaps bobbed up, and two sleepy but eager voices cried out...\r\n\r\n\u201cTell about the party! Tell about the party!\u201d\r\n\r\nWith what Meg called \u2018a great want of manners\u2019 Jo had saved some bonbons for the little girls, and they soon subsided, after hearing the most thrilling events of the evening.\r\n\r\n\u201cI declare, it really seems like being a fine young lady, to come home from the party in a carriage and sit in my dressing gown with a maid to wait on me,\u201d said Meg, as Jo bound up her foot with arnica and brushed her hair.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t believe fine young ladies enjoy themselves a bit more than we do, in spite of our burned hair, old gowns, one glove apiece and tight slippers that sprain our ankles when we are silly enough to wear them.\u201d And I think Jo was quite right.\r\nCHAPTER FOUR\r\nBURDENS\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, dear, how hard it does seem to take up our packs and go on,\u201d sighed Meg the morning after the party, for now the holidays were over, the week of merrymaking did not fit her for going on easily with the task she never liked.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish it was Christmas or New Year\u2019s all the time. Wouldn\u2019t it be fun?\u201d answered Jo, yawning dismally.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe shouldn\u2019t enjoy ourselves half so much as we do now. But it does seem so nice to have little suppers and bouquets, and go to parties, and drive home, and read and rest, and not work. It\u2019s like other people, you know, and I always envy girls who do such things, I\u2019m so fond of luxury,\u201d said Meg, trying to decide which of two shabby gowns was the least shabby.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, we can\u2019t have it, so don\u2019t let us grumble but shoulder our bundles and trudge along as cheerfully as Marmee does. I\u2019m sure Aunt March is a regular Old Man of the Sea to me, but I suppose when I\u2019ve learned to carry her without complaining, she will tumble off, or get so light that I shan\u2019t mind her.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis idea tickled Jo\u2019s fancy and put her in good spirits, but Meg didn\u2019t brighten, for her burden, consisting of four spoiled children, seemed heavier than ever. She had not heart enough even to make herself pretty as usual by putting on a blue neck ribbon and dressing her hair in the most becoming way.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere\u2019s the use of looking nice, when no one sees me but those cross midgets, and no one cares whether I\u2019m pretty or not?\u201d she muttered, shutting her drawer with a jerk. \u201cI shall have to toil and moil all my days, with only little bits of fun now and then, and get old and ugly and sour, because I\u2019m poor and can\u2019t enjoy my life as other girls do. It\u2019s a shame!\u201d\r\n\r\nSo Meg went down, wearing an injured look, and wasn\u2019t at all agreeable at breakfast time. Everyone seemed rather out of sorts and inclined to croak.\r\n\r\nBeth had a headache and lay on the sofa, trying to comfort herself with the cat and three kittens. Amy was fretting because her lessons were not learned, and she couldn\u2019t find her rubbers. Jo would whistle and make a great racket getting ready.\r\n\r\nMrs. March was very busy trying to finish a letter, which must go at once, and Hannah had the grumps, for being up late didn\u2019t suit her.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere never was such a cross family!\u201d cried Jo, losing her temper when she had upset an inkstand, broken both boot lacings, and sat down upon her hat.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019re the crossest person in it!\u201d returned Amy, washing out the sum that was all wrong with the tears that had fallen on her slate.\r\n\r\n\u201cBeth, if you don\u2019t keep these horrid cats down cellar I\u2019ll have them drowned,\u201d exclaimed Meg angrily as she tried to get rid of the kitten which had scrambled up her back and stuck like a burr just out of reach.\r\n\r\nJo laughed, Meg scolded, Beth implored, and Amy wailed because she couldn\u2019t remember how much nine times twelve was.\r\n\r\n\u201cGirls, girls, do be quiet one minute! I must get this off by the early mail, and you drive me distracted with your worry,\u201d cried Mrs. March, crossing out the third spoiled sentence in her letter.\r\n\r\nThere was a momentary lull, broken by Hannah, who stalked in, laid two hot turnovers on the table, and stalked out again. These turnovers were an institution, and the girls called them \u2018muffs\u2019, for they had no others and found the hot pies very comforting to their hands on cold mornings.\r\n\r\nHannah never forgot to make them, no matter how busy or grumpy she might be, for the walk was long and bleak. The poor things got no other lunch and were seldom home before two.\r\n\r\n\u201cCuddle your cats and get over your headache, Bethy. Goodbye, Marmee. We are a set of rascals this morning, but we\u2019ll come home regular angels. Now then, Meg!\u201d And Jo tramped away, feeling that the pilgrims were not setting out as they ought to do.\r\n\r\nThey always looked back before turning the corner, for their mother was always at the window to nod and smile, and wave her hand to them. Somehow it seemed as if they couldn\u2019t have got through the day without that, for whatever their mood might be, the last glimpse of that motherly face was sure to affect them like sunshine.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf Marmee shook her fist instead of kissing her hand to us, it would serve us right, for more ungrateful wretches than we are were never seen,\u201d cried Jo, taking a remorseful satisfaction in the snowy walk and bitter wind.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t use such dreadful expressions,\u201d replied Meg from the depths of the veil in which she had shrouded herself like a nun sick of the world.\r\n\r\n\u201cI like good strong words that mean something,\u201d replied Jo, catching her hat as it took a leap off her head preparatory to flying away altogether.\r\n\r\n\u201cCall yourself any names you like, but I am neither a rascal nor a wretch and I don\u2019t choose to be called so.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019re a blighted being, and decidedly cross today because you can\u2019t sit in the lap of luxury all the time. Poor dear, just wait till I make my fortune, and you shall revel in carriages and ice cream and high-heeled slippers, and posies, and red-headed boys to dance with.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow ridiculous you are, Jo!\u201d But Meg laughed at the nonsense and felt better in spite of herself.\r\n\r\n\u201cLucky for you I am, for if I put on crushed airs and tried to be dismal, as you do, we should be in a nice state. Thank goodness, I can always find something funny to keep me up. Don\u2019t croak any more, but come home jolly, there\u2019s a dear.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo gave her sister an encouraging pat on the shoulder as they parted for the day, each going a different way, each hugging her little warm turnover, and each trying to be cheerful in spite of wintry weather, hard work, and the unsatisfied desires of pleasure-loving youth.\r\n\r\nWhen Mr. March lost his property in trying to help an unfortunate friend, the two oldest girls begged to be allowed to do something toward their own support, at least. Believing that they could not begin too early to cultivate energy, industry, and independence, their parents consented, and both fell to work with the hearty good will which in spite of all obstacles is sure to succeed at last.\r\n\r\nMargaret found a place as nursery governess and felt rich with her small salary. As she said, she was \u2018fond of luxury\u2019, and her chief trouble was poverty. She found it harder to bear than the others because she could remember a time when home was beautiful, life full of ease and pleasure, and want of any kind unknown. She tried not to be envious or discontented, but it was very natural that the young girl should long for pretty things, gay friends, accomplishments, and a happy life. At the Kings\u2019 she daily saw all she wanted, for the children\u2019s older sisters were just out, and Meg caught frequent glimpses of dainty ball dresses and bouquets, heard lively gossip about theaters, concerts, sleighing parties, and merrymakings of all kinds, and saw money lavished on trifles which would have been so precious to her. Poor Meg seldom complained, but a sense of injustice made her feel bitter toward everyone sometimes, for she had not yet learned to know how rich she was in the blessings which alone can make life happy.\r\n\r\nJo happened to suit Aunt March, who was lame and needed an active person to wait upon her. The childless old lady had offered to adopt one of the girls when the troubles came, and was much offended because her offer was declined. Other friends told the Marches that they had lost all chance of being remembered in the rich old lady\u2019s will, but the unworldly Marches only said...\r\n\r\n\u201cWe can\u2019t give up our girls for a dozen fortunes. Rich or poor, we will keep together and be happy in one another.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe old lady wouldn\u2019t speak to them for a time, but happening to meet Jo at a friend\u2019s, something in her comical face and blunt manners struck the old lady\u2019s fancy, and she proposed to take her for a companion. This did not suit Jo at all, but she accepted the place since nothing better appeared and, to every one\u2019s surprise, got on remarkably well with her irascible relative. There was an occasional tempest, and once Jo marched home, declaring she couldn\u2019t bear it longer, but Aunt March always cleared up quickly, and sent for her to come back again with such urgency that she could not refuse, for in her heart she rather liked the peppery old lady.\r\n\r\nI suspect that the real attraction was a large library of fine books, which was left to dust and spiders since Uncle March died. Jo remembered the kind old gentleman, who used to let her build railroads and bridges with his big dictionaries, tell her stories about queer pictures in his Latin books, and buy her cards of gingerbread whenever he met her in the street. The dim, dusty room, with the busts staring down from the tall bookcases, the cozy chairs, the globes, and best of all, the wilderness of books in which she could wander where she liked, made the library a region of bliss to her.\r\n\r\nThe moment Aunt March took her nap, or was busy with company, Jo hurried to this quiet place, and curling herself up in the easy chair, devoured poetry, romance, history, travels, and pictures like a regular bookworm. But, like all happiness, it did not last long, for as sure as she had just reached the heart of the story, the sweetest verse of a song, or the most perilous adventure of her traveler, a shrill voice called, \u201cJosy-phine! Josy-phine!\u201d and she had to leave her paradise to wind yarn, wash the poodle, or read Belsham\u2019s Essays by the hour together.\r\n\r\nJo\u2019s ambition was to do something very splendid. What it was, she had no idea as yet, but left it for time to tell her, and meanwhile, found her greatest affliction in the fact that she couldn\u2019t read, run, and ride as much as she liked. A quick temper, sharp tongue, and restless spirit were always getting her into scrapes, and her life was a series of ups and downs, which were both comic and pathetic. But the training she received at Aunt March\u2019s was just what she needed, and the thought that she was doing something to support herself made her happy in spite of the perpetual \u201cJosy-phine!\u201d\r\n\r\nBeth was too bashful to go to school. It had been tried, but she suffered so much that it was given up, and she did her lessons at home with her father. Even when he went away, and her mother was called to devote her skill and energy to Soldiers\u2019 Aid Societies, Beth went faithfully on by herself and did the best she could. She was a housewifely little creature, and helped Hannah keep home neat and comfortable for the workers, never thinking of any reward but to be loved. Long, quiet days she spent, not lonely nor idle, for her little world was peopled with imaginary friends, and she was by nature a busy bee. There were six dolls to be taken up and dressed every morning, for Beth was a child still and loved her pets as well as ever. Not one whole or handsome one among them, all were outcasts till Beth took them in, for when her sisters outgrew these idols, they passed to her because Amy would have nothing old or ugly. Beth cherished them all the more tenderly for that very reason, and set up a hospital for infirm dolls. No pins were ever stuck into their cotton vitals, no harsh words or blows were ever given them, no neglect ever saddened the heart of the most repulsive, but all were fed and clothed, nursed and caressed with an affection which never failed. One forlorn fragment of dollanity had belonged to Jo and, having led a tempestuous life, was left a wreck in the rag bag, from which dreary poorhouse it was rescued by Beth and taken to her refuge. Having no top to its head, she tied on a neat little cap, and as both arms and legs were gone, she hid these deficiencies by folding it in a blanket and devoting her best bed to this chronic invalid. If anyone had known the care lavished on that dolly, I think it would have touched their hearts, even while they laughed. She brought it bits of bouquets, she read to it, took it out to breathe fresh air, hidden under her coat, she sang it lullabies and never went to bed without kissing its dirty face and whispering tenderly, \u201cI hope you\u2019ll have a good night, my poor dear.\u201d\r\n\r\nBeth had her troubles as well as the others, and not being an angel but a very human little girl, she often \u2018wept a little weep\u2019 as Jo said, because she couldn\u2019t take music lessons and have a fine piano. She loved music so dearly, tried so hard to learn, and practiced away so patiently at the jingling old instrument, that it did seem as if someone (not to hint Aunt March) ought to help her. Nobody did, however, and nobody saw Beth wipe the tears off the yellow keys, that wouldn\u2019t keep in tune, when she was all alone. She sang like a little lark about her work, never was too tired for Marmee and the girls, and day after day said hopefully to herself, \u201cI know I\u2019ll get my music some time, if I\u2019m good.\u201d\r\n\r\nThere are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.\r\n\r\nIf anybody had asked Amy what the greatest trial of her life was, she would have answered at once, \u201cMy nose.\u201d When she was a baby, Jo had accidently dropped her into the coal hod, and Amy insisted that the fall had ruined her nose forever. It was not big nor red, like poor \u2018Petrea\u2019s\u2019, it was only rather flat, and all the pinching in the world could not give it an aristocratic point. No one minded it but herself, and it was doing its best to grow, but Amy felt deeply the want of a Grecian nose, and drew whole sheets of handsome ones to console herself.\r\n\r\n\u201cLittle Raphael,\u201d as her sisters called her, had a decided talent for drawing, and was never so happy as when copying flowers, designing fairies, or illustrating stories with queer specimens of art. Her teachers complained that instead of doing her sums she covered her slate with animals, the blank pages of her atlas were used to copy maps on, and caricatures of the most ludicrous description came fluttering out of all her books at unlucky moments. She got through her lessons as well as she could, and managed to escape reprimands by being a model of deportment. She was a great favorite with her mates, being good-tempered and possessing the happy art of pleasing without effort. Her little airs and graces were much admired, so were her accomplishments, for besides her drawing, she could play twelve tunes, crochet, and read French without mispronouncing more than two-thirds of the words. She had a plaintive way of saying, \u201cWhen Papa was rich we did so-and-so,\u201d which was very touching, and her long words were considered \u2018perfectly elegant\u2019 by the girls.\r\n\r\nAmy was in a fair way to be spoiled, for everyone petted her, and her small vanities and selfishnesses were growing nicely. One thing, however, rather quenched the vanities. She had to wear her cousin\u2019s clothes. Now Florence\u2019s mama hadn\u2019t a particle of taste, and Amy suffered deeply at having to wear a red instead of a blue bonnet, unbecoming gowns, and fussy aprons that did not fit. Everything was good, well made, and little worn, but Amy\u2019s artistic eyes were much afflicted, especially this winter, when her school dress was a dull purple with yellow dots and no trimming.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy only comfort,\u201d she said to Meg, with tears in her eyes, \u201cis that Mother doesn\u2019t take tucks in my dresses whenever I\u2019m naughty, as Maria Parks\u2019s mother does. My dear, it\u2019s really dreadful, for sometimes she is so bad her frock is up to her knees, and she can\u2019t come to school. When I think of this deggerredation, I feel that I can bear even my flat nose and purple gown with yellow sky-rockets on it.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg was Amy\u2019s confidant and monitor, and by some strange attraction of opposites Jo was gentle Beth\u2019s. To Jo alone did the shy child tell her thoughts, and over her big harum-scarum sister Beth unconsciously exercised more influence than anyone in the family. The two older girls were a great deal to one another, but each took one of the younger sisters into her keeping and watched over her in her own way, \u2018playing mother\u2019 they called it, and put their sisters in the places of discarded dolls with the maternal instinct of little women.\r\n\r\n\u201cHas anybody got anything to tell? It\u2019s been such a dismal day I\u2019m really dying for some amusement,\u201d said Meg, as they sat sewing together that evening.\r\n\r\n\u201cI had a queer time with Aunt today, and, as I got the best of it, I\u2019ll tell you about it,\u201d began Jo, who dearly loved to tell stories. \u201cI was reading that everlasting Belsham, and droning away as I always do, for Aunt soon drops off, and then I take out some nice book, and read like fury till she wakes up. I actually made myself sleepy, and before she began to nod, I gave such a gape that she asked me what I meant by opening my mouth wide enough to take the whole book in at once.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish I could, and be done with it,\u201d said I, trying not to be saucy.\r\n\r\n\u201cThen she gave me a long lecture on my sins, and told me to sit and think them over while she just \u2018lost\u2019 herself for a moment. She never finds herself very soon, so the minute her cap began to bob like a top-heavy dahlia, I whipped the Vicar of Wakefield out of my pocket, and read away, with one eye on him and one on Aunt. I\u2019d just got to where they all tumbled into the water when I forgot and laughed out loud. Aunt woke up and, being more good-natured after her nap, told me to read a bit and show what frivolous work I preferred to the worthy and instructive Belsham. I did my very best, and she liked it, though she only said...\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018I don\u2019t understand what it\u2019s all about. Go back and begin it, child.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBack I went, and made the Primroses as interesting as ever I could. Once I was wicked enough to stop in a thrilling place, and say meekly, \u2018I\u2019m afraid it tires you, ma\u2019am. Shan\u2019t I stop now?\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShe caught up her knitting, which had dropped out of her hands, gave me a sharp look through her specs, and said, in her short way, \u2018Finish the chapter, and don\u2019t be impertinent, miss\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDid she own she liked it?\u201d asked Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, bless you, no! But she let old Belsham rest, and when I ran back after my gloves this afternoon, there she was, so hard at the Vicar that she didn\u2019t hear me laugh as I danced a jig in the hall because of the good time coming. What a pleasant life she might have if only she chose! I don\u2019t envy her much, in spite of her money, for after all rich people have about as many worries as poor ones, I think,\u201d added Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat reminds me,\u201d said Meg, \u201cthat I\u2019ve got something to tell. It isn\u2019t funny, like Jo\u2019s story, but I thought about it a good deal as I came home. At the Kings\u2019 today I found everybody in a flurry, and one of the children said that her oldest brother had done something dreadful, and Papa had sent him away. I heard Mrs. King crying and Mr. King talking very loud, and Grace and Ellen turned away their faces when they passed me, so I shouldn\u2019t see how red and swollen their eyes were. I didn\u2019t ask any questions, of course, but I felt so sorry for them and was rather glad I hadn\u2019t any wild brothers to do wicked things and disgrace the family.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI think being disgraced in school is a great deal tryinger than anything bad boys can do,\u201d said Amy, shaking her head, as if her experience of life had been a deep one. \u201cSusie Perkins came to school today with a lovely red carnelian ring. I wanted it dreadfully, and wished I was her with all my might. Well, she drew a picture of Mr. Davis, with a monstrous nose and a hump, and the words, \u2018Young ladies, my eye is upon you!\u2019 coming out of his mouth in a balloon thing. We were laughing over it when all of a sudden his eye was on us, and he ordered Susie to bring up her slate. She was parrylized with fright, but she went, and oh, what do you think he did? He took her by the ear\u2014the ear! Just fancy how horrid!\u2014and led her to the recitation platform, and made her stand there half an hour, holding the slate so everyone could see.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDidn\u2019t the girls laugh at the picture?\u201d asked Jo, who relished the scrape.\r\n\r\n\u201cLaugh? Not one! They sat still as mice, and Susie cried quarts, I know she did. I didn\u2019t envy her then, for I felt that millions of carnelian rings wouldn\u2019t have made me happy after that. I never, never should have got over such a agonizing mortification.\u201d And Amy went on with her work, in the proud consciousness of virtue and the successful utterance of two long words in a breath.\r\n\r\n\u201cI saw something I liked this morning, and I meant to tell it at dinner, but I forgot,\u201d said Beth, putting Jo\u2019s topsy-turvy basket in order as she talked. \u201cWhen I went to get some oysters for Hannah, Mr. Laurence was in the fish shop, but he didn\u2019t see me, for I kept behind the fish barrel, and he was busy with Mr. Cutter the fish-man. A poor woman came in with a pail and a mop, and asked Mr. Cutter if he would let her do some scrubbing for a bit of fish, because she hadn\u2019t any dinner for her children, and had been disappointed of a day\u2019s work. Mr. Cutter was in a hurry and said \u2018No\u2019, rather crossly, so she was going away, looking hungry and sorry, when Mr. Laurence hooked up a big fish with the crooked end of his cane and held it out to her. She was so glad and surprised she took it right into her arms, and thanked him over and over. He told her to \u2018go along and cook it\u2019, and she hurried off, so happy! Wasn\u2019t it good of him? Oh, she did look so funny, hugging the big, slippery fish, and hoping Mr. Laurence\u2019s bed in heaven would be \u2018aisy\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen they had laughed at Beth\u2019s story, they asked their mother for one, and after a moments thought, she said soberly, \u201cAs I sat cutting out blue flannel jackets today at the rooms, I felt very anxious about Father, and thought how lonely and helpless we should be, if anything happened to him. It was not a wise thing to do, but I kept on worrying till an old man came in with an order for some clothes. He sat down near me, and I began to talk to him, for he looked poor and tired and anxious.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Have you sons in the army?\u2019 I asked, for the note he brought was not to me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, ma\u2019am. I had four, but two were killed, one is a prisoner, and I\u2019m going to the other, who is very sick in a Washington hospital.\u2019 he answered quietly.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018You have done a great deal for your country, sir,\u2019 I said, feeling respect now, instead of pity.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Not a mite more than I ought, ma\u2019am. I\u2019d go myself, if I was any use. As I ain\u2019t, I give my boys, and give \u2019em free.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe spoke so cheerfully, looked so sincere, and seemed so glad to give his all, that I was ashamed of myself. I\u2019d given one man and thought it too much, while he gave four without grudging them. I had all my girls to comfort me at home, and his last son was waiting, miles away, to say good-by to him, perhaps! I felt so rich, so happy thinking of my blessings, that I made him a nice bundle, gave him some money, and thanked him heartily for the lesson he had taught me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTell another story, Mother, one with a moral to it, like this. I like to think about them afterward, if they are real and not too preachy,\u201d said Jo, after a minute\u2019s silence.\r\n\r\nMrs. March smiled and began at once, for she had told stories to this little audience for many years, and knew how to please them.\r\n\r\n\u201cOnce upon a time, there were four girls, who had enough to eat and drink and wear, a good many comforts and pleasures, kind friends and parents who loved them dearly, and yet they were not contented.\u201d (Here the listeners stole sly looks at one another, and began to sew diligently.) \u201cThese girls were anxious to be good and made many excellent resolutions, but they did not keep them very well, and were constantly saying, \u2018If only we had this,\u2019 or \u2018If we could only do that,\u2019 quite forgetting how much they already had, and how many things they actually could do. So they asked an old woman what spell they could use to make them happy, and she said, \u2018When you feel discontented, think over your blessings, and be grateful.\u2019\u201d (Here Jo looked up quickly, as if about to speak, but changed her mind, seeing that the story was not done yet.)\r\n\r\n\u201cBeing sensible girls, they decided to try her advice, and soon were surprised to see how well off they were. One discovered that money couldn\u2019t keep shame and sorrow out of rich people\u2019s houses, another that, though she was poor, she was a great deal happier, with her youth, health, and good spirits, than a certain fretful, feeble old lady who couldn\u2019t enjoy her comforts, a third that, disagreeable as it was to help get dinner, it was harder still to go begging for it and the fourth, that even carnelian rings were not so valuable as good behavior. So they agreed to stop complaining, to enjoy the blessings already possessed, and try to deserve them, lest they should be taken away entirely, instead of increased, and I believe they were never disappointed or sorry that they took the old woman\u2019s advice.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, Marmee, that is very cunning of you to turn our own stories against us, and give us a sermon instead of a romance!\u201d cried Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cI like that kind of sermon. It\u2019s the sort Father used to tell us,\u201d said Beth thoughtfully, putting the needles straight on Jo\u2019s cushion.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t complain near as much as the others do, and I shall be more careful than ever now, for I\u2019ve had warning from Susie\u2019s downfall,\u201d said Amy morally.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe needed that lesson, and we won\u2019t forget it. If we do so, you just say to us, as old Chloe did in Uncle Tom, \u2018Tink ob yer marcies, chillen!\u2019 \u2018Tink ob yer marcies!\u2019\u201d added Jo, who could not, for the life of her, help getting a morsel of fun out of the little sermon, though she took it to heart as much as any of them.\r\nCHAPTER FIVE\r\nBEING NEIGHBORLY\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat in the world are you going to do now, Jo?\u201d asked Meg one snowy afternoon, as her sister came tramping through the hall, in rubber boots, old sack, and hood, with a broom in one hand and a shovel in the other.\r\n\r\n\u201cGoing out for exercise,\u201d answered Jo with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.\r\n\r\n\u201cI should think two long walks this morning would have been enough! It\u2019s cold and dull out, and I advise you to stay warm and dry by the fire, as I do,\u201d said Meg with a shiver.\r\n\r\n\u201cNever take advice! Can\u2019t keep still all day, and not being a pussycat, I don\u2019t like to doze by the fire. I like adventures, and I\u2019m going to find some.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg went back to toast her feet and read Ivanhoe, and Jo began to dig paths with great energy. The snow was light, and with her broom she soon swept a path all round the garden, for Beth to walk in when the sun came out and the invalid dolls needed air. Now, the garden separated the Marches\u2019 house from that of Mr. Laurence. Both stood in a suburb of the city, which was still country-like, with groves and lawns, large gardens, and quiet streets. A low hedge parted the two estates. On one side was an old, brown house, looking rather bare and shabby, robbed of the vines that in summer covered its walls and the flowers, which then surrounded it. On the other side was a stately stone mansion, plainly betokening every sort of comfort and luxury, from the big coach house and well-kept grounds to the conservatory and the glimpses of lovely things one caught between the rich curtains.\r\n\r\nYet it seemed a lonely, lifeless sort of house, for no children frolicked on the lawn, no motherly face ever smiled at the windows, and few people went in and out, except the old gentleman and his grandson.\r\n\r\nTo Jo\u2019s lively fancy, this fine house seemed a kind of enchanted palace, full of splendors and delights which no one enjoyed. She had long wanted to behold these hidden glories, and to know the Laurence boy, who looked as if he would like to be known, if he only knew how to begin. Since the party, she had been more eager than ever, and had planned many ways of making friends with him, but he had not been seen lately, and Jo began to think he had gone away, when she one day spied a brown face at an upper window, looking wistfully down into their garden, where Beth and Amy were snow-balling one another.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat boy is suffering for society and fun,\u201d she said to herself. \u201cHis grandpa does not know what\u2019s good for him, and keeps him shut up all alone. He needs a party of jolly boys to play with, or somebody young and lively. I\u2019ve a great mind to go over and tell the old gentleman so!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe idea amused Jo, who liked to do daring things and was always scandalizing Meg by her queer performances. The plan of \u2018going over\u2019 was not forgotten. And when the snowy afternoon came, Jo resolved to try what could be done. She saw Mr. Lawrence drive off, and then sallied out to dig her way down to the hedge, where she paused and took a survey. All quiet, curtains down at the lower windows, servants out of sight, and nothing human visible but a curly black head leaning on a thin hand at the upper window.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere he is,\u201d thought Jo, \u201cPoor boy! All alone and sick this dismal day. It\u2019s a shame! I\u2019ll toss up a snowball and make him look out, and then say a kind word to him.\u201d\r\n\r\nUp went a handful of soft snow, and the head turned at once, showing a face which lost its listless look in a minute, as the big eyes brightened and the mouth began to smile. Jo nodded and laughed, and flourished her broom as she called out...\r\n\r\n\u201cHow do you do? Are you sick?\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie opened the window, and croaked out as hoarsely as a raven...\r\n\r\n\u201cBetter, thank you. I\u2019ve had a bad cold, and been shut up a week.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m sorry. What do you amuse yourself with?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNothing. It\u2019s dull as tombs up here.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you read?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot much. They won\u2019t let me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCan\u2019t somebody read to you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGrandpa does sometimes, but my books don\u2019t interest him, and I hate to ask Brooke all the time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHave someone come and see you then.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere isn\u2019t anyone I\u2019d like to see. Boys make such a row, and my head is weak.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIsn\u2019t there some nice girl who\u2019d read and amuse you? Girls are quiet and like to play nurse.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t know any.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou know us,\u201d began Jo, then laughed and stopped.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo I do! Will you come, please?\u201d cried Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m not quiet and nice, but I\u2019ll come, if Mother will let me. I\u2019ll go ask her. Shut the window, like a good boy, and wait till I come.\u201d\r\n\r\nWith that, Jo shouldered her broom and marched into the house, wondering what they would all say to her. Laurie was in a flutter of excitement at the idea of having company, and flew about to get ready, for as Mrs. March said, he was \u2018a little gentleman\u2019, and did honor to the coming guest by brushing his curly pate, putting on a fresh color, and trying to tidy up the room, which in spite of half a dozen servants, was anything but neat. Presently there came a loud ring, then a decided voice, asking for \u2018Mr. Laurie\u2019, and a surprised-looking servant came running up to announce a young lady.\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right, show her up, it\u2019s Miss Jo,\u201d said Laurie, going to the door of his little parlor to meet Jo, who appeared, looking rosy and quite at her ease, with a covered dish in one hand and Beth\u2019s three kittens in the other.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere I am, bag and baggage,\u201d she said briskly. \u201cMother sent her love, and was glad if I could do anything for you. Meg wanted me to bring some of her blanc mange, she makes it very nicely, and Beth thought her cats would be comforting. I knew you\u2019d laugh at them, but I couldn\u2019t refuse, she was so anxious to do something.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt so happened that Beth\u2019s funny loan was just the thing, for in laughing over the kits, Laurie forgot his bashfulness, and grew sociable at once.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat looks too pretty to eat,\u201d he said, smiling with pleasure, as Jo uncovered the dish, and showed the blanc mange, surrounded by a garland of green leaves, and the scarlet flowers of Amy\u2019s pet geranium.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt isn\u2019t anything, only they all felt kindly and wanted to show it. Tell the girl to put it away for your tea. It\u2019s so simple you can eat it, and being soft, it will slip down without hurting your sore throat. What a cozy room this is!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt might be if it was kept nice, but the maids are lazy, and I don\u2019t know how to make them mind. It worries me though.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll right it up in two minutes, for it only needs to have the hearth brushed, so\u2014and the things made straight on the mantelpiece, so\u2014and the books put here, and the bottles there, and your sofa turned from the light, and the pillows plumped up a bit. Now then, you\u2019re fixed.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd so he was, for, as she laughed and talked, Jo had whisked things into place and given quite a different air to the room. Laurie watched her in respectful silence, and when she beckoned him to his sofa, he sat down with a sigh of satisfaction, saying gratefully...\r\n\r\n\u201cHow kind you are! Yes, that\u2019s what it wanted. Now please take the big chair and let me do something to amuse my company.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I came to amuse you. Shall I read aloud?\u201d and Jo looked affectionately toward some inviting books near by.\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you! I\u2019ve read all those, and if you don\u2019t mind, I\u2019d rather talk,\u201d answered Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a bit. I\u2019ll talk all day if you\u2019ll only set me going. Beth says I never know when to stop.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIs Beth the rosy one, who stays at home good deal and sometimes goes out with a little basket?\u201d asked Laurie with interest.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, that\u2019s Beth. She\u2019s my girl, and a regular good one she is, too.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe pretty one is Meg, and the curly-haired one is Amy, I believe?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow did you find that out?\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie colored up, but answered frankly, \u201cWhy, you see I often hear you calling to one another, and when I\u2019m alone up here, I can\u2019t help looking over at your house, you always seem to be having such good times. I beg your pardon for being so rude, but sometimes you forget to put down the curtain at the window where the flowers are. And when the lamps are lighted, it\u2019s like looking at a picture to see the fire, and you all around the table with your mother. Her face is right opposite, and it looks so sweet behind the flowers, I can\u2019t help watching it. I haven\u2019t got any mother, you know.\u201d And Laurie poked the fire to hide a little twitching of the lips that he could not control.\r\n\r\nThe solitary, hungry look in his eyes went straight to Jo\u2019s warm heart. She had been so simply taught that there was no nonsense in her head, and at fifteen she was as innocent and frank as any child. Laurie was sick and lonely, and feeling how rich she was in home and happiness, she gladly tried to share it with him. Her face was very friendly and her sharp voice unusually gentle as she said...\r\n\r\n\u201cWe\u2019ll never draw that curtain any more, and I give you leave to look as much as you like. I just wish, though, instead of peeping, you\u2019d come over and see us. Mother is so splendid, she\u2019d do you heaps of good, and Beth would sing to you if I begged her to, and Amy would dance. Meg and I would make you laugh over our funny stage properties, and we\u2019d have jolly times. Wouldn\u2019t your grandpa let you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI think he would, if your mother asked him. He\u2019s very kind, though he does not look so, and he lets me do what I like, pretty much, only he\u2019s afraid I might be a bother to strangers,\u201d began Laurie, brightening more and more.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe are not strangers, we are neighbors, and you needn\u2019t think you\u2019d be a bother. We want to know you, and I\u2019ve been trying to do it this ever so long. We haven\u2019t been here a great while, you know, but we have got acquainted with all our neighbors but you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou see, Grandpa lives among his books, and doesn\u2019t mind much what happens outside. Mr. Brooke, my tutor, doesn\u2019t stay here, you know, and I have no one to go about with me, so I just stop at home and get on as I can.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s bad. You ought to make an effort and go visiting everywhere you are asked, then you\u2019ll have plenty of friends, and pleasant places to go to. Never mind being bashful. It won\u2019t last long if you keep going.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie turned red again, but wasn\u2019t offended at being accused of bashfulness, for there was so much good will in Jo it was impossible not to take her blunt speeches as kindly as they were meant.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you like your school?\u201d asked the boy, changing the subject, after a little pause, during which he stared at the fire and Jo looked about her, well pleased.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t go to school, I\u2019m a businessman\u2014girl, I mean. I go to wait on my great-aunt, and a dear, cross old soul she is, too,\u201d answered Jo.\r\n\r\nLaurie opened his mouth to ask another question, but remembering just in time that it wasn\u2019t manners to make too many inquiries into people\u2019s affairs, he shut it again, and looked uncomfortable.\r\n\r\nJo liked his good breeding, and didn\u2019t mind having a laugh at Aunt March, so she gave him a lively description of the fidgety old lady, her fat poodle, the parrot that talked Spanish, and the library where she reveled.\r\n\r\nLaurie enjoyed that immensely, and when she told about the prim old gentleman who came once to woo Aunt March, and in the middle of a fine speech, how Poll had tweaked his wig off to his great dismay, the boy lay back and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks, and a maid popped her head in to see what was the matter.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh! That does me no end of good. Tell on, please,\u201d he said, taking his face out of the sofa cushion, red and shining with merriment.\r\n\r\nMuch elated with her success, Jo did \u2018tell on\u2019, all about their plays and plans, their hopes and fears for Father, and the most interesting events of the little world in which the sisters lived. Then they got to talking about books, and to Jo\u2019s delight, she found that Laurie loved them as well as she did, and had read even more than herself.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you like them so much, come down and see ours. Grandfather is out, so you needn\u2019t be afraid,\u201d said Laurie, getting up.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m not afraid of anything,\u201d returned Jo, with a toss of the head.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t believe you are!\u201d exclaimed the boy, looking at her with much admiration, though he privately thought she would have good reason to be a trifle afraid of the old gentleman, if she met him in some of his moods.\r\n\r\nThe atmosphere of the whole house being summerlike, Laurie led the way from room to room, letting Jo stop to examine whatever struck her fancy. And so, at last they came to the library, where she clapped her hands and pranced, as she always did when especially delighted. It was lined with books, and there were pictures and statues, and distracting little cabinets full of coins and curiosities, and Sleepy Hollow chairs, and queer tables, and bronzes, and best of all, a great open fireplace with quaint tiles all round it.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat richness!\u201d sighed Jo, sinking into the depth of a velour chair and gazing about her with an air of intense satisfaction. \u201cTheodore Laurence, you ought to be the happiest boy in the world,\u201d she added impressively.\r\n\r\n\u201cA fellow can\u2019t live on books,\u201d said Laurie, shaking his head as he perched on a table opposite.\r\n\r\nBefore he could say more, a bell rang, and Jo flew up, exclaiming with alarm, \u201cMercy me! It\u2019s your grandpa!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, what if it is? You are not afraid of anything, you know,\u201d returned the boy, looking wicked.\r\n\r\n\u201cI think I am a little bit afraid of him, but I don\u2019t know why I should be. Marmee said I might come, and I don\u2019t think you\u2019re any the worse for it,\u201d said Jo, composing herself, though she kept her eyes on the door.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m a great deal better for it, and ever so much obliged. I\u2019m only afraid you are very tired of talking to me. It was so pleasant, I couldn\u2019t bear to stop,\u201d said Laurie gratefully.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe doctor to see you, sir,\u201d and the maid beckoned as she spoke.\r\n\r\n\u201cWould you mind if I left you for a minute? I suppose I must see him,\u201d said Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t mind me. I\u2019m happy as a cricket here,\u201d answered Jo.\r\n\r\nLaurie went away, and his guest amused herself in her own way. She was standing before a fine portrait of the old gentleman when the door opened again, and without turning, she said decidedly, \u201cI\u2019m sure now that I shouldn\u2019t be afraid of him, for he\u2019s got kind eyes, though his mouth is grim, and he looks as if he had a tremendous will of his own. He isn\u2019t as handsome as my grandfather, but I like him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you, ma\u2019am,\u201d said a gruff voice behind her, and there, to her great dismay, stood old Mr. Laurence.\r\n\r\nPoor Jo blushed till she couldn\u2019t blush any redder, and her heart began to beat uncomfortably fast as she thought what she had said. For a minute a wild desire to run away possessed her, but that was cowardly, and the girls would laugh at her, so she resolved to stay and get out of the scrape as she could. A second look showed her that the living eyes, under the bushy eyebrows, were kinder even than the painted ones, and there was a sly twinkle in them, which lessened her fear a good deal. The gruff voice was gruffer than ever, as the old gentleman said abruptly, after the dreadful pause, \u201cSo you\u2019re not afraid of me, hey?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot much, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd you don\u2019t think me as handsome as your grandfather?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot quite, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd I\u2019ve got a tremendous will, have I?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI only said I thought so.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut you like me in spite of it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I do, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat answer pleased the old gentleman. He gave a short laugh, shook hands with her, and, putting his finger under her chin, turned up her face, examined it gravely, and let it go, saying with a nod, \u201cYou\u2019ve got your grandfather\u2019s spirit, if you haven\u2019t his face. He was a fine man, my dear, but what is better, he was a brave and an honest one, and I was proud to be his friend.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you, sir,\u201d And Jo was quite comfortable after that, for it suited her exactly.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat have you been doing to this boy of mine, hey?\u201d was the next question, sharply put.\r\n\r\n\u201cOnly trying to be neighborly, sir.\u201d And Jo told how her visit came about.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou think he needs cheering up a bit, do you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, sir, he seems a little lonely, and young folks would do him good perhaps. We are only girls, but we should be glad to help if we could, for we don\u2019t forget the splendid Christmas present you sent us,\u201d said Jo eagerly.\r\n\r\n\u201cTut, tut, tut! That was the boy\u2019s affair. How is the poor woman?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDoing nicely, sir.\u201d And off went Jo, talking very fast, as she told all about the Hummels, in whom her mother had interested richer friends than they were.\r\n\r\n\u201cJust her father\u2019s way of doing good. I shall come and see your mother some fine day. Tell her so. There\u2019s the tea bell, we have it early on the boy\u2019s account. Come down and go on being neighborly.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you\u2019d like to have me, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShouldn\u2019t ask you, if I didn\u2019t.\u201d And Mr. Laurence offered her his arm with old-fashioned courtesy.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat would Meg say to this?\u201d thought Jo, as she was marched away, while her eyes danced with fun as she imagined herself telling the story at home.\r\n\r\n\u201cHey! Why, what the dickens has come to the fellow?\u201d said the old gentleman, as Laurie came running downstairs and brought up with a start of surprise at the astounding sight of Jo arm in arm with his redoubtable grandfather.\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t know you\u2019d come, sir,\u201d he began, as Jo gave him a triumphant little glance.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s evident, by the way you racket downstairs. Come to your tea, sir, and behave like a gentleman.\u201d And having pulled the boy\u2019s hair by way of a caress, Mr. Laurence walked on, while Laurie went through a series of comic evolutions behind their backs, which nearly produced an explosion of laughter from Jo.\r\n\r\nThe old gentleman did not say much as he drank his four cups of tea, but he watched the young people, who soon chatted away like old friends, and the change in his grandson did not escape him. There was color, light, and life in the boy\u2019s face now, vivacity in his manner, and genuine merriment in his laugh.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe\u2019s right, the lad is lonely. I\u2019ll see what these little girls can do for him,\u201d thought Mr. Laurence, as he looked and listened. He liked Jo, for her odd, blunt ways suited him, and she seemed to understand the boy almost as well as if she had been one herself.\r\n\r\nIf the Laurences had been what Jo called \u2018prim and poky\u2019, she would not have got on at all, for such people always made her shy and awkward. But finding them free and easy, she was so herself, and made a good impression. When they rose she proposed to go, but Laurie said he had something more to show her, and took her away to the conservatory, which had been lighted for her benefit. It seemed quite fairylike to Jo, as she went up and down the walks, enjoying the blooming walls on either side, the soft light, the damp sweet air, and the wonderful vines and trees that hung about her, while her new friend cut the finest flowers till his hands were full. Then he tied them up, saying, with the happy look Jo liked to see, \u201cPlease give these to your mother, and tell her I like the medicine she sent me very much.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey found Mr. Laurence standing before the fire in the great drawing room, but Jo\u2019s attention was entirely absorbed by a grand piano, which stood open.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you play?\u201d she asked, turning to Laurie with a respectful expression.\r\n\r\n\u201cSometimes,\u201d he answered modestly.\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease do now. I want to hear it, so I can tell Beth.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWon\u2019t you first?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t know how. Too stupid to learn, but I love music dearly.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo Laurie played and Jo listened, with her nose luxuriously buried in heliotrope and tea roses. Her respect and regard for the \u2018Laurence\u2019 boy increased very much, for he played remarkably well and didn\u2019t put on any airs. She wished Beth could hear him, but she did not say so, only praised him till he was quite abashed, and his grandfather came to his rescue.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat will do, that will do, young lady. Too many sugarplums are not good for him. His music isn\u2019t bad, but I hope he will do as well in more important things. Going? well, I\u2019m much obliged to you, and I hope you\u2019ll come again. My respects to your mother. Good night, Doctor Jo.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe shook hands kindly, but looked as if something did not please him. When they got into the hall, Jo asked Laurie if she had said something amiss. He shook his head.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, it was me. He doesn\u2019t like to hear me play.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy not?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll tell you some day. John is going home with you, as I can\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo need of that. I am not a young lady, and it\u2019s only a step. Take care of yourself, won\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, but you will come again, I hope?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you promise to come and see us after you are well.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI will.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood night, Laurie!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood night, Jo, good night!\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen all the afternoon\u2019s adventures had been told, the family felt inclined to go visiting in a body, for each found something very attractive in the big house on the other side of the hedge. Mrs. March wanted to talk of her father with the old man who had not forgotten him, Meg longed to walk in the conservatory, Beth sighed for the grand piano, and Amy was eager to see the fine pictures and statues.\r\n\r\n\u201cMother, why didn\u2019t Mr. Laurence like to have Laurie play?\u201d asked Jo, who was of an inquiring disposition.\r\n\r\n\u201cI am not sure, but I think it was because his son, Laurie\u2019s father, married an Italian lady, a musician, which displeased the old man, who is very proud. The lady was good and lovely and accomplished, but he did not like her, and never saw his son after he married. They both died when Laurie was a little child, and then his grandfather took him home. I fancy the boy, who was born in Italy, is not very strong, and the old man is afraid of losing him, which makes him so careful. Laurie comes naturally by his love of music, for he is like his mother, and I dare say his grandfather fears that he may want to be a musician. At any rate, his skill reminds him of the woman he did not like, and so he \u2018glowered\u2019 as Jo said.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDear me, how romantic!\u201d exclaimed Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow silly!\u201d said Jo. \u201cLet him be a musician if he wants to, and not plague his life out sending him to college, when he hates to go.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s why he has such handsome black eyes and pretty manners, I suppose. Italians are always nice,\u201d said Meg, who was a little sentimental.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you know about his eyes and his manners? You never spoke to him, hardly,\u201d cried Jo, who was not sentimental.\r\n\r\n\u201cI saw him at the party, and what you tell shows that he knows how to behave. That was a nice little speech about the medicine Mother sent him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe meant the blanc mange, I suppose.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow stupid you are, child! He meant you, of course.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDid he?\u201d And Jo opened her eyes as if it had never occurred to her before.\r\n\r\n\u201cI never saw such a girl! You don\u2019t know a compliment when you get it,\u201d said Meg, with the air of a young lady who knew all about the matter.\r\n\r\n\u201cI think they are great nonsense, and I\u2019ll thank you not to be silly and spoil my fun. Laurie\u2019s a nice boy and I like him, and I won\u2019t have any sentimental stuff about compliments and such rubbish. We\u2019ll all be good to him because he hasn\u2019t got any mother, and he may come over and see us, mayn\u2019t he, Marmee?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Jo, your little friend is very welcome, and I hope Meg will remember that children should be children as long as they can.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t call myself a child, and I\u2019m not in my teens yet,\u201d observed Amy. \u201cWhat do you say, Beth?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI was thinking about our \u2018Pilgrim\u2019s Progress\u2019,\u201d answered Beth, who had not heard a word. \u201cHow we got out of the Slough and through the Wicket Gate by resolving to be good, and up the steep hill by trying, and that maybe the house over there, full of splendid things, is going to be our Palace Beautiful.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe have got to get by the lions first,\u201d said Jo, as if she rather liked the prospect.\r\nCHAPTER SIX\r\nBETH FINDS THE PALACE BEAUTIFUL\r\n\r\nThe big house did prove a Palace Beautiful, though it took some time for all to get in, and Beth found it very hard to pass the lions. Old Mr. Laurence was the biggest one, but after he had called, said something funny or kind to each one of the girls, and talked over old times with their mother, nobody felt much afraid of him, except timid Beth. The other lion was the fact that they were poor and Laurie rich, for this made them shy of accepting favors which they could not return. But, after a while, they found that he considered them the benefactors, and could not do enough to show how grateful he was for Mrs. March\u2019s motherly welcome, their cheerful society, and the comfort he took in that humble home of theirs. So they soon forgot their pride and interchanged kindnesses without stopping to think which was the greater.\r\n\r\nAll sorts of pleasant things happened about that time, for the new friendship flourished like grass in spring. Every one liked Laurie, and he privately informed his tutor that \u201cthe Marches were regularly splendid girls.\u201d With the delightful enthusiasm of youth, they took the solitary boy into their midst and made much of him, and he found something very charming in the innocent companionship of these simple-hearted girls. Never having known mother or sisters, he was quick to feel the influences they brought about him, and their busy, lively ways made him ashamed of the indolent life he led. He was tired of books, and found people so interesting now that Mr. Brooke was obliged to make very unsatisfactory reports, for Laurie was always playing truant and running over to the Marches\u2019.\r\n\r\n\u201cNever mind, let him take a holiday, and make it up afterward,\u201d said the old gentleman. \u201cThe good lady next door says he is studying too hard and needs young society, amusement, and exercise. I suspect she is right, and that I\u2019ve been coddling the fellow as if I\u2019d been his grandmother. Let him do what he likes, as long as he is happy. He can\u2019t get into mischief in that little nunnery over there, and Mrs. March is doing more for him than we can.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhat good times they had, to be sure. Such plays and tableaux, such sleigh rides and skating frolics, such pleasant evenings in the old parlor, and now and then such gay little parties at the great house. Meg could walk in the conservatory whenever she liked and revel in bouquets, Jo browsed over the new library voraciously, and convulsed the old gentleman with her criticisms, Amy copied pictures and enjoyed beauty to her heart\u2019s content, and Laurie played \u2018lord of the manor\u2019 in the most delightful style.\r\n\r\nBut Beth, though yearning for the grand piano, could not pluck up courage to go to the \u2018Mansion of Bliss\u2019, as Meg called it. She went once with Jo, but the old gentleman, not being aware of her infirmity, stared at her so hard from under his heavy eyebrows, and said \u201cHey!\u201d so loud, that he frightened her so much her \u2018feet chattered on the floor\u2019, she never told her mother, and she ran away, declaring she would never go there any more, not even for the dear piano. No persuasions or enticements could overcome her fear, till, the fact coming to Mr. Laurence\u2019s ear in some mysterious way, he set about mending matters. During one of the brief calls he made, he artfully led the conversation to music, and talked away about great singers whom he had seen, fine organs he had heard, and told such charming anecdotes that Beth found it impossible to stay in her distant corner, but crept nearer and nearer, as if fascinated. At the back of his chair she stopped and stood listening, with her great eyes wide open and her cheeks red with excitement of this unusual performance. Taking no more notice of her than if she had been a fly, Mr. Laurence talked on about Laurie\u2019s lessons and teachers. And presently, as if the idea had just occurred to him, he said to Mrs. March...\r\n\r\n\u201cThe boy neglects his music now, and I\u2019m glad of it, for he was getting too fond of it. But the piano suffers for want of use. Wouldn\u2019t some of your girls like to run over, and practice on it now and then, just to keep it in tune, you know, ma\u2019am?\u201d\r\n\r\nBeth took a step forward, and pressed her hands tightly together to keep from clapping them, for this was an irresistible temptation, and the thought of practicing on that splendid instrument quite took her breath away. Before Mrs. March could reply, Mr. Laurence went on with an odd little nod and smile...\r\n\r\n\u201cThey needn\u2019t see or speak to anyone, but run in at any time. For I\u2019m shut up in my study at the other end of the house, Laurie is out a great deal, and the servants are never near the drawing room after nine o\u2019clock.\u201d\r\n\r\nHere he rose, as if going, and Beth made up her mind to speak, for that last arrangement left nothing to be desired. \u201cPlease, tell the young ladies what I say, and if they don\u2019t care to come, why, never mind.\u201d Here a little hand slipped into his, and Beth looked up at him with a face full of gratitude, as she said, in her earnest yet timid way...\r\n\r\n\u201cOh sir, they do care, very very much!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAre you the musical girl?\u201d he asked, without any startling \u201cHey!\u201d as he looked down at her very kindly.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m Beth. I love it dearly, and I\u2019ll come, if you are quite sure nobody will hear me, and be disturbed,\u201d she added, fearing to be rude, and trembling at her own boldness as she spoke.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a soul, my dear. The house is empty half the day, so come and drum away as much as you like, and I shall be obliged to you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow kind you are, sir!\u201d\r\n\r\nBeth blushed like a rose under the friendly look he wore, but she was not frightened now, and gave the hand a grateful squeeze because she had no words to thank him for the precious gift he had given her. The old gentleman softly stroked the hair off her forehead, and, stooping down, he kissed her, saying, in a tone few people ever heard...\r\n\r\n\u201cI had a little girl once, with eyes like these. God bless you, my dear! Good day, madam.\u201d And away he went, in a great hurry.\r\n\r\nBeth had a rapture with her mother, and then rushed up to impart the glorious news to her family of invalids, as the girls were not home. How blithely she sang that evening, and how they all laughed at her because she woke Amy in the night by playing the piano on her face in her sleep. Next day, having seen both the old and young gentleman out of the house, Beth, after two or three retreats, fairly got in at the side door, and made her way as noiselessly as any mouse to the drawing room where her idol stood. Quite by accident, of course, some pretty, easy music lay on the piano, and with trembling fingers and frequent stops to listen and look about, Beth at last touched the great instrument, and straightway forgot her fear, herself, and everything else but the unspeakable delight which the music gave her, for it was like the voice of a beloved friend.\r\n\r\nShe stayed till Hannah came to take her home to dinner, but she had no appetite, and could only sit and smile upon everyone in a general state of beatitude.\r\n\r\nAfter that, the little brown hood slipped through the hedge nearly every day, and the great drawing room was haunted by a tuneful spirit that came and went unseen. She never knew that Mr. Laurence opened his study door to hear the old-fashioned airs he liked. She never saw Laurie mount guard in the hall to warn the servants away. She never suspected that the exercise books and new songs which she found in the rack were put there for her especial benefit, and when he talked to her about music at home, she only thought how kind he was to tell things that helped her so much. So she enjoyed herself heartily, and found, what isn\u2019t always the case, that her granted wish was all she had hoped. Perhaps it was because she was so grateful for this blessing that a greater was given her. At any rate she deserved both.\r\n\r\n\u201cMother, I\u2019m going to work Mr. Laurence a pair of slippers. He is so kind to me, I must thank him, and I don\u2019t know any other way. Can I do it?\u201d asked Beth, a few weeks after that eventful call of his.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, dear. It will please him very much, and be a nice way of thanking him. The girls will help you about them, and I will pay for the making up,\u201d replied Mrs. March, who took peculiar pleasure in granting Beth\u2019s requests because she so seldom asked anything for herself.\r\n\r\nAfter many serious discussions with Meg and Jo, the pattern was chosen, the materials bought, and the slippers begun. A cluster of grave yet cheerful pansies on a deeper purple ground was pronounced very appropriate and pretty, and Beth worked away early and late, with occasional lifts over hard parts. She was a nimble little needlewoman, and they were finished before anyone got tired of them. Then she wrote a short, simple note, and with Laurie\u2019s help, got them smuggled onto the study table one morning before the old gentleman was up.\r\n\r\nWhen this excitement was over, Beth waited to see what would happen. All day passed and a part of the next before any acknowledgement arrived, and she was beginning to fear she had offended her crochety friend. On the afternoon of the second day, she went out to do an errand, and give poor Joanna, the invalid doll, her daily exercise. As she came up the street, on her return, she saw three, yes, four heads popping in and out of the parlor windows, and the moment they saw her, several hands were waved, and several joyful voices screamed...\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s a letter from the old gentleman! Come quick, and read it!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Beth, he\u2019s sent you...\u201d began Amy, gesticulating with unseemly energy, but she got no further, for Jo quenched her by slamming down the window.\r\n\r\nBeth hurried on in a flutter of suspense. At the door her sisters seized and bore her to the parlor in a triumphal procession, all pointing and all saying at once, \u201cLook there! Look there!\u201d Beth did look, and turned pale with delight and surprise, for there stood a little cabinet piano, with a letter lying on the glossy lid, directed like a sign board to \u201cMiss Elizabeth March.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFor me?\u201d gasped Beth, holding onto Jo and feeling as if she should tumble down, it was such an overwhelming thing altogether.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, all for you, my precious! Isn\u2019t it splendid of him? Don\u2019t you think he\u2019s the dearest old man in the world? Here\u2019s the key in the letter. We didn\u2019t open it, but we are dying to know what he says,\u201d cried Jo, hugging her sister and offering the note.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou read it! I can\u2019t, I feel so queer! Oh, it is too lovely!\u201d and Beth hid her face in Jo\u2019s apron, quite upset by her present.\r\n\r\nJo opened the paper and began to laugh, for the first words she saw were...\r\n\r\n\u201cMiss March: \u201cDear Madam\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow nice it sounds! I wish someone would write to me so!\u201d said Amy, who thought the old-fashioned address very elegant.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018I have had many pairs of slippers in my life, but I never had any that suited me so well as yours,\u2019\u201d continues Jo. \u201c\u2018Heart\u2019s-ease is my favorite flower, and these will always remind me of the gentle giver. I like to pay my debts, so I know you will allow \u2018the old gentleman\u2019 to send you something which once belonged to the little grand daughter he lost. With hearty thanks and best wishes, I remain \u201c\u2018Your grateful friend and humble servant, \u2018JAMES LAURENCE\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere, Beth, that\u2019s an honor to be proud of, I\u2019m sure! Laurie told me how fond Mr. Laurence used to be of the child who died, and how he kept all her little things carefully. Just think, he\u2019s given you her piano. That comes of having big blue eyes and loving music,\u201d said Jo, trying to soothe Beth, who trembled and looked more excited than she had ever been before.\r\n\r\n\u201cSee the cunning brackets to hold candles, and the nice green silk, puckered up, with a gold rose in the middle, and the pretty rack and stool, all complete,\u201d added Meg, opening the instrument and displaying its beauties.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Your humble servant, James Laurence\u2019. Only think of his writing that to you. I\u2019ll tell the girls. They\u2019ll think it\u2019s splendid,\u201d said Amy, much impressed by the note.\r\n\r\n\u201cTry it, honey. Let\u2019s hear the sound of the baby pianny,\u201d said Hannah, who always took a share in the family joys and sorrows.\r\n\r\nSo Beth tried it, and everyone pronounced it the most remarkable piano ever heard. It had evidently been newly tuned and put in apple-pie order, but, perfect as it was, I think the real charm lay in the happiest of all happy faces which leaned over it, as Beth lovingly touched the beautiful black and white keys and pressed the bright pedals.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ll have to go and thank him,\u201d said Jo, by way of a joke, for the idea of the child\u2019s really going never entered her head.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I mean to. I guess I\u2019ll go now, before I get frightened thinking about it.\u201d And, to the utter amazement of the assembled family, Beth walked deliberately down the garden, through the hedge, and in at the Laurences\u2019 door.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I wish I may die if it ain\u2019t the queerest thing I ever see! The pianny has turned her head! She\u2019d never have gone in her right mind,\u201d cried Hannah, staring after her, while the girls were rendered quite speechless by the miracle.\r\n\r\nThey would have been still more amazed if they had seen what Beth did afterward. If you will believe me, she went and knocked at the study door before she gave herself time to think, and when a gruff voice called out, \u201ccome in!\u201d she did go in, right up to Mr. Laurence, who looked quite taken aback, and held out her hand, saying, with only a small quaver in her voice, \u201cI came to thank you, sir, for...\u201d But she didn\u2019t finish, for he looked so friendly that she forgot her speech and, only remembering that he had lost the little girl he loved, she put both arms round his neck and kissed him.\r\n\r\nIf the roof of the house had suddenly flown off, the old gentleman wouldn\u2019t have been more astonished. But he liked it. Oh, dear, yes, he liked it amazingly! And was so touched and pleased by that confiding little kiss that all his crustiness vanished, and he just set her on his knee, and laid his wrinkled cheek against her rosy one, feeling as if he had got his own little granddaughter back again. Beth ceased to fear him from that moment, and sat there talking to him as cozily as if she had known him all her life, for love casts out fear, and gratitude can conquer pride. When she went home, he walked with her to her own gate, shook hands cordially, and touched his hat as he marched back again, looking very stately and erect, like a handsome, soldierly old gentleman, as he was.\r\n\r\nWhen the girls saw that performance, Jo began to dance a jig, by way of expressing her satisfaction, Amy nearly fell out of the window in her surprise, and Meg exclaimed, with up-lifted hands, \u201cWell, I do believe the world is coming to an end.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER SEVEN\r\nAMY\u2019S VALLEY OF HUMILIATION\r\n\r\n\u201cThat boy is a perfect cyclops, isn\u2019t he?\u201d said Amy one day, as Laurie clattered by on horseback, with a flourish of his whip as he passed.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow dare you say so, when he\u2019s got both his eyes? And very handsome ones they are, too,\u201d cried Jo, who resented any slighting remarks about her friend.\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t say anything about his eyes, and I don\u2019t see why you need fire up when I admire his riding.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, my goodness! That little goose means a centaur, and she called him a Cyclops,\u201d exclaimed Jo, with a burst of laughter.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou needn\u2019t be so rude, it\u2019s only a \u2018lapse of lingy\u2019, as Mr. Davis says,\u201d retorted Amy, finishing Jo with her Latin. \u201cI just wish I had a little of the money Laurie spends on that horse,\u201d she added, as if to herself, yet hoping her sisters would hear.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy?\u201d asked Meg kindly, for Jo had gone off in another laugh at Amy\u2019s second blunder.\r\n\r\n\u201cI need it so much. I\u2019m dreadfully in debt, and it won\u2019t be my turn to have the rag money for a month.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIn debt, Amy? What do you mean?\u201d And Meg looked sober.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, I owe at least a dozen pickled limes, and I can\u2019t pay them, you know, till I have money, for Marmee forbade my having anything charged at the shop.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTell me all about it. Are limes the fashion now? It used to be pricking bits of rubber to make balls.\u201d And Meg tried to keep her countenance, Amy looked so grave and important.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, you see, the girls are always buying them, and unless you want to be thought mean, you must do it too. It\u2019s nothing but limes now, for everyone is sucking them in their desks in schooltime, and trading them off for pencils, bead rings, paper dolls, or something else, at recess. If one girl likes another, she gives her a lime. If she\u2019s mad with her, she eats one before her face, and doesn\u2019t offer even a suck. They treat by turns, and I\u2019ve had ever so many but haven\u2019t returned them, and I ought for they are debts of honor, you know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow much will pay them off and restore your credit?\u201d asked Meg, taking out her purse.\r\n\r\n\u201cA quarter would more than do it, and leave a few cents over for a treat for you. Don\u2019t you like limes?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot much. You may have my share. Here\u2019s the money. Make it last as long as you can, for it isn\u2019t very plenty, you know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, thank you! It must be so nice to have pocket money! I\u2019ll have a grand feast, for I haven\u2019t tasted a lime this week. I felt delicate about taking any, as I couldn\u2019t return them, and I\u2019m actually suffering for one.\u201d\r\n\r\nNext day Amy was rather late at school, but could not resist the temptation of displaying, with pardonable pride, a moist brown-paper parcel, before she consigned it to the inmost recesses of her desk. During the next few minutes the rumor that Amy March had got twenty-four delicious limes (she ate one on the way) and was going to treat circulated through her \u2018set\u2019, and the attentions of her friends became quite overwhelming. Katy Brown invited her to her next party on the spot. Mary Kingsley insisted on lending her her watch till recess, and Jenny Snow, a satirical young lady, who had basely twitted Amy upon her limeless state, promptly buried the hatchet and offered to furnish answers to certain appalling sums. But Amy had not forgotten Miss Snow\u2019s cutting remarks about \u2018some persons whose noses were not too flat to smell other people\u2019s limes, and stuck-up people who were not too proud to ask for them\u2019, and she instantly crushed \u2018that Snow girl\u2019s\u2019 hopes by the withering telegram, \u201cYou needn\u2019t be so polite all of a sudden, for you won\u2019t get any.\u201d\r\n\r\nA distinguished personage happened to visit the school that morning, and Amy\u2019s beautifully drawn maps received praise, which honor to her foe rankled in the soul of Miss Snow, and caused Miss March to assume the airs of a studious young peacock. But, alas, alas! Pride goes before a fall, and the revengeful Snow turned the tables with disastrous success. No sooner had the guest paid the usual stale compliments and bowed himself out, than Jenny, under pretense of asking an important question, informed Mr. Davis, the teacher, that Amy March had pickled limes in her desk.\r\n\r\nNow Mr. Davis had declared limes a contraband article, and solemnly vowed to publicly ferrule the first person who was found breaking the law. This much-enduring man had succeeded in banishing chewing gum after a long and stormy war, had made a bonfire of the confiscated novels and newspapers, had suppressed a private post office, had forbidden distortions of the face, nicknames, and caricatures, and done all that one man could do to keep half a hundred rebellious girls in order. Boys are trying enough to human patience, goodness knows, but girls are infinitely more so, especially to nervous gentlemen with tyrannical tempers and no more talent for teaching than Dr. Blimber. Mr. Davis knew any quantity of Greek, Latin, algebra, and ologies of all sorts so he was called a fine teacher, and manners, morals, feelings, and examples were not considered of any particular importance. It was a most unfortunate moment for denouncing Amy, and Jenny knew it. Mr. Davis had evidently taken his coffee too strong that morning, there was an east wind, which always affected his neuralgia, and his pupils had not done him the credit which he felt he deserved. Therefore, to use the expressive, if not elegant, language of a schoolgirl, \u201cHe was as nervous as a witch and as cross as a bear\u201d. The word \u2018limes\u2019 was like fire to powder, his yellow face flushed, and he rapped on his desk with an energy which made Jenny skip to her seat with unusual rapidity.\r\n\r\n\u201cYoung ladies, attention, if you please!\u201d\r\n\r\nAt the stern order the buzz ceased, and fifty pairs of blue, black, gray, and brown eyes were obediently fixed upon his awful countenance.\r\n\r\n\u201cMiss March, come to the desk.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy rose to comply with outward composure, but a secret fear oppressed her, for the limes weighed upon her conscience.\r\n\r\n\u201cBring with you the limes you have in your desk,\u201d was the unexpected command which arrested her before she got out of her seat.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t take all.\u201d whispered her neighbor, a young lady of great presence of mind.\r\n\r\nAmy hastily shook out half a dozen and laid the rest down before Mr. Davis, feeling that any man possessing a human heart would relent when that delicious perfume met his nose. Unfortunately, Mr. Davis particularly detested the odor of the fashionable pickle, and disgust added to his wrath.\r\n\r\n\u201cIs that all?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot quite,\u201d stammered Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cBring the rest immediately.\u201d\r\n\r\nWith a despairing glance at her set, she obeyed.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou are sure there are no more?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI never lie, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo I see. Now take these disgusting things two by two, and throw them out of the window.\u201d\r\n\r\nThere was a simultaneous sigh, which created quite a little gust, as the last hope fled, and the treat was ravished from their longing lips. Scarlet with shame and anger, Amy went to and fro six dreadful times, and as each doomed couple, looking oh, so plump and juicy, fell from her reluctant hands, a shout from the street completed the anguish of the girls, for it told them that their feast was being exulted over by the little Irish children, who were their sworn foes. This\u2014this was too much. All flashed indignant or appealing glances at the inexorable Davis, and one passionate lime lover burst into tears.\r\n\r\nAs Amy returned from her last trip, Mr. Davis gave a portentous \u201cHem!\u201d and said, in his most impressive manner...\r\n\r\n\u201cYoung ladies, you remember what I said to you a week ago. I am sorry this has happened, but I never allow my rules to be infringed, and I never break my word. Miss March, hold out your hand.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy started, and put both hands behind her, turning on him an imploring look which pleaded for her better than the words she could not utter. She was rather a favorite with \u2018old Davis\u2019, as, of course, he was called, and it\u2019s my private belief that he would have broken his word if the indignation of one irrepressible young lady had not found vent in a hiss. That hiss, faint as it was, irritated the irascible gentleman, and sealed the culprit\u2019s fate.\r\n\r\n\u201cYour hand, Miss March!\u201d was the only answer her mute appeal received, and too proud to cry or beseech, Amy set her teeth, threw back her head defiantly, and bore without flinching several tingling blows on her little palm. They were neither many nor heavy, but that made no difference to her. For the first time in her life she had been struck, and the disgrace, in her eyes, was as deep as if he had knocked her down.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou will now stand on the platform till recess,\u201d said Mr. Davis, resolved to do the thing thoroughly, since he had begun.\r\n\r\nThat was dreadful. It would have been bad enough to go to her seat, and see the pitying faces of her friends, or the satisfied ones of her few enemies, but to face the whole school, with that shame fresh upon her, seemed impossible, and for a second she felt as if she could only drop down where she stood, and break her heart with crying. A bitter sense of wrong and the thought of Jenny Snow helped her to bear it, and, taking the ignominious place, she fixed her eyes on the stove funnel above what now seemed a sea of faces, and stood there, so motionless and white that the girls found it hard to study with that pathetic figure before them.\r\n\r\nDuring the fifteen minutes that followed, the proud and sensitive little girl suffered a shame and pain which she never forgot. To others it might seem a ludicrous or trivial affair, but to her it was a hard experience, for during the twelve years of her life she had been governed by love alone, and a blow of that sort had never touched her before. The smart of her hand and the ache of her heart were forgotten in the sting of the thought, \u201cI shall have to tell at home, and they will be so disappointed in me!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe fifteen minutes seemed an hour, but they came to an end at last, and the word \u2018Recess!\u2019 had never seemed so welcome to her before.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou can go, Miss March,\u201d said Mr. Davis, looking, as he felt, uncomfortable.\r\n\r\nHe did not soon forget the reproachful glance Amy gave him, as she went, without a word to anyone, straight into the anteroom, snatched her things, and left the place \u201cforever,\u201d as she passionately declared to herself. She was in a sad state when she got home, and when the older girls arrived, some time later, an indignation meeting was held at once. Mrs. March did not say much but looked disturbed, and comforted her afflicted little daughter in her tenderest manner. Meg bathed the insulted hand with glycerine and tears, Beth felt that even her beloved kittens would fail as a balm for griefs like this, Jo wrathfully proposed that Mr. Davis be arrested without delay, and Hannah shook her fist at the \u2018villain\u2019 and pounded potatoes for dinner as if she had him under her pestle.\r\n\r\nNo notice was taken of Amy\u2019s flight, except by her mates, but the sharp-eyed demoiselles discovered that Mr. Davis was quite benignant in the afternoon, also unusually nervous. Just before school closed, Jo appeared, wearing a grim expression as she stalked up to the desk, and delivered a letter from her mother, then collected Amy\u2019s property, and departed, carefully scraping the mud from her boots on the door mat, as if she shook the dust of the place off her feet.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, you can have a vacation from school, but I want you to study a little every day with Beth,\u201d said Mrs. March that evening. \u201cI don\u2019t approve of corporal punishment, especially for girls. I dislike Mr. Davis\u2019s manner of teaching and don\u2019t think the girls you associate with are doing you any good, so I shall ask your father\u2019s advice before I send you anywhere else.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s good! I wish all the girls would leave, and spoil his old school. It\u2019s perfectly maddening to think of those lovely limes,\u201d sighed Amy, with the air of a martyr.\r\n\r\n\u201cI am not sorry you lost them, for you broke the rules, and deserved some punishment for disobedience,\u201d was the severe reply, which rather disappointed the young lady, who expected nothing but sympathy.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you mean you are glad I was disgraced before the whole school?\u201d cried Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cI should not have chosen that way of mending a fault,\u201d replied her mother, \u201cbut I\u2019m not sure that it won\u2019t do you more good than a bolder method. You are getting to be rather conceited, my dear, and it is quite time you set about correcting it. You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo it is!\u201d cried Laurie, who was playing chess in a corner with Jo. \u201cI knew a girl once, who had a really remarkable talent for music, and she didn\u2019t know it, never guessed what sweet little things she composed when she was alone, and wouldn\u2019t have believed it if anyone had told her.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish I\u2019d known that nice girl. Maybe she would have helped me, I\u2019m so stupid,\u201d said Beth, who stood beside him, listening eagerly.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou do know her, and she helps you better than anyone else could,\u201d answered Laurie, looking at her with such mischievous meaning in his merry black eyes that Beth suddenly turned very red, and hid her face in the sofa cushion, quite overcome by such an unexpected discovery.\r\n\r\nJo let Laurie win the game to pay for that praise of her Beth, who could not be prevailed upon to play for them after her compliment. So Laurie did his best, and sang delightfully, being in a particularly lively humor, for to the Marches he seldom showed the moody side of his character. When he was gone, Amy, who had been pensive all evening, said suddenly, as if busy over some new idea, \u201cIs Laurie an accomplished boy?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, he has had an excellent education, and has much talent. He will make a fine man, if not spoiled by petting,\u201d replied her mother.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd he isn\u2019t conceited, is he?\u201d asked Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot in the least. That is why he is so charming and we all like him so much.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI see. It\u2019s nice to have accomplishments and be elegant, but not to show off or get perked up,\u201d said Amy thoughtfully.\r\n\r\n\u201cThese things are always seen and felt in a person\u2019s manner and conversations, if modestly used, but it is not necessary to display them,\u201d said Mrs. March.\r\n\r\n\u201cAny more than it\u2019s proper to wear all your bonnets and gowns and ribbons at once, that folks may know you\u2019ve got them,\u201d added Jo, and the lecture ended in a laugh.\r\nCHAPTER EIGHT\r\nJO MEETS APOLLYON\r\n\r\n\u201cGirls, where are you going?\u201d asked Amy, coming into their room one Saturday afternoon, and finding them getting ready to go out with an air of secrecy which excited her curiosity.\r\n\r\n\u201cNever mind. Little girls shouldn\u2019t ask questions,\u201d returned Jo sharply.\r\n\r\nNow if there is anything mortifying to our feelings when we are young, it is to be told that, and to be bidden to \u201crun away, dear\u201d is still more trying to us. Amy bridled up at this insult, and determined to find out the secret, if she teased for an hour. Turning to Meg, who never refused her anything very long, she said coaxingly, \u201cDo tell me! I should think you might let me go, too, for Beth is fussing over her piano, and I haven\u2019t got anything to do, and am so lonely.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t, dear, because you aren\u2019t invited,\u201d began Meg, but Jo broke in impatiently, \u201cNow, Meg, be quiet or you will spoil it all. You can\u2019t go, Amy, so don\u2019t be a baby and whine about it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou are going somewhere with Laurie, I know you are. You were whispering and laughing together on the sofa last night, and you stopped when I came in. Aren\u2019t you going with him?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, we are. Now do be still, and stop bothering.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy held her tongue, but used her eyes, and saw Meg slip a fan into her pocket.\r\n\r\n\u201cI know! I know! You\u2019re going to the theater to see the Seven Castles!\u201d she cried, adding resolutely, \u201cand I shall go, for Mother said I might see it, and I\u2019ve got my rag money, and it was mean not to tell me in time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJust listen to me a minute, and be a good child,\u201d said Meg soothingly. \u201cMother doesn\u2019t wish you to go this week, because your eyes are not well enough yet to bear the light of this fairy piece. Next week you can go with Beth and Hannah, and have a nice time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t like that half as well as going with you and Laurie. Please let me. I\u2019ve been sick with this cold so long, and shut up, I\u2019m dying for some fun. Do, Meg! I\u2019ll be ever so good,\u201d pleaded Amy, looking as pathetic as she could.\r\n\r\n\u201cSuppose we take her. I don\u2019t believe Mother would mind, if we bundle her up well,\u201d began Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf she goes I shan\u2019t, and if I don\u2019t, Laurie won\u2019t like it, and it will be very rude, after he invited only us, to go and drag in Amy. I should think she\u2019d hate to poke herself where she isn\u2019t wanted,\u201d said Jo crossly, for she disliked the trouble of overseeing a fidgety child when she wanted to enjoy herself.\r\n\r\nHer tone and manner angered Amy, who began to put her boots on, saying, in her most aggravating way, \u201cI shall go. Meg says I may, and if I pay for myself, Laurie hasn\u2019t anything to do with it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou can\u2019t sit with us, for our seats are reserved, and you mustn\u2019t sit alone, so Laurie will give you his place, and that will spoil our pleasure. Or he\u2019ll get another seat for you, and that isn\u2019t proper when you weren\u2019t asked. You shan\u2019t stir a step, so you may just stay where you are,\u201d scolded Jo, crosser than ever, having just pricked her finger in her hurry.\r\n\r\nSitting on the floor with one boot on, Amy began to cry and Meg to reason with her, when Laurie called from below, and the two girls hurried down, leaving their sister wailing. For now and then she forgot her grown-up ways and acted like a spoiled child. Just as the party was setting out, Amy called over the banisters in a threatening tone, \u201cYou\u2019ll be sorry for this, Jo March, see if you ain\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFiddlesticks!\u201d returned Jo, slamming the door.\r\n\r\nThey had a charming time, for The Seven Castles Of The Diamond Lake was as brilliant and wonderful as heart could wish. But in spite of the comical red imps, sparkling elves, and the gorgeous princes and princesses, Jo\u2019s pleasure had a drop of bitterness in it. The fairy queen\u2019s yellow curls reminded her of Amy, and between the acts she amused herself with wondering what her sister would do to make her \u2018sorry for it\u2019. She and Amy had had many lively skirmishes in the course of their lives, for both had quick tempers and were apt to be violent when fairly roused. Amy teased Jo, and Jo irritated Amy, and semioccasional explosions occurred, of which both were much ashamed afterward. Although the oldest, Jo had the least self-control, and had hard times trying to curb the fiery spirit which was continually getting her into trouble. Her anger never lasted long, and having humbly confessed her fault, she sincerely repented and tried to do better. Her sisters used to say that they rather liked to get Jo into a fury because she was such an angel afterward. Poor Jo tried desperately to be good, but her bosom enemy was always ready to flame up and defeat her, and it took years of patient effort to subdue it.\r\n\r\nWhen they got home, they found Amy reading in the parlor. She assumed an injured air as they came in, never lifted her eyes from her book, or asked a single question. Perhaps curiosity might have conquered resentment, if Beth had not been there to inquire and receive a glowing description of the play. On going up to put away her best hat, Jo\u2019s first look was toward the bureau, for in their last quarrel Amy had soothed her feelings by turning Jo\u2019s top drawer upside down on the floor. Everything was in its place, however, and after a hasty glance into her various closets, bags, and boxes, Jo decided that Amy had forgiven and forgotten her wrongs.\r\n\r\nThere Jo was mistaken, for next day she made a discovery which produced a tempest. Meg, Beth, and Amy were sitting together, late in the afternoon, when Jo burst into the room, looking excited and demanding breathlessly, \u201cHas anyone taken my book?\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg and Beth said, \u201cNo.\u201d at once, and looked surprised. Amy poked the fire and said nothing. Jo saw her color rise and was down upon her in a minute.\r\n\r\n\u201cAmy, you\u2019ve got it!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I haven\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou know where it is, then!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I don\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s a fib!\u201d cried Jo, taking her by the shoulders, and looking fierce enough to frighten a much braver child than Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt isn\u2019t. I haven\u2019t got it, don\u2019t know where it is now, and don\u2019t care.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou know something about it, and you\u2019d better tell at once, or I\u2019ll make you.\u201d And Jo gave her a slight shake.\r\n\r\n\u201cScold as much as you like, you\u2019ll never see your silly old book again,\u201d cried Amy, getting excited in her turn.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy not?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI burned it up.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat! My little book I was so fond of, and worked over, and meant to finish before Father got home? Have you really burned it?\u201d said Jo, turning very pale, while her eyes kindled and her hands clutched Amy nervously.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I did! I told you I\u2019d make you pay for being so cross yesterday, and I have, so...\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy got no farther, for Jo\u2019s hot temper mastered her, and she shook Amy till her teeth chattered in her head, crying in a passion of grief and anger...\r\n\r\n\u201cYou wicked, wicked girl! I never can write it again, and I\u2019ll never forgive you as long as I live.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg flew to rescue Amy, and Beth to pacify Jo, but Jo was quite beside herself, and with a parting box on her sister\u2019s ear, she rushed out of the room up to the old sofa in the garret, and finished her fight alone.\r\n\r\nThe storm cleared up below, for Mrs. March came home, and, having heard the story, soon brought Amy to a sense of the wrong she had done her sister. Jo\u2019s book was the pride of her heart, and was regarded by her family as a literary sprout of great promise. It was only half a dozen little fairy tales, but Jo had worked over them patiently, putting her whole heart into her work, hoping to make something good enough to print. She had just copied them with great care, and had destroyed the old manuscript, so that Amy\u2019s bonfire had consumed the loving work of several years. It seemed a small loss to others, but to Jo it was a dreadful calamity, and she felt that it never could be made up to her. Beth mourned as for a departed kitten, and Meg refused to defend her pet. Mrs. March looked grave and grieved, and Amy felt that no one would love her till she had asked pardon for the act which she now regretted more than any of them.\r\n\r\nWhen the tea bell rang, Jo appeared, looking so grim and unapproachable that it took all Amy\u2019s courage to say meekly...\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease forgive me, Jo. I\u2019m very, very sorry.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI never shall forgive you,\u201d was Jo\u2019s stern answer, and from that moment she ignored Amy entirely.\r\n\r\nNo one spoke of the great trouble, not even Mrs. March, for all had learned by experience that when Jo was in that mood words were wasted, and the wisest course was to wait till some little accident, or her own generous nature, softened Jo\u2019s resentment and healed the breach. It was not a happy evening, for though they sewed as usual, while their mother read aloud from Bremer, Scott, or Edgeworth, something was wanting, and the sweet home peace was disturbed. They felt this most when singing time came, for Beth could only play, Jo stood dumb as a stone, and Amy broke down, so Meg and Mother sang alone. But in spite of their efforts to be as cheery as larks, the flutelike voices did not seem to chord as well as usual, and all felt out of tune.\r\n\r\nAs Jo received her good-night kiss, Mrs. March whispered gently, \u201cMy dear, don\u2019t let the sun go down upon your anger. Forgive each other, help each other, and begin again tomorrow.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo wanted to lay her head down on that motherly bosom, and cry her grief and anger all away, but tears were an unmanly weakness, and she felt so deeply injured that she really couldn\u2019t quite forgive yet. So she winked hard, shook her head, and said gruffly because Amy was listening, \u201cIt was an abominable thing, and she doesn\u2019t deserve to be forgiven.\u201d\r\n\r\nWith that she marched off to bed, and there was no merry or confidential gossip that night.\r\n\r\nAmy was much offended that her overtures of peace had been repulsed, and began to wish she had not humbled herself, to feel more injured than ever, and to plume herself on her superior virtue in a way which was particularly exasperating. Jo still looked like a thunder cloud, and nothing went well all day. It was bitter cold in the morning, she dropped her precious turnover in the gutter, Aunt March had an attack of the fidgets, Meg was sensitive, Beth would look grieved and wistful when she got home, and Amy kept making remarks about people who were always talking about being good and yet wouldn\u2019t even try when other people set them a virtuous example.\r\n\r\n\u201cEverybody is so hateful, I\u2019ll ask Laurie to go skating. He is always kind and jolly, and will put me to rights, I know,\u201d said Jo to herself, and off she went.\r\n\r\nAmy heard the clash of skates, and looked out with an impatient exclamation.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere! She promised I should go next time, for this is the last ice we shall have. But it\u2019s no use to ask such a crosspatch to take me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t say that. You were very naughty, and it is hard to forgive the loss of her precious little book, but I think she might do it now, and I guess she will, if you try her at the right minute,\u201d said Meg. \u201cGo after them. Don\u2019t say anything till Jo has got good-natured with Laurie, than take a quiet minute and just kiss her, or do some kind thing, and I\u2019m sure she\u2019ll be friends again with all her heart.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll try,\u201d said Amy, for the advice suited her, and after a flurry to get ready, she ran after the friends, who were just disappearing over the hill.\r\n\r\nIt was not far to the river, but both were ready before Amy reached them. Jo saw her coming, and turned her back. Laurie did not see, for he was carefully skating along the shore, sounding the ice, for a warm spell had preceded the cold snap.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll go on to the first bend, and see if it\u2019s all right before we begin to race,\u201d Amy heard him say, as he shot away, looking like a young Russian in his fur-trimmed coat and cap.\r\n\r\nJo heard Amy panting after her run, stamping her feet and blowing on her fingers as she tried to put her skates on, but Jo never turned and went slowly zigzagging down the river, taking a bitter, unhappy sort of satisfaction in her sister\u2019s troubles. She had cherished her anger till it grew strong and took possession of her, as evil thoughts and feelings always do unless cast out at once. As Laurie turned the bend, he shouted back...\r\n\r\n\u201cKeep near the shore. It isn\u2019t safe in the middle.\u201d Jo heard, but Amy was struggling to her feet and did not catch a word. Jo glanced over her shoulder, and the little demon she was harboring said in her ear...\r\n\r\n\u201cNo matter whether she heard or not, let her take care of herself.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie had vanished round the bend, Jo was just at the turn, and Amy, far behind, striking out toward the smoother ice in the middle of the river. For a minute Jo stood still with a strange feeling in her heart, then she resolved to go on, but something held and turned her round, just in time to see Amy throw up her hands and go down, with a sudden crash of rotten ice, the splash of water, and a cry that made Jo\u2019s heart stand still with fear. She tried to call Laurie, but her voice was gone. She tried to rush forward, but her feet seemed to have no strength in them, and for a second, she could only stand motionless, staring with a terror-stricken face at the little blue hood above the black water. Something rushed swiftly by her, and Laurie\u2019s voice cried out...\r\n\r\n\u201cBring a rail. Quick, quick!\u201d\r\n\r\nHow she did it, she never knew, but for the next few minutes she worked as if possessed, blindly obeying Laurie, who was quite self-possessed, and lying flat, held Amy up by his arm and hockey stick till Jo dragged a rail from the fence, and together they got the child out, more frightened than hurt.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow then, we must walk her home as fast as we can. Pile our things on her, while I get off these confounded skates,\u201d cried Laurie, wrapping his coat round Amy, and tugging away at the straps which never seemed so intricate before.\r\n\r\nShivering, dripping, and crying, they got Amy home, and after an exciting time of it, she fell asleep, rolled in blankets before a hot fire. During the bustle Jo had scarcely spoken but flown about, looking pale and wild, with her things half off, her dress torn, and her hands cut and bruised by ice and rails and refractory buckles. When Amy was comfortably asleep, the house quiet, and Mrs. March sitting by the bed, she called Jo to her and began to bind up the hurt hands.\r\n\r\n\u201cAre you sure she is safe?\u201d whispered Jo, looking remorsefully at the golden head, which might have been swept away from her sight forever under the treacherous ice.\r\n\r\n\u201cQuite safe, dear. She is not hurt, and won\u2019t even take cold, I think, you were so sensible in covering and getting her home quickly,\u201d replied her mother cheerfully.\r\n\r\n\u201cLaurie did it all. I only let her go. Mother, if she should die, it would be my fault.\u201d And Jo dropped down beside the bed in a passion of penitent tears, telling all that had happened, bitterly condemning her hardness of heart, and sobbing out her gratitude for being spared the heavy punishment which might have come upon her.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s my dreadful temper! I try to cure it, I think I have, and then it breaks out worse than ever. Oh, Mother, what shall I do? What shall I do?\u201d cried poor Jo, in despair.\r\n\r\n\u201cWatch and pray, dear, never get tired of trying, and never think it is impossible to conquer your fault,\u201d said Mrs. March, drawing the blowzy head to her shoulder and kissing the wet cheek so tenderly that Jo cried even harder.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t know, you can\u2019t guess how bad it is! It seems as if I could do anything when I\u2019m in a passion. I get so savage, I could hurt anyone and enjoy it. I\u2019m afraid I shall do something dreadful some day, and spoil my life, and make everybody hate me. Oh, Mother, help me, do help me!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI will, my child, I will. Don\u2019t cry so bitterly, but remember this day, and resolve with all your soul that you will never know another like it. Jo, dear, we all have our temptations, some far greater than yours, and it often takes us all our lives to conquer them. You think your temper is the worst in the world, but mine used to be just like it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYours, Mother? Why, you are never angry!\u201d And for the moment Jo forgot remorse in surprise.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo, but I have learned not to show it, and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe patience and the humility of the face she loved so well was a better lesson to Jo than the wisest lecture, the sharpest reproof. She felt comforted at once by the sympathy and confidence given her. The knowledge that her mother had a fault like hers, and tried to mend it, made her own easier to bear and strengthened her resolution to cure it, though forty years seemed rather a long time to watch and pray to a girl of fifteen.\r\n\r\n\u201cMother, are you angry when you fold your lips tight together and go out of the room sometimes, when Aunt March scolds or people worry you?\u201d asked Jo, feeling nearer and dearer to her mother than ever before.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I\u2019ve learned to check the hasty words that rise to my lips, and when I feel that they mean to break out against my will, I just go away for a minute, and give myself a little shake for being so weak and wicked,\u201d answered Mrs. March with a sigh and a smile, as she smoothed and fastened up Jo\u2019s disheveled hair.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow did you learn to keep still? That is what troubles me, for the sharp words fly out before I know what I\u2019m about, and the more I say the worse I get, till it\u2019s a pleasure to hurt people\u2019s feelings and say dreadful things. Tell me how you do it, Marmee dear.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy good mother used to help me...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAs you do us...\u201d interrupted Jo, with a grateful kiss.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I lost her when I was a little older than you are, and for years had to struggle on alone, for I was too proud to confess my weakness to anyone else. I had a hard time, Jo, and shed a good many bitter tears over my failures, for in spite of my efforts I never seemed to get on. Then your father came, and I was so happy that I found it easy to be good. But by-and-by, when I had four little daughters round me and we were poor, then the old trouble began again, for I am not patient by nature, and it tried me very much to see my children wanting anything.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor Mother! What helped you then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYour father, Jo. He never loses patience, never doubts or complains, but always hopes, and works and waits so cheerfully that one is ashamed to do otherwise before him. He helped and comforted me, and showed me that I must try to practice all the virtues I would have my little girls possess, for I was their example. It was easier to try for your sakes than for my own. A startled or surprised look from one of you when I spoke sharply rebuked me more than any words could have done, and the love, respect, and confidence of my children was the sweetest reward I could receive for my efforts to be the woman I would have them copy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Mother, if I\u2019m ever half as good as you, I shall be satisfied,\u201d cried Jo, much touched.\r\n\r\n\u201cI hope you will be a great deal better, dear, but you must keep watch over your \u2018bosom enemy\u2019, as father calls it, or it may sadden, if not spoil your life. You have had a warning. Remember it, and try with heart and soul to master this quick temper, before it brings you greater sorrow and regret than you have known today.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI will try, Mother, I truly will. But you must help me, remind me, and keep me from flying out. I used to see Father sometimes put his finger on his lips, and look at you with a very kind but sober face, and you always folded your lips tight and went away. Was he reminding you then?\u201d asked Jo softly.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes. I asked him to help me so, and he never forgot it, but saved me from many a sharp word by that little gesture and kind look.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo saw that her mother\u2019s eyes filled and her lips trembled as she spoke, and fearing that she had said too much, she whispered anxiously, \u201cWas it wrong to watch you and to speak of it? I didn\u2019t mean to be rude, but it\u2019s so comfortable to say all I think to you, and feel so safe and happy here.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy Jo, you may say anything to your mother, for it is my greatest happiness and pride to feel that my girls confide in me and know how much I love them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought I\u2019d grieved you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, dear, but speaking of Father reminded me how much I miss him, how much I owe him, and how faithfully I should watch and work to keep his little daughters safe and good for him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYet you told him to go, Mother, and didn\u2019t cry when he went, and never complain now, or seem as if you needed any help,\u201d said Jo, wondering.\r\n\r\n\u201cI gave my best to the country I love, and kept my tears till he was gone. Why should I complain, when we both have merely done our duty and will surely be the happier for it in the end? If I don\u2019t seem to need help, it is because I have a better friend, even than Father, to comfort and sustain me. My child, the troubles and temptations of your life are beginning and may be many, but you can overcome and outlive them all if you learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father as you do that of your earthly one. The more you love and trust Him, the nearer you will feel to Him, and the less you will depend on human power and wisdom. His love and care never tire or change, can never be taken from you, but may become the source of lifelong peace, happiness, and strength. Believe this heartily, and go to God with all your little cares, and hopes, and sins, and sorrows, as freely and confidingly as you come to your mother.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo\u2019s only answer was to hold her mother close, and in the silence which followed the sincerest prayer she had ever prayed left her heart without words. For in that sad yet happy hour, she had learned not only the bitterness of remorse and despair, but the sweetness of self-denial and self-control, and led by her mother\u2019s hand, she had drawn nearer to the Friend who always welcomes every child with a love stronger than that of any father, tenderer than that of any mother.\r\n\r\nAmy stirred and sighed in her sleep, and as if eager to begin at once to mend her fault, Jo looked up with an expression on her face which it had never worn before.\r\n\r\n\u201cI let the sun go down on my anger. I wouldn\u2019t forgive her, and today, if it hadn\u2019t been for Laurie, it might have been too late! How could I be so wicked?\u201d said Jo, half aloud, as she leaned over her sister softly stroking the wet hair scattered on the pillow.\r\n\r\nAs if she heard, Amy opened her eyes, and held out her arms, with a smile that went straight to Jo\u2019s heart. Neither said a word, but they hugged one another close, in spite of the blankets, and everything was forgiven and forgotten in one hearty kiss.\r\nCHAPTER NINE\r\nMEG GOES TO VANITY FAIR\r\n\r\n\u201cI do think it was the most fortunate thing in the world that those children should have the measles just now,\u201d said Meg, one April day, as she stood packing the \u2018go abroady\u2019 trunk in her room, surrounded by her sisters.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd so nice of Annie Moffat not to forget her promise. A whole fortnight of fun will be regularly splendid,\u201d replied Jo, looking like a windmill as she folded skirts with her long arms.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd such lovely weather, I\u2019m so glad of that,\u201d added Beth, tidily sorting neck and hair ribbons in her best box, lent for the great occasion.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish I was going to have a fine time and wear all these nice things,\u201d said Amy with her mouth full of pins, as she artistically replenished her sister\u2019s cushion.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish you were all going, but as you can\u2019t, I shall keep my adventures to tell you when I come back. I\u2019m sure it\u2019s the least I can do when you have been so kind, lending me things and helping me get ready,\u201d said Meg, glancing round the room at the very simple outfit, which seemed nearly perfect in their eyes.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat did Mother give you out of the treasure box?\u201d asked Amy, who had not been present at the opening of a certain cedar chest in which Mrs. March kept a few relics of past splendor, as gifts for her girls when the proper time came.\r\n\r\n\u201cA pair of silk stockings, that pretty carved fan, and a lovely blue sash. I wanted the violet silk, but there isn\u2019t time to make it over, so I must be contented with my old tarlaton.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt will look nice over my new muslin skirt, and the sash will set it off beautifully. I wish I hadn\u2019t smashed my coral bracelet, for you might have had it,\u201d said Jo, who loved to give and lend, but whose possessions were usually too dilapidated to be of much use.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere is a lovely old-fashioned pearl set in the treasure chest, but Mother said real flowers were the prettiest ornament for a young girl, and Laurie promised to send me all I want,\u201d replied Meg. \u201cNow, let me see, there\u2019s my new gray walking suit, just curl up the feather in my hat, Beth, then my poplin for Sunday and the small party, it looks heavy for spring, doesn\u2019t it? The violet silk would be so nice. Oh, dear!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNever mind, you\u2019ve got the tarlaton for the big party, and you always look like an angel in white,\u201d said Amy, brooding over the little store of finery in which her soul delighted.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt isn\u2019t low-necked, and it doesn\u2019t sweep enough, but it will have to do. My blue housedress looks so well, turned and freshly trimmed, that I feel as if I\u2019d got a new one. My silk sacque isn\u2019t a bit the fashion, and my bonnet doesn\u2019t look like Sallie\u2019s. I didn\u2019t like to say anything, but I was sadly disappointed in my umbrella. I told Mother black with a white handle, but she forgot and bought a green one with a yellowish handle. It\u2019s strong and neat, so I ought not to complain, but I know I shall feel ashamed of it beside Annie\u2019s silk one with a gold top,\u201d sighed Meg, surveying the little umbrella with great disfavor.\r\n\r\n\u201cChange it,\u201d advised Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cI won\u2019t be so silly, or hurt Marmee\u2019s feelings, when she took so much pains to get my things. It\u2019s a nonsensical notion of mine, and I\u2019m not going to give up to it. My silk stockings and two pairs of new gloves are my comfort. You are a dear to lend me yours, Jo. I feel so rich and sort of elegant, with two new pairs, and the old ones cleaned up for common.\u201d And Meg took a refreshing peep at her glove box.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnnie Moffat has blue and pink bows on her nightcaps. Would you put some on mine?\u201d she asked, as Beth brought up a pile of snowy muslins, fresh from Hannah\u2019s hands.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I wouldn\u2019t, for the smart caps won\u2019t match the plain gowns without any trimming on them. Poor folks shouldn\u2019t rig,\u201d said Jo decidedly.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wonder if I shall ever be happy enough to have real lace on my clothes and bows on my caps?\u201d said Meg impatiently.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou said the other day that you\u2019d be perfectly happy if you could only go to Annie Moffat\u2019s,\u201d observed Beth in her quiet way.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo I did! Well, I am happy, and I won\u2019t fret, but it does seem as if the more one gets the more one wants, doesn\u2019t it? There now, the trays are ready, and everything in but my ball dress, which I shall leave for Mother to pack,\u201d said Meg, cheering up, as she glanced from the half-filled trunk to the many times pressed and mended white tarlaton, which she called her \u2018ball dress\u2019 with an important air.\r\n\r\nThe next day was fine, and Meg departed in style for a fortnight of novelty and pleasure. Mrs. March had consented to the visit rather reluctantly, fearing that Margaret would come back more discontented than she went. But she begged so hard, and Sallie had promised to take good care of her, and a little pleasure seemed so delightful after a winter of irksome work that the mother yielded, and the daughter went to take her first taste of fashionable life.\r\n\r\nThe Moffats were very fashionable, and simple Meg was rather daunted, at first, by the splendor of the house and the elegance of its occupants. But they were kindly people, in spite of the frivolous life they led, and soon put their guest at her ease. Perhaps Meg felt, without understanding why, that they were not particularly cultivated or intelligent people, and that all their gilding could not quite conceal the ordinary material of which they were made. It certainly was agreeable to fare sumptuously, drive in a fine carriage, wear her best frock every day, and do nothing but enjoy herself. It suited her exactly, and soon she began to imitate the manners and conversation of those about her, to put on little airs and graces, use French phrases, crimp her hair, take in her dresses, and talk about the fashions as well as she could. The more she saw of Annie Moffat\u2019s pretty things, the more she envied her and sighed to be rich. Home now looked bare and dismal as she thought of it, work grew harder than ever, and she felt that she was a very destitute and much-injured girl, in spite of the new gloves and silk stockings.\r\n\r\nShe had not much time for repining, however, for the three young girls were busily employed in \u2018having a good time\u2019. They shopped, walked, rode, and called all day, went to theaters and operas or frolicked at home in the evening, for Annie had many friends and knew how to entertain them. Her older sisters were very fine young ladies, and one was engaged, which was extremely interesting and romantic, Meg thought. Mr. Moffat was a fat, jolly old gentleman, who knew her father, and Mrs. Moffat, a fat, jolly old lady, who took as great a fancy to Meg as her daughter had done. Everyone petted her, and \u2018Daisey\u2019, as they called her, was in a fair way to have her head turned.\r\n\r\nWhen the evening for the small party came, she found that the poplin wouldn\u2019t do at all, for the other girls were putting on thin dresses and making themselves very fine indeed. So out came the tarlatan, looking older, limper, and shabbier than ever beside Sallie\u2019s crisp new one. Meg saw the girls glance at it and then at one another, and her cheeks began to burn, for with all her gentleness she was very proud. No one said a word about it, but Sallie offered to dress her hair, and Annie to tie her sash, and Belle, the engaged sister, praised her white arms. But in their kindness Meg saw only pity for her poverty, and her heart felt very heavy as she stood by herself, while the others laughed, chattered, and flew about like gauzy butterflies. The hard, bitter feeling was getting pretty bad, when the maid brought in a box of flowers. Before she could speak, Annie had the cover off, and all were exclaiming at the lovely roses, heath, and fern within.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s for Belle, of course, George always sends her some, but these are altogether ravishing,\u201d cried Annie, with a great sniff.\r\n\r\n\u201cThey are for Miss March, the man said. And here\u2019s a note,\u201d put in the maid, holding it to Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat fun! Who are they from? Didn\u2019t know you had a lover,\u201d cried the girls, fluttering about Meg in a high state of curiosity and surprise.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe note is from Mother, and the flowers from Laurie,\u201d said Meg simply, yet much gratified that he had not forgotten her.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, indeed!\u201d said Annie with a funny look, as Meg slipped the note into her pocket as a sort of talisman against envy, vanity, and false pride, for the few loving words had done her good, and the flowers cheered her up by their beauty.\r\n\r\nFeeling almost happy again, she laid by a few ferns and roses for herself, and quickly made up the rest in dainty bouquets for the breasts, hair, or skirts of her friends, offering them so prettily that Clara, the elder sister, told her she was \u2018the sweetest little thing she ever saw\u2019, and they looked quite charmed with her small attention. Somehow the kind act finished her despondency, and when all the rest went to show themselves to Mrs. Moffat, she saw a happy, bright-eyed face in the mirror, as she laid her ferns against her rippling hair and fastened the roses in the dress that didn\u2019t strike her as so very shabby now.\r\n\r\nShe enjoyed herself very much that evening, for she danced to her heart\u2019s content. Everyone was very kind, and she had three compliments. Annie made her sing, and some one said she had a remarkably fine voice. Major Lincoln asked who \u2018the fresh little girl with the beautiful eyes\u2019 was, and Mr. Moffat insisted on dancing with her because she \u2018didn\u2019t dawdle, but had some spring in her\u2019, as he gracefully expressed it. So altogether she had a very nice time, till she overheard a bit of conversation, which disturbed her extremely. She was sitting just inside the conservatory, waiting for her partner to bring her an ice, when she heard a voice ask on the other side of the flowery wall...\r\n\r\n\u201cHow old is he?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSixteen or seventeen, I should say,\u201d replied another voice.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt would be a grand thing for one of those girls, wouldn\u2019t it? Sallie says they are very intimate now, and the old man quite dotes on them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMrs. M. has made her plans, I dare say, and will play her cards well, early as it is. The girl evidently doesn\u2019t think of it yet,\u201d said Mrs. Moffat.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe told that fib about her momma, as if she did know, and colored up when the flowers came quite prettily. Poor thing! She\u2019d be so nice if she was only got up in style. Do you think she\u2019d be offended if we offered to lend her a dress for Thursday?\u201d asked another voice.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe\u2019s proud, but I don\u2019t believe she\u2019d mind, for that dowdy tarlaton is all she has got. She may tear it tonight, and that will be a good excuse for offering a decent one.\u201d\r\n\r\nHere Meg\u2019s partner appeared, to find her looking much flushed and rather agitated. She was proud, and her pride was useful just then, for it helped her hide her mortification, anger, and disgust at what she had just heard. For, innocent and unsuspicious as she was, she could not help understanding the gossip of her friends. She tried to forget it, but could not, and kept repeating to herself, \u201cMrs. M. has made her plans,\u201d \u201cthat fib about her mamma,\u201d and \u201cdowdy tarlaton,\u201d till she was ready to cry and rush home to tell her troubles and ask for advice. As that was impossible, she did her best to seem gay, and being rather excited, she succeeded so well that no one dreamed what an effort she was making. She was very glad when it was all over and she was quiet in her bed, where she could think and wonder and fume till her head ached and her hot cheeks were cooled by a few natural tears. Those foolish, yet well meant words, had opened a new world to Meg, and much disturbed the peace of the old one in which till now she had lived as happily as a child. Her innocent friendship with Laurie was spoiled by the silly speeches she had overheard. Her faith in her mother was a little shaken by the worldly plans attributed to her by Mrs. Moffat, who judged others by herself, and the sensible resolution to be contented with the simple wardrobe which suited a poor man\u2019s daughter was weakened by the unnecessary pity of girls who thought a shabby dress one of the greatest calamities under heaven.\r\n\r\nPoor Meg had a restless night, and got up heavy-eyed, unhappy, half resentful toward her friends, and half ashamed of herself for not speaking out frankly and setting everything right. Everybody dawdled that morning, and it was noon before the girls found energy enough even to take up their worsted work. Something in the manner of her friends struck Meg at once. They treated her with more respect, she thought, took quite a tender interest in what she said, and looked at her with eyes that plainly betrayed curiosity. All this surprised and flattered her, though she did not understand it till Miss Belle looked up from her writing, and said, with a sentimental air...\r\n\r\n\u201cDaisy, dear, I\u2019ve sent an invitation to your friend, Mr. Laurence, for Thursday. We should like to know him, and it\u2019s only a proper compliment to you.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg colored, but a mischievous fancy to tease the girls made her reply demurely, \u201cYou are very kind, but I\u2019m afraid he won\u2019t come.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy not, Cherie?\u201d asked Miss Belle.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s too old.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy child, what do you mean? What is his age, I beg to know!\u201d cried Miss Clara.\r\n\r\n\u201cNearly seventy, I believe,\u201d answered Meg, counting stitches to hide the merriment in her eyes.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou sly creature! Of course we meant the young man,\u201d exclaimed Miss Belle, laughing.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere isn\u2019t any, Laurie is only a little boy.\u201d And Meg laughed also at the queer look which the sisters exchanged as she thus described her supposed lover.\r\n\r\n\u201cAbout your age,\u201d Nan said.\r\n\r\n\u201cNearer my sister Jo\u2019s; I am seventeen in August,\u201d returned Meg, tossing her head.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s very nice of him to send you flowers, isn\u2019t it?\u201d said Annie, looking wise about nothing.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, he often does, to all of us, for their house is full, and we are so fond of them. My mother and old Mr. Laurence are friends, you know, so it is quite natural that we children should play together,\u201d and Meg hoped they would say no more.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s evident Daisy isn\u2019t out yet,\u201d said Miss Clara to Belle with a nod.\r\n\r\n\u201cQuite a pastoral state of innocence all round,\u201d returned Miss Belle with a shrug.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m going out to get some little matters for my girls. Can I do anything for you, young ladies?\u201d asked Mrs. Moffat, lumbering in like an elephant in silk and lace.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, thank you, ma\u2019am,\u201d replied Sallie. \u201cI\u2019ve got my new pink silk for Thursday and don\u2019t want a thing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNor I...\u201d began Meg, but stopped because it occurred to her that she did want several things and could not have them.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat shall you wear?\u201d asked Sallie.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy old white one again, if I can mend it fit to be seen, it got sadly torn last night,\u201d said Meg, trying to speak quite easily, but feeling very uncomfortable.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy don\u2019t you send home for another?\u201d said Sallie, who was not an observing young lady.\r\n\r\n\u201cI haven\u2019t got any other.\u201d It cost Meg an effort to say that, but Sallie did not see it and exclaimed in amiable surprise, \u201cOnly that? How funny...\u201d She did not finish her speech, for Belle shook her head at her and broke in, saying kindly...\r\n\r\n\u201cNot at all. Where is the use of having a lot of dresses when she isn\u2019t out yet? There\u2019s no need of sending home, Daisy, even if you had a dozen, for I\u2019ve got a sweet blue silk laid away, which I\u2019ve outgrown, and you shall wear it to please me, won\u2019t you, dear?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou are very kind, but I don\u2019t mind my old dress if you don\u2019t, it does well enough for a little girl like me,\u201d said Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow do let me please myself by dressing you up in style. I admire to do it, and you\u2019d be a regular little beauty with a touch here and there. I shan\u2019t let anyone see you till you are done, and then we\u2019ll burst upon them like Cinderella and her godmother going to the ball,\u201d said Belle in her persuasive tone.\r\n\r\nMeg couldn\u2019t refuse the offer so kindly made, for a desire to see if she would be \u2018a little beauty\u2019 after touching up caused her to accept and forget all her former uncomfortable feelings toward the Moffats.\r\n\r\nOn the Thursday evening, Belle shut herself up with her maid, and between them they turned Meg into a fine lady. They crimped and curled her hair, they polished her neck and arms with some fragrant powder, touched her lips with coralline salve to make them redder, and Hortense would have added \u2018a soupcon of rouge\u2019, if Meg had not rebelled. They laced her into a sky-blue dress, which was so tight she could hardly breathe and so low in the neck that modest Meg blushed at herself in the mirror. A set of silver filagree was added, bracelets, necklace, brooch, and even earrings, for Hortense tied them on with a bit of pink silk which did not show. A cluster of tea-rose buds at the bosom, and a ruche, reconciled Meg to the display of her pretty, white shoulders, and a pair of high-heeled silk boots satisfied the last wish of her heart. A lace handkerchief, a plumy fan, and a bouquet in a shoulder holder finished her off, and Miss Belle surveyed her with the satisfaction of a little girl with a newly dressed doll.\r\n\r\n\u201cMademoiselle is charmante, tres jolie, is she not?\u201d cried Hortense, clasping her hands in an affected rapture.\r\n\r\n\u201cCome and show yourself,\u201d said Miss Belle, leading the way to the room where the others were waiting.\r\n\r\nAs Meg went rustling after, with her long skirts trailing, her earrings tinkling, her curls waving, and her heart beating, she felt as if her fun had really begun at last, for the mirror had plainly told her that she was \u2018a little beauty\u2019. Her friends repeated the pleasing phrase enthusiastically, and for several minutes she stood, like a jackdaw in the fable, enjoying her borrowed plumes, while the rest chattered like a party of magpies.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhile I dress, do you drill her, Nan, in the management of her skirt and those French heels, or she will trip herself up. Take your silver butterfly, and catch up that long curl on the left side of her head, Clara, and don\u2019t any of you disturb the charming work of my hands,\u201d said Belle, as she hurried away, looking well pleased with her success.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t look a bit like yourself, but you are very nice. I\u2019m nowhere beside you, for Belle has heaps of taste, and you\u2019re quite French, I assure you. Let your flowers hang, don\u2019t be so careful of them, and be sure you don\u2019t trip,\u201d returned Sallie, trying not to care that Meg was prettier than herself.\r\n\r\nKeeping that warning carefully in mind, Margaret got safely down stairs and sailed into the drawing rooms where the Moffats and a few early guests were assembled. She very soon discovered that there is a charm about fine clothes which attracts a certain class of people and secures their respect. Several young ladies, who had taken no notice of her before, were very affectionate all of a sudden. Several young gentlemen, who had only stared at her at the other party, now not only stared, but asked to be introduced, and said all manner of foolish but agreeable things to her, and several old ladies, who sat on the sofas, and criticized the rest of the party, inquired who she was with an air of interest. She heard Mrs. Moffat reply to one of them...\r\n\r\n\u201cDaisy March\u2014father a colonel in the army\u2014one of our first families, but reverses of fortune, you know; intimate friends of the Laurences; sweet creature, I assure you; my Ned is quite wild about her.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDear me!\u201d said the old lady, putting up her glass for another observation of Meg, who tried to look as if she had not heard and been rather shocked at Mrs. Moffat\u2019s fibs. The \u2018queer feeling\u2019 did not pass away, but she imagined herself acting the new part of fine lady and so got on pretty well, though the tight dress gave her a side-ache, the train kept getting under her feet, and she was in constant fear lest her earrings should fly off and get lost or broken. She was flirting her fan and laughing at the feeble jokes of a young gentleman who tried to be witty, when she suddenly stopped laughing and looked confused, for just opposite, she saw Laurie. He was staring at her with undisguised surprise, and disapproval also, she thought, for though he bowed and smiled, yet something in his honest eyes made her blush and wish she had her old dress on. To complete her confusion, she saw Belle nudge Annie, and both glance from her to Laurie, who, she was happy to see, looked unusually boyish and shy.\r\n\r\n\u201cSilly creatures, to put such thoughts into my head. I won\u2019t care for it, or let it change me a bit,\u201d thought Meg, and rustled across the room to shake hands with her friend.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad you came, I was afraid you wouldn\u2019t.\u201d she said, with her most grown-up air.\r\n\r\n\u201cJo wanted me to come, and tell her how you looked, so I did,\u201d answered Laurie, without turning his eyes upon her, though he half smiled at her maternal tone.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat shall you tell her?\u201d asked Meg, full of curiosity to know his opinion of her, yet feeling ill at ease with him for the first time.\r\n\r\n\u201cI shall say I didn\u2019t know you, for you look so grown-up and unlike yourself, I\u2019m quite afraid of you,\u201d he said, fumbling at his glove button.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow absurd of you! The girls dressed me up for fun, and I rather like it. Wouldn\u2019t Jo stare if she saw me?\u201d said Meg, bent on making him say whether he thought her improved or not.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I think she would,\u201d returned Laurie gravely.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you like me so?\u201d asked Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I don\u2019t,\u201d was the blunt reply.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy not?\u201d in an anxious tone.\r\n\r\nHe glanced at her frizzled head, bare shoulders, and fantastically trimmed dress with an expression that abashed her more than his answer, which had not a particle of his usual politeness in it.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t like fuss and feathers.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat was altogether too much from a lad younger than herself, and Meg walked away, saying petulantly, \u201cYou are the rudest boy I ever saw.\u201d\r\n\r\nFeeling very much ruffled, she went and stood at a quiet window to cool her cheeks, for the tight dress gave her an uncomfortably brilliant color. As she stood there, Major Lincoln passed by, and a minute after she heard him saying to his mother...\r\n\r\n\u201cThey are making a fool of that little girl. I wanted you to see her, but they have spoiled her entirely. She\u2019s nothing but a doll tonight.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, dear!\u201d sighed Meg. \u201cI wish I\u2019d been sensible and worn my own things, then I should not have disgusted other people, or felt so uncomfortable and ashamed of myself.\u201d\r\n\r\nShe leaned her forehead on the cool pane, and stood half hidden by the curtains, never minding that her favorite waltz had begun, till some one touched her, and turning, she saw Laurie, looking penitent, as he said, with his very best bow and his hand out...\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease forgive my rudeness, and come and dance with me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m afraid it will be too disagreeable to you,\u201d said Meg, trying to look offended and failing entirely.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a bit of it, I\u2019m dying to do it. Come, I\u2019ll be good. I don\u2019t like your gown, but I do think you are just splendid.\u201d And he waved his hands, as if words failed to express his admiration.\r\n\r\nMeg smiled and relented, and whispered as they stood waiting to catch the time, \u201cTake care my skirt doesn\u2019t trip you up. It\u2019s the plague of my life and I was a goose to wear it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPin it round your neck, and then it will be useful,\u201d said Laurie, looking down at the little blue boots, which he evidently approved of.\r\n\r\nAway they went fleetly and gracefully, for having practiced at home, they were well matched, and the blithe young couple were a pleasant sight to see, as they twirled merrily round and round, feeling more friendly than ever after their small tiff.\r\n\r\n\u201cLaurie, I want you to do me a favor, will you?\u201d said Meg, as he stood fanning her when her breath gave out, which it did very soon though she would not own why.\r\n\r\n\u201cWon\u2019t I!\u201d said Laurie, with alacrity.\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease don\u2019t tell them at home about my dress tonight. They won\u2019t understand the joke, and it will worry Mother.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen why did you do it?\u201d said Laurie\u2019s eyes, so plainly that Meg hastily added...\r\n\r\n\u201cI shall tell them myself all about it, and \u2018fess\u2019 to Mother how silly I\u2019ve been. But I\u2019d rather do it myself. So you\u2019ll not tell, will you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI give you my word I won\u2019t, only what shall I say when they ask me?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJust say I looked pretty well and was having a good time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll say the first with all my heart, but how about the other? You don\u2019t look as if you were having a good time. Are you?\u201d And Laurie looked at her with an expression which made her answer in a whisper...\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, not just now. Don\u2019t think I\u2019m horrid. I only wanted a little fun, but this sort doesn\u2019t pay, I find, and I\u2019m getting tired of it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHere comes Ned Moffat. What does he want?\u201d said Laurie, knitting his black brows as if he did not regard his young host in the light of a pleasant addition to the party.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe put his name down for three dances, and I suppose he\u2019s coming for them. What a bore!\u201d said Meg, assuming a languid air which amused Laurie immensely.\r\n\r\nHe did not speak to her again till suppertime, when he saw her drinking champagne with Ned and his friend Fisher, who were behaving \u2018like a pair of fools\u2019, as Laurie said to himself, for he felt a brotherly sort of right to watch over the Marches and fight their battles whenever a defender was needed.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ll have a splitting headache tomorrow, if you drink much of that. I wouldn\u2019t, Meg, your mother doesn\u2019t like it, you know,\u201d he whispered, leaning over her chair, as Ned turned to refill her glass and Fisher stooped to pick up her fan.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m not Meg tonight, I\u2019m \u2018a doll\u2019 who does all sorts of crazy things. Tomorrow I shall put away my \u2018fuss and feathers\u2019 and be desperately good again,\u201d she answered with an affected little laugh.\r\n\r\n\u201cWish tomorrow was here, then,\u201d muttered Laurie, walking off, ill-pleased at the change he saw in her.\r\n\r\nMeg danced and flirted, chattered and giggled, as the other girls did. After supper she undertook the German, and blundered through it, nearly upsetting her partner with her long skirt, and romping in a way that scandalized Laurie, who looked on and meditated a lecture. But he got no chance to deliver it, for Meg kept away from him till he came to say good night.\r\n\r\n\u201cRemember!\u201d she said, trying to smile, for the splitting headache had already begun.\r\n\r\n\u201cSilence a la mort,\u201d replied Laurie, with a melodramatic flourish, as he went away.\r\n\r\nThis little bit of byplay excited Annie\u2019s curiosity, but Meg was too tired for gossip and went to bed, feeling as if she had been to a masquerade and hadn\u2019t enjoyed herself as much as she expected. She was sick all the next day, and on Saturday went home, quite used up with her fortnight\u2019s fun and feeling that she had \u2018sat in the lap of luxury\u2019 long enough.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt does seem pleasant to be quiet, and not have company manners on all the time. Home is a nice place, though it isn\u2019t splendid,\u201d said Meg, looking about her with a restful expression, as she sat with her mother and Jo on the Sunday evening.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad to hear you say so, dear, for I was afraid home would seem dull and poor to you after your fine quarters,\u201d replied her mother, who had given her many anxious looks that day. For motherly eyes are quick to see any change in children\u2019s faces.\r\n\r\nMeg had told her adventures gayly and said over and over what a charming time she had had, but something still seemed to weigh upon her spirits, and when the younger girls were gone to bed, she sat thoughtfully staring at the fire, saying little and looking worried. As the clock struck nine and Jo proposed bed, Meg suddenly left her chair and, taking Beth\u2019s stool, leaned her elbows on her mother\u2019s knee, saying bravely...\r\n\r\n\u201cMarmee, I want to \u2018fess\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought so. What is it, dear?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShall I go away?\u201d asked Jo discreetly.\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course not. Don\u2019t I always tell you everything? I was ashamed to speak of it before the younger children, but I want you to know all the dreadful things I did at the Moffats\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe are prepared,\u201d said Mrs. March, smiling but looking a little anxious.\r\n\r\n\u201cI told you they dressed me up, but I didn\u2019t tell you that they powdered and squeezed and frizzled, and made me look like a fashion-plate. Laurie thought I wasn\u2019t proper. I know he did, though he didn\u2019t say so, and one man called me \u2018a doll\u2019. I knew it was silly, but they flattered me and said I was a beauty, and quantities of nonsense, so I let them make a fool of me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIs that all?\u201d asked Jo, as Mrs. March looked silently at the downcast face of her pretty daughter, and could not find it in her heart to blame her little follies.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I drank champagne and romped and tried to flirt, and was altogether abominable,\u201d said Meg self-reproachfully.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere is something more, I think.\u201d And Mrs. March smoothed the soft cheek, which suddenly grew rosy as Meg answered slowly...\r\n\r\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very silly, but I want to tell it, because I hate to have people say and think such things about us and Laurie.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen she told the various bits of gossip she had heard at the Moffats\u2019, and as she spoke, Jo saw her mother fold her lips tightly, as if ill pleased that such ideas should be put into Meg\u2019s innocent mind.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, if that isn\u2019t the greatest rubbish I ever heard,\u201d cried Jo indignantly. \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you pop out and tell them so on the spot?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI couldn\u2019t, it was so embarrassing for me. I couldn\u2019t help hearing at first, and then I was so angry and ashamed, I didn\u2019t remember that I ought to go away.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJust wait till I see Annie Moffat, and I\u2019ll show you how to settle such ridiculous stuff. The idea of having \u2018plans\u2019 and being kind to Laurie because he\u2019s rich and may marry us by-and-by! Won\u2019t he shout when I tell him what those silly things say about us poor children?\u201d And Jo laughed, as if on second thoughts the thing struck her as a good joke.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you tell Laurie, I\u2019ll never forgive you! She mustn\u2019t, must she, Mother?\u201d said Meg, looking distressed.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, never repeat that foolish gossip, and forget it as soon as you can,\u201d said Mrs. March gravely. \u201cI was very unwise to let you go among people of whom I know so little, kind, I dare say, but worldly, ill-bred, and full of these vulgar ideas about young people. I am more sorry than I can express for the mischief this visit may have done you, Meg.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t be sorry, I won\u2019t let it hurt me. I\u2019ll forget all the bad and remember only the good, for I did enjoy a great deal, and thank you very much for letting me go. I\u2019ll not be sentimental or dissatisfied, Mother. I know I\u2019m a silly little girl, and I\u2019ll stay with you till I\u2019m fit to take care of myself. But it is nice to be praised and admired, and I can\u2019t help saying I like it,\u201d said Meg, looking half ashamed of the confession.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat is perfectly natural, and quite harmless, if the liking does not become a passion and lead one to do foolish or unmaidenly things. Learn to know and value the praise which is worth having, and to excite the admiration of excellent people by being modest as well as pretty, Meg.\u201d\r\n\r\nMargaret sat thinking a moment, while Jo stood with her hands behind her, looking both interested and a little perplexed, for it was a new thing to see Meg blushing and talking about admiration, lovers, and things of that sort. And Jo felt as if during that fortnight her sister had grown up amazingly, and was drifting away from her into a world where she could not follow.\r\n\r\n\u201cMother, do you have \u2018plans\u2019, as Mrs. Moffat said?\u201d asked Meg bashfully.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, my dear, I have a great many, all mothers do, but mine differ somewhat from Mrs. Moffat\u2019s, I suspect. I will tell you some of them, for the time has come when a word may set this romantic little head and heart of yours right, on a very serious subject. You are young, Meg, but not too young to understand me, and mothers\u2019 lips are the fittest to speak of such things to girls like you. Jo, your turn will come in time, perhaps, so listen to my \u2018plans\u2019 and help me carry them out, if they are good.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo went and sat on one arm of the chair, looking as if she thought they were about to join in some very solemn affair. Holding a hand of each, and watching the two young faces wistfully, Mrs. March said, in her serious yet cheery way...\r\n\r\n\u201cI want my daughters to be beautiful, accomplished, and good. To be admired, loved, and respected. To have a happy youth, to be well and wisely married, and to lead useful, pleasant lives, with as little care and sorrow to try them as God sees fit to send. To be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing which can happen to a woman, and I sincerely hope my girls may know this beautiful experience. It is natural to think of it, Meg, right to hope and wait for it, and wise to prepare for it, so that when the happy time comes, you may feel ready for the duties and worthy of the joy. My dear girls, I am ambitious for you, but not to have you make a dash in the world, marry rich men merely because they are rich, or have splendid houses, which are not homes because love is wanting. Money is a needful and precious thing, and when well used, a noble thing, but I never want you to think it is the first or only prize to strive for. I\u2019d rather see you poor men\u2019s wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones, without self-respect and peace.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor girls don\u2019t stand any chance, Belle says, unless they put themselves forward,\u201d sighed Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cThen we\u2019ll be old maids,\u201d said Jo stoutly.\r\n\r\n\u201cRight, Jo. Better be happy old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands,\u201d said Mrs. March decidedly. \u201cDon\u2019t be troubled, Meg, poverty seldom daunts a sincere lover. Some of the best and most honored women I know were poor girls, but so love-worthy that they were not allowed to be old maids. Leave these things to time. Make this home happy, so that you may be fit for homes of your own, if they are offered you, and contented here if they are not. One thing remember, my girls. Mother is always ready to be your confidant, Father to be your friend, and both of us hope and trust that our daughters, whether married or single, will be the pride and comfort of our lives.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe will, Marmee, we will!\u201d cried both, with all their hearts, as she bade them good night.\r\nCHAPTER TEN\r\nTHE P.C. AND P.O.\r\n\r\nAs spring came on, a new set of amusements became the fashion, and the lengthening days gave long afternoons for work and play of all sorts. The garden had to be put in order, and each sister had a quarter of the little plot to do what she liked with. Hannah used to say, \u201cI\u2019d know which each of them gardings belonged to, ef I see \u2019em in Chiny,\u201d and so she might, for the girls\u2019 tastes differed as much as their characters. Meg\u2019s had roses and heliotrope, myrtle, and a little orange tree in it. Jo\u2019s bed was never alike two seasons, for she was always trying experiments. This year it was to be a plantation of sun flowers, the seeds of which cheerful and aspiring plant were to feed Aunt Cockle-top and her family of chicks. Beth had old-fashioned fragrant flowers in her garden, sweet peas and mignonette, larkspur, pinks, pansies, and southernwood, with chickweed for the birds and catnip for the pussies. Amy had a bower in hers, rather small and earwiggy, but very pretty to look at, with honeysuckle and morning-glories hanging their colored horns and bells in graceful wreaths all over it, tall white lilies, delicate ferns, and as many brilliant, picturesque plants as would consent to blossom there.\r\n\r\nGardening, walks, rows on the river, and flower hunts employed the fine days, and for rainy ones, they had house diversions, some old, some new, all more or less original. One of these was the \u2018P.C.\u2019, for as secret societies were the fashion, it was thought proper to have one, and as all of the girls admired Dickens, they called themselves the Pickwick Club. With a few interruptions, they had kept this up for a year, and met every Saturday evening in the big garret, on which occasions the ceremonies were as follows: Three chairs were arranged in a row before a table on which was a lamp, also four white badges, with a big \u2018P.C.\u2019 in different colors on each, and the weekly newspaper called, The Pickwick Portfolio, to which all contributed something, while Jo, who reveled in pens and ink, was the editor. At seven o\u2019clock, the four members ascended to the clubroom, tied their badges round their heads, and took their seats with great solemnity. Meg, as the eldest, was Samuel Pickwick, Jo, being of a literary turn, Augustus Snodgrass, Beth, because she was round and rosy, Tracy Tupman, and Amy, who was always trying to do what she couldn\u2019t, was Nathaniel Winkle. Pickwick, the president, read the paper, which was filled with original tales, poetry, local news, funny advertisements, and hints, in which they good-naturedly reminded each other of their faults and short comings. On one occasion, Mr. Pickwick put on a pair of spectacles without any glass, rapped upon the table, hemmed, and having stared hard at Mr. Snodgrass, who was tilting back in his chair, till he arranged himself properly, began to read:\r\n\r\n\u201cTHE PICKWICK PORTFOLIO\u201d\r\n\r\nMAY 20, 18\u2014\r\n\r\nPOET\u2019S CORNER\r\n\r\nANNIVERSARY ODE\r\n\r\nAgain we meet to celebrate\r\n    With badge and solemn rite,\r\nOur fifty-second anniversary,\r\n    In Pickwick Hall, tonight.\r\n\r\nWe all are here in perfect health,\r\n    None gone from our small band:\r\nAgain we see each well-known face,\r\n    And press each friendly hand.\r\n\r\nOur Pickwick, always at his post,\r\n    With reverence we greet,\r\nAs, spectacles on nose, he reads\r\n    Our well-filled weekly sheet.\r\n\r\nAlthough he suffers from a cold,\r\n    We joy to hear him speak,\r\nFor words of wisdom from him fall,\r\n    In spite of croak or squeak.\r\n\r\nOld six-foot Snodgrass looms on high,\r\n    With elephantine grace,\r\nAnd beams upon the company,\r\n    With brown and jovial face.\r\n\r\nPoetic fire lights up his eye,\r\n    He struggles \u2019gainst his lot.\r\nBehold ambition on his brow,\r\n    And on his nose, a blot.\r\n\r\nNext our peaceful Tupman comes,\r\n    So rosy, plump, and sweet,\r\nWho chokes with laughter at the puns,\r\n    And tumbles off his seat.\r\n\r\nPrim little Winkle too is here,\r\n    With every hair in place,\r\nA model of propriety,\r\n    Though he hates to wash his face.\r\n\r\nThe year is gone, we still unite\r\n    To joke and laugh and read,\r\nAnd tread the path of literature\r\n    That doth to glory lead.\r\n\r\nLong may our paper prosper well,\r\n    Our club unbroken be,\r\nAnd coming years their blessings pour\r\n    On the useful, gay \u2018P. C.\u2019.\r\n\r\nA. SNODGRASS\r\n\r\nTHE MASKED MARRIAGE\r\n(A Tale Of Venice)\r\n\r\nGondola after gondola swept up to the marble steps, and left its lovely load to swell the brilliant throng that filled the stately halls of Count Adelon. Knights and ladies, elves and pages, monks and flower girls, all mingled gaily in the dance. Sweet voices and rich melody filled the air, and so with mirth and music the masquerade went on. \u201cHas your Highness seen the Lady Viola tonight?\u201d asked a gallant troubadour of the fairy queen who floated down the hall upon his arm.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, is she not lovely, though so sad! Her dress is well chosen, too, for in a week she weds Count Antonio, whom she passionately hates.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBy my faith, I envy him. Yonder he comes, arrayed like a bridegroom, except the black mask. When that is off we shall see how he regards the fair maid whose heart he cannot win, though her stern father bestows her hand,\u201d returned the troubadour.\r\n\r\n\u201cTis whispered that she loves the young English artist who haunts her steps, and is spurned by the old Count,\u201d said the lady, as they joined the dance. The revel was at its height when a priest appeared, and withdrawing the young pair to an alcove, hung with purple velvet, he motioned them to kneel. Instant silence fell on the gay throng, and not a sound, but the dash of fountains or the rustle of orange groves sleeping in the moonlight, broke the hush, as Count de Adelon spoke thus:\r\n\r\n\u201cMy lords and ladies, pardon the ruse by which I have gathered you here to witness the marriage of my daughter. Father, we wait your services.\u201d All eyes turned toward the bridal party, and a murmur of amazement went through the throng, for neither bride nor groom removed their masks. Curiosity and wonder possessed all hearts, but respect restrained all tongues till the holy rite was over. Then the eager spectators gathered round the count, demanding an explanation.\r\n\r\n\u201cGladly would I give it if I could, but I only know that it was the whim of my timid Viola, and I yielded to it. Now, my children, let the play end. Unmask and receive my blessing.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut neither bent the knee, for the young bridegroom replied in a tone that startled all listeners as the mask fell, disclosing the noble face of Ferdinand Devereux, the artist lover, and leaning on the breast where now flashed the star of an English earl was the lovely Viola, radiant with joy and beauty.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy lord, you scornfully bade me claim your daughter when I could boast as high a name and vast a fortune as the Count Antonio. I can do more, for even your ambitious soul cannot refuse the Earl of Devereux and De Vere, when he gives his ancient name and boundless wealth in return for the beloved hand of this fair lady, now my wife.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe count stood like one changed to stone, and turning to the bewildered crowd, Ferdinand added, with a gay smile of triumph, \u201cTo you, my gallant friends, I can only wish that your wooing may prosper as mine has done, and that you may all win as fair a bride as I have by this masked marriage.\u201d\r\n\r\nS. PICKWICK\r\n\r\nWhy is the P. C. like the Tower of Babel?\r\nIt is full of unruly members.\r\n\r\nTHE HISTORY OF A SQUASH\r\n\r\nOnce upon a time a farmer planted a little seed in his garden, and after a while it sprouted and became a vine and bore many squashes. One day in October, when they were ripe, he picked one and took it to market. A grocerman bought and put it in his shop. That same morning, a little girl in a brown hat and blue dress, with a round face and snub nose, went and bought it for her mother. She lugged it home, cut it up, and boiled it in the big pot, mashed some of it with salt and butter, for dinner. And to the rest she added a pint of milk, two eggs, four spoons of sugar, nutmeg, and some crackers, put it in a deep dish, and baked it till it was brown and nice, and next day it was eaten by a family named March.\r\n\r\nT. TUPMAN\r\n\r\nMr. Pickwick, Sir:\u2014\r\n    I address you upon the subject of sin the sinner I mean is a man named Winkle who makes trouble in his club by laughing and sometimes won\u2019t write his piece in this fine paper I hope you will pardon his badness and let him send a French fable because he can\u2019t write out of his head as he has so many lessons to do and no brains in future I will try to take time by the fetlock and prepare some work which will be all commy la fo that means all right I am in haste as it is nearly school time.\r\n\r\nYours respectably,\r\nN. WINKLE\r\n\r\n[The above is a manly and handsome acknowledgment of past misdemeanors. If our young friend studied punctuation, it would be well.]\r\n\r\nA SAD ACCIDENT\r\n\r\nOn Friday last, we were startled by a violent shock in our basement, followed by cries of distress. On rushing in a body to the cellar, we discovered our beloved President prostrate upon the floor, having tripped and fallen while getting wood for domestic purposes. A perfect scene of ruin met our eyes, for in his fall Mr. Pickwick had plunged his head and shoulders into a tub of water, upset a keg of soft soap upon his manly form, and torn his garments badly. On being removed from this perilous situation, it was discovered that he had suffered no injury but several bruises, and we are happy to add, is now doing well.\r\n\r\nED.\r\n\r\nTHE PUBLIC BEREAVEMENT\r\n\r\nIt is our painful duty to record the sudden and mysterious disappearance of our cherished friend, Mrs. Snowball Pat Paw. This lovely and beloved cat was the pet of a large circle of warm and admiring friends; for her beauty attracted all eyes, her graces and virtues endeared her to all hearts, and her loss is deeply felt by the whole community.\r\n    When last seen, she was sitting at the gate, watching the butcher\u2019s cart, and it is feared that some villain, tempted by her charms, basely stole her. Weeks have passed, but no trace of her has been discovered, and we relinquish all hope, tie a black ribbon to her basket, set aside her dish, and weep for her as one lost to us forever.\r\n\r\nA sympathizing friend sends the following gem:\r\n\r\nA LAMENT\r\nFOR S. B. PAT PAW\r\n\r\nWe mourn the loss of our little pet,\r\n    And sigh o\u2019er her hapless fate,\r\nFor never more by the fire she\u2019ll sit,\r\n    Nor play by the old green gate.\r\n\r\nThe little grave where her infant sleeps\r\n    Is \u2019neath the chestnut tree.\r\nBut o\u2019er her grave we may not weep,\r\n    We know not where it may be.\r\n\r\nHer empty bed, her idle ball,\r\n    Will never see her more;\r\nNo gentle tap, no loving purr\r\n    Is heard at the parlor door.\r\n\r\nAnother cat comes after her mice,\r\n    A cat with a dirty face,\r\nBut she does not hunt as our darling did,\r\n    Nor play with her airy grace.\r\n\r\nHer stealthy paws tread the very hall\r\n    Where Snowball used to play,\r\nBut she only spits at the dogs our pet\r\n    So gallantly drove away.\r\n\r\nShe is useful and mild, and does her best,\r\n    But she is not fair to see,\r\nAnd we cannot give her your place dear,\r\n    Nor worship her as we worship thee.\r\n\r\nA.S.\r\n\r\nADVERTISEMENTS\r\n\r\nMISS ORANTHY BLUGGAGE, the accomplished strong-minded lecturer, will deliver her famous lecture on \u201cWOMAN AND HER POSITION\u201d at Pickwick Hall, next Saturday Evening, after the usual performances.\r\n\r\nA WEEKLY MEETING will be held at Kitchen Place, to teach young ladies how to cook. Hannah Brown will preside, and all are invited to attend.\r\n\r\nTHE DUSTPAN SOCIETY will meet on Wednesday next, and parade in the upper story of the Club House. All members to appear in uniform and shoulder their brooms at nine precisely.\r\n\r\nMRS. BETH BOUNCER will open her new assortment of Doll\u2019s Millinery next week. The latest Paris fashions have arrived, and orders are respectfully solicited.\r\n\r\nA NEW PLAY will appear at the Barnville Theatre, in the course of a few weeks, which will surpass anything ever seen on the American stage. \u201cTHE GREEK SLAVE, or Constantine the Avenger,\u201d is the name of this thrilling drama!!!\r\n\r\nHINTS\r\n\r\nIf S.P. didn\u2019t use so much soap on his hands, he wouldn\u2019t always be late at breakfast. A.S. is requested not to whistle in the street. T.T. please don\u2019t forget Amy\u2019s napkin. N.W. must not fret because his dress has not nine tucks.\r\n\r\nWEEKLY REPORT\r\n\r\nMeg\u2014Good.\r\nJo\u2014Bad.\r\nBeth\u2014Very Good.\r\nAmy\u2014Middling.\r\n\r\nAs the President finished reading the paper (which I beg leave to assure my readers is a bona fide copy of one written by bona fide girls once upon a time), a round of applause followed, and then Mr. Snodgrass rose to make a proposition.\r\n\r\n\u201cMr. President and gentlemen,\u201d he began, assuming a parliamentary attitude and tone, \u201cI wish to propose the admission of a new member\u2014one who highly deserves the honor, would be deeply grateful for it, and would add immensely to the spirit of the club, the literary value of the paper, and be no end jolly and nice. I propose Mr. Theodore Laurence as an honorary member of the P. C. Come now, do have him.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo\u2019s sudden change of tone made the girls laugh, but all looked rather anxious, and no one said a word as Snodgrass took his seat.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe\u2019ll put it to a vote,\u201d said the President. \u201cAll in favor of this motion please to manifest it by saying, \u2018Aye\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\nA loud response from Snodgrass, followed, to everybody\u2019s surprise, by a timid one from Beth.\r\n\r\n\u201cContrary-minded say, \u2018No\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg and Amy were contrary-minded, and Mr. Winkle rose to say with great elegance, \u201cWe don\u2019t wish any boys, they only joke and bounce about. This is a ladies\u2019 club, and we wish to be private and proper.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m afraid he\u2019ll laugh at our paper, and make fun of us afterward,\u201d observed Pickwick, pulling the little curl on her forehead, as she always did when doubtful.\r\n\r\nUp rose Snodgrass, very much in earnest. \u201cSir, I give you my word as a gentleman, Laurie won\u2019t do anything of the sort. He likes to write, and he\u2019ll give a tone to our contributions and keep us from being sentimental, don\u2019t you see? We can do so little for him, and he does so much for us, I think the least we can do is to offer him a place here, and make him welcome if he comes.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis artful allusion to benefits conferred brought Tupman to his feet, looking as if he had quite made up his mind.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes; we ought to do it, even if we are afraid. I say he may come, and his grandpa, too, if he likes.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis spirited burst from Beth electrified the club, and Jo left her seat to shake hands approvingly. \u201cNow then, vote again. Everybody remember it\u2019s our Laurie, and say, \u2018Aye!\u2019\u201d cried Snodgrass excitedly.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye! Aye! Aye!\u201d replied three voices at once.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood! Bless you! Now, as there\u2019s nothing like \u2018taking time by the fetlock\u2019, as Winkle characteristically observes, allow me to present the new member.\u201d And, to the dismay of the rest of the club, Jo threw open the door of the closet, and displayed Laurie sitting on a rag bag, flushed and twinkling with suppressed laughter.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou rogue! You traitor! Jo, how could you?\u201d cried the three girls, as Snodgrass led her friend triumphantly forth, and producing both a chair and a badge, installed him in a jiffy.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe coolness of you two rascals is amazing,\u201d began Mr. Pickwick, trying to get up an awful frown and only succeeding in producing an amiable smile. But the new member was equal to the occasion, and rising, with a grateful salutation to the Chair, said in the most engaging manner, \u201cMr. President and ladies\u2014I beg pardon, gentlemen\u2014allow me to introduce myself as Sam Weller, the very humble servant of the club.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood! Good!\u201d cried Jo, pounding with the handle of the old warming pan on which she leaned.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy faithful friend and noble patron,\u201d continued Laurie with a wave of the hand, \u201cwho has so flatteringly presented me, is not to be blamed for the base stratagem of tonight. I planned it, and she only gave in after lots of teasing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCome now, don\u2019t lay it all on yourself. You know I proposed the cupboard,\u201d broke in Snodgrass, who was enjoying the joke amazingly.\r\n\r\n\u201cNever mind what she says. I\u2019m the wretch that did it, sir,\u201d said the new member, with a Welleresque nod to Mr. Pickwick. \u201cBut on my honor, I never will do so again, and henceforth devote myself to the interest of this immortal club.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHear! Hear!\u201d cried Jo, clashing the lid of the warming pan like a cymbal.\r\n\r\n\u201cGo on, go on!\u201d added Winkle and Tupman, while the President bowed benignly.\r\n\r\n\u201cI merely wish to say, that as a slight token of my gratitude for the honor done me, and as a means of promoting friendly relations between adjoining nations, I have set up a post office in the hedge in the lower corner of the garden, a fine, spacious building with padlocks on the doors and every convenience for the mails, also the females, if I may be allowed the expression. It\u2019s the old martin house, but I\u2019ve stopped up the door and made the roof open, so it will hold all sorts of things, and save our valuable time. Letters, manuscripts, books, and bundles can be passed in there, and as each nation has a key, it will be uncommonly nice, I fancy. Allow me to present the club key, and with many thanks for your favor, take my seat.\u201d\r\n\r\nGreat applause as Mr. Weller deposited a little key on the table and subsided, the warming pan clashed and waved wildly, and it was some time before order could be restored. A long discussion followed, and everyone came out surprising, for everyone did her best. So it was an unusually lively meeting, and did not adjourn till a late hour, when it broke up with three shrill cheers for the new member.\r\n\r\nNo one ever regretted the admittance of Sam Weller, for a more devoted, well-behaved, and jovial member no club could have. He certainly did add \u2018spirit\u2019 to the meetings, and \u2018a tone\u2019 to the paper, for his orations convulsed his hearers and his contributions were excellent, being patriotic, classical, comical, or dramatic, but never sentimental. Jo regarded them as worthy of Bacon, Milton, or Shakespeare, and remodeled her own works with good effect, she thought.\r\n\r\nThe P. O. was a capital little institution, and flourished wonderfully, for nearly as many queer things passed through it as through the real post office. Tragedies and cravats, poetry and pickles, garden seeds and long letters, music and gingerbread, rubbers, invitations, scoldings, and puppies. The old gentleman liked the fun, and amused himself by sending odd bundles, mysterious messages, and funny telegrams, and his gardener, who was smitten with Hannah\u2019s charms, actually sent a love letter to Jo\u2019s care. How they laughed when the secret came out, never dreaming how many love letters that little post office would hold in the years to come.\r\nCHAPTER ELEVEN\r\nEXPERIMENTS\r\n\r\n\u201cThe first of June! The Kings are off to the seashore tomorrow, and I\u2019m free. Three months\u2019 vacation\u2014how I shall enjoy it!\u201d exclaimed Meg, coming home one warm day to find Jo laid upon the sofa in an unusual state of exhaustion, while Beth took off her dusty boots, and Amy made lemonade for the refreshment of the whole party.\r\n\r\n\u201cAunt March went today, for which, oh, be joyful!\u201d said Jo. \u201cI was mortally afraid she\u2019d ask me to go with her. If she had, I should have felt as if I ought to do it, but Plumfield is about as gay as a churchyard, you know, and I\u2019d rather be excused. We had a flurry getting the old lady off, and I had a fright every time she spoke to me, for I was in such a hurry to be through that I was uncommonly helpful and sweet, and feared she\u2019d find it impossible to part from me. I quaked till she was fairly in the carriage, and had a final fright, for as it drove of, she popped out her head, saying, \u2018Josyphine, won\u2019t you\u2014?\u2019 I didn\u2019t hear any more, for I basely turned and fled. I did actually run, and whisked round the corner where I felt safe.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor old Jo! She came in looking as if bears were after her,\u201d said Beth, as she cuddled her sister\u2019s feet with a motherly air.\r\n\r\n\u201cAunt March is a regular samphire, is she not?\u201d observed Amy, tasting her mixture critically.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe means vampire, not seaweed, but it doesn\u2019t matter. It\u2019s too warm to be particular about one\u2019s parts of speech,\u201d murmured Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat shall you do all your vacation?\u201d asked Amy, changing the subject with tact.\r\n\r\n\u201cI shall lie abed late, and do nothing,\u201d replied Meg, from the depths of the rocking chair. \u201cI\u2019ve been routed up early all winter and had to spend my days working for other people, so now I\u2019m going to rest and revel to my heart\u2019s content.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo,\u201d said Jo, \u201cthat dozy way wouldn\u2019t suit me. I\u2019ve laid in a heap of books, and I\u2019m going to improve my shining hours reading on my perch in the old apple tree, when I\u2019m not having l\u2014\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t say \u2018larks!\u2019\u201d implored Amy, as a return snub for the \u2018samphire\u2019 correction.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll say \u2018nightingales\u2019 then, with Laurie. That\u2019s proper and appropriate, since he\u2019s a warbler.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t let us do any lessons, Beth, for a while, but play all the time and rest, as the girls mean to,\u201d proposed Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I will, if Mother doesn\u2019t mind. I want to learn some new songs, and my children need fitting up for the summer. They are dreadfully out of order and really suffering for clothes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMay we, Mother?\u201d asked Meg, turning to Mrs. March, who sat sewing in what they called \u2018Marmee\u2019s corner\u2019.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou may try your experiment for a week and see how you like it. I think by Saturday night you will find that all play and no work is as bad as all work and no play.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, dear, no! It will be delicious, I\u2019m sure,\u201d said Meg complacently.\r\n\r\n\u201cI now propose a toast, as my \u2018friend and pardner, Sairy Gamp\u2019, says. Fun forever, and no grubbing!\u201d cried Jo, rising, glass in hand, as the lemonade went round.\r\n\r\nThey all drank it merrily, and began the experiment by lounging for the rest of the day. Next morning, Meg did not appear till ten o\u2019clock. Her solitary breakfast did not taste good, and the room seemed lonely and untidy, for Jo had not filled the vases, Beth had not dusted, and Amy\u2019s books lay scattered about. Nothing was neat and pleasant but \u2018Marmee\u2019s corner\u2019, which looked as usual. And there Meg sat, to \u2018rest and read\u2019, which meant to yawn and imagine what pretty summer dresses she would get with her salary. Jo spent the morning on the river with Laurie and the afternoon reading and crying over The Wide, Wide World, up in the apple tree. Beth began by rummaging everything out of the big closet where her family resided, but getting tired before half done, she left her establishment topsy-turvy and went to her music, rejoicing that she had no dishes to wash. Amy arranged her bower, put on her best white frock, smoothed her curls, and sat down to draw under the honeysuckle, hoping someone would see and inquire who the young artist was. As no one appeared but an inquisitive daddy-longlegs, who examined her work with interest, she went to walk, got caught in a shower, and came home dripping.\r\n\r\nAt teatime they compared notes, and all agreed that it had been a delightful, though unusually long day. Meg, who went shopping in the afternoon and got a \u2018sweet blue muslin\u2019, had discovered, after she had cut the breadths off, that it wouldn\u2019t wash, which mishap made her slightly cross. Jo had burned the skin off her nose boating, and got a raging headache by reading too long. Beth was worried by the confusion of her closet and the difficulty of learning three or four songs at once, and Amy deeply regretted the damage done her frock, for Katy Brown\u2019s party was to be the next day and now like Flora McFlimsey, she had \u2018nothing to wear\u2019. But these were mere trifles, and they assured their mother that the experiment was working finely. She smiled, said nothing, and with Hannah\u2019s help did their neglected work, keeping home pleasant and the domestic machinery running smoothly. It was astonishing what a peculiar and uncomfortable state of things was produced by the \u2018resting and reveling\u2019 process. The days kept getting longer and longer, the weather was unusually variable and so were tempers; an unsettled feeling possessed everyone, and Satan found plenty of mischief for the idle hands to do. As the height of luxury, Meg put out some of her sewing, and then found time hang so heavily, that she fell to snipping and spoiling her clothes in her attempts to furbish them up a la Moffat. Jo read till her eyes gave out and she was sick of books, got so fidgety that even good-natured Laurie had a quarrel with her, and so reduced in spirits that she desperately wished she had gone with Aunt March. Beth got on pretty well, for she was constantly forgetting that it was to be all play and no work, and fell back into her old ways now and then. But something in the air affected her, and more than once her tranquility was much disturbed, so much so that on one occasion she actually shook poor dear Joanna and told her she was \u2018a fright\u2019. Amy fared worst of all, for her resources were small, and when her sisters left her to amuse herself, she soon found that accomplished and important little self a great burden. She didn\u2019t like dolls, fairy tales were childish, and one couldn\u2019t draw all the time. Tea parties didn\u2019t amount to much, neither did picnics, unless very well conducted. \u201cIf one could have a fine house, full of nice girls, or go traveling, the summer would be delightful, but to stay at home with three selfish sisters and a grown-up boy was enough to try the patience of a Boaz,\u201d complained Miss Malaprop, after several days devoted to pleasure, fretting, and ennui.\r\n\r\nNo one would own that they were tired of the experiment, but by Friday night each acknowledged to herself that she was glad the week was nearly done. Hoping to impress the lesson more deeply, Mrs. March, who had a good deal of humor, resolved to finish off the trial in an appropriate manner, so she gave Hannah a holiday and let the girls enjoy the full effect of the play system.\r\n\r\nWhen they got up on Saturday morning, there was no fire in the kitchen, no breakfast in the dining room, and no mother anywhere to be seen.\r\n\r\n\u201cMercy on us! What has happened?\u201d cried Jo, staring about her in dismay.\r\n\r\nMeg ran upstairs and soon came back again, looking relieved but rather bewildered, and a little ashamed.\r\n\r\n\u201cMother isn\u2019t sick, only very tired, and she says she is going to stay quietly in her room all day and let us do the best we can. It\u2019s a very queer thing for her to do, she doesn\u2019t act a bit like herself. But she says it has been a hard week for her, so we mustn\u2019t grumble but take care of ourselves.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s easy enough, and I like the idea, I\u2019m aching for something to do, that is, some new amusement, you know,\u201d added Jo quickly.\r\n\r\nIn fact it was an immense relief to them all to have a little work, and they took hold with a will, but soon realized the truth of Hannah\u2019s saying, \u201cHousekeeping ain\u2019t no joke.\u201d There was plenty of food in the larder, and while Beth and Amy set the table, Meg and Jo got breakfast, wondering as they did why servants ever talked about hard work.\r\n\r\n\u201cI shall take some up to Mother, though she said we were not to think of her, for she\u2019d take care of herself,\u201d said Meg, who presided and felt quite matronly behind the teapot.\r\n\r\nSo a tray was fitted out before anyone began, and taken up with the cook\u2019s compliments. The boiled tea was very bitter, the omelet scorched, and the biscuits speckled with saleratus, but Mrs. March received her repast with thanks and laughed heartily over it after Jo was gone.\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor little souls, they will have a hard time, I\u2019m afraid, but they won\u2019t suffer, and it will do them good,\u201d she said, producing the more palatable viands with which she had provided herself, and disposing of the bad breakfast, so that their feelings might not be hurt, a motherly little deception for which they were grateful.\r\n\r\nMany were the complaints below, and great the chagrin of the head cook at her failures. \u201cNever mind, I\u2019ll get the dinner and be servant, you be mistress, keep your hands nice, see company, and give orders,\u201d said Jo, who knew still less than Meg about culinary affairs.\r\n\r\nThis obliging offer was gladly accepted, and Margaret retired to the parlor, which she hastily put in order by whisking the litter under the sofa and shutting the blinds to save the trouble of dusting. Jo, with perfect faith in her own powers and a friendly desire to make up the quarrel, immediately put a note in the office, inviting Laurie to dinner.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019d better see what you have got before you think of having company,\u201d said Meg, when informed of the hospitable but rash act.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, there\u2019s corned beef and plenty of potatoes, and I shall get some asparagus and a lobster, \u2018for a relish\u2019, as Hannah says. We\u2019ll have lettuce and make a salad. I don\u2019t know how, but the book tells. I\u2019ll have blanc mange and strawberries for dessert, and coffee too, if you want to be elegant.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t try too many messes, Jo, for you can\u2019t make anything but gingerbread and molasses candy fit to eat. I wash my hands of the dinner party, and since you have asked Laurie on your own responsibility, you may just take care of him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t want you to do anything but be civil to him and help to the pudding. You\u2019ll give me your advice if I get in a muddle, won\u2019t you?\u201d asked Jo, rather hurt.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, but I don\u2019t know much, except about bread and a few trifles. You had better ask Mother\u2019s leave before you order anything,\u201d returned Meg prudently.\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course I shall. I\u2019m not a fool.\u201d And Jo went off in a huff at the doubts expressed of her powers.\r\n\r\n\u201cGet what you like, and don\u2019t disturb me. I\u2019m going out to dinner and can\u2019t worry about things at home,\u201d said Mrs. March, when Jo spoke to her. \u201cI never enjoyed housekeeping, and I\u2019m going to take a vacation today, and read, write, go visiting, and amuse myself.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe unusual spectacle of her busy mother rocking comfortably and reading early in the morning made Jo feel as if some unnatural phenomenon had occurred, for an eclipse, an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption would hardly have seemed stranger.\r\n\r\n\u201cEverything is out of sorts, somehow,\u201d she said to herself, going downstairs. \u201cThere\u2019s Beth crying, that\u2019s a sure sign that something is wrong in this family. If Amy is bothering, I\u2019ll shake her.\u201d\r\n\r\nFeeling very much out of sorts herself, Jo hurried into the parlor to find Beth sobbing over Pip, the canary, who lay dead in the cage with his little claws pathetically extended, as if imploring the food for want of which he had died.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s all my fault, I forgot him, there isn\u2019t a seed or a drop left. Oh, Pip! Oh, Pip! How could I be so cruel to you?\u201d cried Beth, taking the poor thing in her hands and trying to restore him.\r\n\r\nJo peeped into his half-open eye, felt his little heart, and finding him stiff and cold, shook her head, and offered her domino box for a coffin.\r\n\r\n\u201cPut him in the oven, and maybe he will get warm and revive,\u201d said Amy hopefully.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s been starved, and he shan\u2019t be baked now he\u2019s dead. I\u2019ll make him a shroud, and he shall be buried in the garden, and I\u2019ll never have another bird, never, my Pip! for I am too bad to own one,\u201d murmured Beth, sitting on the floor with her pet folded in her hands.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe funeral shall be this afternoon, and we will all go. Now, don\u2019t cry, Bethy. It\u2019s a pity, but nothing goes right this week, and Pip has had the worst of the experiment. Make the shroud, and lay him in my box, and after the dinner party, we\u2019ll have a nice little funeral,\u201d said Jo, beginning to feel as if she had undertaken a good deal.\r\n\r\nLeaving the others to console Beth, she departed to the kitchen, which was in a most discouraging state of confusion. Putting on a big apron, she fell to work and got the dishes piled up ready for washing, when she discovered that the fire was out.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s a sweet prospect!\u201d muttered Jo, slamming the stove door open, and poking vigorously among the cinders.\r\n\r\nHaving rekindled the fire, she thought she would go to market while the water heated. The walk revived her spirits, and flattering herself that she had made good bargains, she trudged home again, after buying a very young lobster, some very old asparagus, and two boxes of acid strawberries. By the time she got cleared up, the dinner arrived and the stove was red-hot. Hannah had left a pan of bread to rise, Meg had worked it up early, set it on the hearth for a second rising, and forgotten it. Meg was entertaining Sallie Gardiner in the parlor, when the door flew open and a floury, crocky, flushed, and disheveled figure appeared, demanding tartly...\r\n\r\n\u201cI say, isn\u2019t bread \u2018riz\u2019 enough when it runs over the pans?\u201d\r\n\r\nSallie began to laugh, but Meg nodded and lifted her eyebrows as high as they would go, which caused the apparition to vanish and put the sour bread into the oven without further delay. Mrs. March went out, after peeping here and there to see how matters went, also saying a word of comfort to Beth, who sat making a winding sheet, while the dear departed lay in state in the domino box. A strange sense of helplessness fell upon the girls as the gray bonnet vanished round the corner, and despair seized them when a few minutes later Miss Crocker appeared, and said she\u2019d come to dinner. Now this lady was a thin, yellow spinster, with a sharp nose and inquisitive eyes, who saw everything and gossiped about all she saw. They disliked her, but had been taught to be kind to her, simply because she was old and poor and had few friends. So Meg gave her the easy chair and tried to entertain her, while she asked questions, criticized everything, and told stories of the people whom she knew.\r\n\r\nLanguage cannot describe the anxieties, experiences, and exertions which Jo underwent that morning, and the dinner she served up became a standing joke. Fearing to ask any more advice, she did her best alone, and discovered that something more than energy and good will is necessary to make a cook. She boiled the asparagus for an hour and was grieved to find the heads cooked off and the stalks harder than ever. The bread burned black; for the salad dressing so aggravated her that she could not make it fit to eat. The lobster was a scarlet mystery to her, but she hammered and poked till it was unshelled and its meager proportions concealed in a grove of lettuce leaves. The potatoes had to be hurried, not to keep the asparagus waiting, and were not done at the last. The blanc mange was lumpy, and the strawberries not as ripe as they looked, having been skilfully \u2018deaconed\u2019.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, they can eat beef and bread and butter, if they are hungry, only it\u2019s mortifying to have to spend your whole morning for nothing,\u201d thought Jo, as she rang the bell half an hour later than usual, and stood, hot, tired, and dispirited, surveying the feast spread before Laurie, accustomed to all sorts of elegance, and Miss Crocker, whose tattling tongue would report them far and wide.\r\n\r\nPoor Jo would gladly have gone under the table, as one thing after another was tasted and left, while Amy giggled, Meg looked distressed, Miss Crocker pursed her lips, and Laurie talked and laughed with all his might to give a cheerful tone to the festive scene. Jo\u2019s one strong point was the fruit, for she had sugared it well, and had a pitcher of rich cream to eat with it. Her hot cheeks cooled a trifle, and she drew a long breath as the pretty glass plates went round, and everyone looked graciously at the little rosy islands floating in a sea of cream. Miss Crocker tasted first, made a wry face, and drank some water hastily. Jo, who refused, thinking there might not be enough, for they dwindled sadly after the picking over, glanced at Laurie, but he was eating away manfully, though there was a slight pucker about his mouth and he kept his eye fixed on his plate. Amy, who was fond of delicate fare, took a heaping spoonful, choked, hid her face in her napkin, and left the table precipitately.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, what is it?\u201d exclaimed Jo, trembling.\r\n\r\n\u201cSalt instead of sugar, and the cream is sour,\u201d replied Meg with a tragic gesture.\r\n\r\nJo uttered a groan and fell back in her chair, remembering that she had given a last hasty powdering to the berries out of one of the two boxes on the kitchen table, and had neglected to put the milk in the refrigerator. She turned scarlet and was on the verge of crying, when she met Laurie\u2019s eyes, which would look merry in spite of his heroic efforts. The comical side of the affair suddenly struck her, and she laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks. So did everyone else, even \u2018Croaker\u2019 as the girls called the old lady, and the unfortunate dinner ended gaily, with bread and butter, olives and fun.\r\n\r\n\u201cI haven\u2019t strength of mind enough to clear up now, so we will sober ourselves with a funeral,\u201d said Jo, as they rose, and Miss Crocker made ready to go, being eager to tell the new story at another friend\u2019s dinner table.\r\n\r\nThey did sober themselves for Beth\u2019s sake. Laurie dug a grave under the ferns in the grove, little Pip was laid in, with many tears by his tender-hearted mistress, and covered with moss, while a wreath of violets and chickweed was hung on the stone which bore his epitaph, composed by Jo while she struggled with the dinner.\r\n\r\nHere lies Pip March,\r\nWho died the 7th of June;\r\nLoved and lamented sore,\r\nAnd not forgotten soon.\r\n\r\nAt the conclusion of the ceremonies, Beth retired to her room, overcome with emotion and lobster, but there was no place of repose, for the beds were not made, and she found her grief much assuaged by beating up the pillows and putting things in order. Meg helped Jo clear away the remains of the feast, which took half the afternoon and left them so tired that they agreed to be contented with tea and toast for supper.\r\n\r\nLaurie took Amy to drive, which was a deed of charity, for the sour cream seemed to have had a bad effect upon her temper. Mrs. March came home to find the three older girls hard at work in the middle of the afternoon, and a glance at the closet gave her an idea of the success of one part of the experiment.\r\n\r\nBefore the housewives could rest, several people called, and there was a scramble to get ready to see them. Then tea must be got, errands done, and one or two necessary bits of sewing neglected until the last minute. As twilight fell, dewy and still, one by one they gathered on the porch where the June roses were budding beautifully, and each groaned or sighed as she sat down, as if tired or troubled.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat a dreadful day this has been!\u201d began Jo, usually the first to speak.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt has seemed shorter than usual, but so uncomfortable,\u201d said Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a bit like home,\u201d added Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt can\u2019t seem so without Marmee and little Pip,\u201d sighed Beth, glancing with full eyes at the empty cage above her head.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s Mother, dear, and you shall have another bird tomorrow, if you want it.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs she spoke, Mrs. March came and took her place among them, looking as if her holiday had not been much pleasanter than theirs.\r\n\r\n\u201cAre you satisfied with your experiment, girls, or do you want another week of it?\u201d she asked, as Beth nestled up to her and the rest turned toward her with brightening faces, as flowers turn toward the sun.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t!\u201d cried Jo decidedly.\r\n\r\n\u201cNor I,\u201d echoed the others.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou think then, that it is better to have a few duties and live a little for others, do you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLounging and larking doesn\u2019t pay,\u201d observed Jo, shaking her head. \u201cI\u2019m tired of it and mean to go to work at something right off.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSuppose you learn plain cooking. That\u2019s a useful accomplishment, which no woman should be without,\u201d said Mrs. March, laughing inaudibly at the recollection of Jo\u2019s dinner party, for she had met Miss Crocker and heard her account of it.\r\n\r\n\u201cMother, did you go away and let everything be, just to see how we\u2019d get on?\u201d cried Meg, who had had suspicions all day.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I wanted you to see how the comfort of all depends on each doing her share faithfully. While Hannah and I did your work, you got on pretty well, though I don\u2019t think you were very happy or amiable. So I thought, as a little lesson, I would show you what happens when everyone thinks only of herself. Don\u2019t you feel that it is pleasanter to help one another, to have daily duties which make leisure sweet when it comes, and to bear and forbear, that home may be comfortable and lovely to us all?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe do, Mother, we do!\u201d cried the girls.\r\n\r\n\u201cThen let me advise you to take up your little burdens again, for though they seem heavy sometimes, they are good for us, and lighten as we learn to carry them. Work is wholesome, and there is plenty for everyone. It keeps us from ennui and mischief, is good for health and spirits, and gives us a sense of power and independence better than money or fashion.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe\u2019ll work like bees, and love it too, see if we don\u2019t,\u201d said Jo. \u201cI\u2019ll learn plain cooking for my holiday task, and the next dinner party I have shall be a success.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll make the set of shirts for father, instead of letting you do it, Marmee. I can and I will, though I\u2019m not fond of sewing. That will be better than fussing over my own things, which are plenty nice enough as they are.\u201d said Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll do my lessons every day, and not spend so much time with my music and dolls. I am a stupid thing, and ought to be studying, not playing,\u201d was Beth\u2019s resolution, while Amy followed their example by heroically declaring, \u201cI shall learn to make buttonholes, and attend to my parts of speech.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cVery good! Then I am quite satisfied with the experiment, and fancy that we shall not have to repeat it, only don\u2019t go to the other extreme and delve like slaves. Have regular hours for work and play, make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life become a beautiful success, in spite of poverty.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe\u2019ll remember, Mother!\u201d and they did.\r\nCHAPTER TWELVE\r\nCAMP LAURENCE\r\n\r\nBeth was postmistress, for, being most at home, she could attend to it regularly, and dearly liked the daily task of unlocking the little door and distributing the mail. One July day she came in with her hands full, and went about the house leaving letters and parcels like the penny post.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s your posy, Mother! Laurie never forgets that,\u201d she said, putting the fresh nosegay in the vase that stood in \u2018Marmee\u2019s corner\u2019, and was kept supplied by the affectionate boy.\r\n\r\n\u201cMiss Meg March, one letter and a glove,\u201d continued Beth, delivering the articles to her sister, who sat near her mother, stitching wristbands.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, I left a pair over there, and here is only one,\u201d said Meg, looking at the gray cotton glove. \u201cDidn\u2019t you drop the other in the garden?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I\u2019m sure I didn\u2019t, for there was only one in the office.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hate to have odd gloves! Never mind, the other may be found. My letter is only a translation of the German song I wanted. I think Mr. Brooke did it, for this isn\u2019t Laurie\u2019s writing.\u201d\r\n\r\nMrs. March glanced at Meg, who was looking very pretty in her gingham morning gown, with the little curls blowing about her forehead, and very womanly, as she sat sewing at her little worktable, full of tidy white rolls, so unconscious of the thought in her mother\u2019s mind as she sewed and sang, while her fingers flew and her thoughts were busied with girlish fancies as innocent and fresh as the pansies in her belt, that Mrs. March smiled and was satisfied.\r\n\r\n\u201cTwo letters for Doctor Jo, a book, and a funny old hat, which covered the whole post office and stuck outside,\u201d said Beth, laughing as she went into the study where Jo sat writing.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat a sly fellow Laurie is! I said I wished bigger hats were the fashion, because I burn my face every hot day. He said, \u2018Why mind the fashion? Wear a big hat, and be comfortable!\u2019 I said I would if I had one, and he has sent me this, to try me. I\u2019ll wear it for fun, and show him I don\u2019t care for the fashion.\u201d And hanging the antique broad-brim on a bust of Plato, Jo read her letters.\r\n\r\nOne from her mother made her cheeks glow and her eyes fill, for it said to her...\r\n\r\nMy Dear:\r\n\r\nI write a little word to tell you with how much satisfaction I watch your efforts to control your temper. You say nothing about your trials, failures, or successes, and think, perhaps, that no one sees them but the Friend whose help you daily ask, if I may trust the well-worn cover of your guidebook. I, too, have seen them all, and heartily believe in the sincerity of your resolution, since it begins to bear fruit. Go on, dear, patiently and bravely, and always believe that no one sympathizes more tenderly with you than your loving...\r\n\r\nMother\r\n\r\n\u201cThat does me good! That\u2019s worth millions of money and pecks of praise. Oh, Marmee, I do try! I will keep on trying, and not get tired, since I have you to help me.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaying her head on her arms, Jo wet her little romance with a few happy tears, for she had thought that no one saw and appreciated her efforts to be good, and this assurance was doubly precious, doubly encouraging, because unexpected and from the person whose commendation she most valued. Feeling stronger than ever to meet and subdue her Apollyon, she pinned the note inside her frock, as a shield and a reminder, lest she be taken unaware, and proceeded to open her other letter, quite ready for either good or bad news. In a big, dashing hand, Laurie wrote...\r\n\r\nDear Jo, What ho!\r\n\r\nSome English girls and boys are coming to see me tomorrow and I want to have a jolly time. If it\u2019s fine, I\u2019m going to pitch my tent in Longmeadow, and row up the whole crew to lunch and croquet\u2014have a fire, make messes, gypsy fashion, and all sorts of larks. They are nice people, and like such things. Brooke will go to keep us boys steady, and Kate Vaughn will play propriety for the girls. I want you all to come, can\u2019t let Beth off at any price, and nobody shall worry her. Don\u2019t bother about rations, I\u2019ll see to that and everything else, only do come, there\u2019s a good fellow!\r\n\r\nIn a tearing hurry, Yours ever, Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s richness!\u201d cried Jo, flying in to tell the news to Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course we can go, Mother? It will be such a help to Laurie, for I can row, and Meg see to the lunch, and the children be useful in some way.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hope the Vaughns are not fine grown-up people. Do you know anything about them, Jo?\u201d asked Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cOnly that there are four of them. Kate is older than you, Fred and Frank (twins) about my age, and a little girl (Grace), who is nine or ten. Laurie knew them abroad, and liked the boys. I fancied, from the way he primmed up his mouth in speaking of her, that he didn\u2019t admire Kate much.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m so glad my French print is clean, it\u2019s just the thing and so becoming!\u201d observed Meg complacently. \u201cHave you anything decent, Jo?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cScarlet and gray boating suit, good enough for me. I shall row and tramp about, so I don\u2019t want any starch to think of. You\u2019ll come, Betty?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you won\u2019t let any boys talk to me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a boy!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI like to please Laurie, and I\u2019m not afraid of Mr. Brooke, he is so kind. But I don\u2019t want to play, or sing, or say anything. I\u2019ll work hard and not trouble anyone, and you\u2019ll take care of me, Jo, so I\u2019ll go.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s my good girl. You do try to fight off your shyness, and I love you for it. Fighting faults isn\u2019t easy, as I know, and a cheery word kind of gives a lift. Thank you, Mother,\u201d And Jo gave the thin cheek a grateful kiss, more precious to Mrs. March than if it had given back the rosy roundness of her youth.\r\n\r\n\u201cI had a box of chocolate drops, and the picture I wanted to copy,\u201d said Amy, showing her mail.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd I got a note from Mr. Laurence, asking me to come over and play to him tonight, before the lamps are lighted, and I shall go,\u201d added Beth, whose friendship with the old gentleman prospered finely.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow let\u2019s fly round, and do double duty today, so that we can play tomorrow with free minds,\u201d said Jo, preparing to replace her pen with a broom.\r\n\r\nWhen the sun peeped into the girls\u2019 room early next morning to promise them a fine day, he saw a comical sight. Each had made such preparation for the fete as seemed necessary and proper. Meg had an extra row of little curlpapers across her forehead, Jo had copiously anointed her afflicted face with cold cream, Beth had taken Joanna to bed with her to atone for the approaching separation, and Amy had capped the climax by putting a clothespin on her nose to uplift the offending feature. It was one of the kind artists use to hold the paper on their drawing boards, therefore quite appropriate and effective for the purpose it was now being put. This funny spectacle appeared to amuse the sun, for he burst out with such radiance that Jo woke up and roused her sisters by a hearty laugh at Amy\u2019s ornament.\r\n\r\nSunshine and laughter were good omens for a pleasure party, and soon a lively bustle began in both houses. Beth, who was ready first, kept reporting what went on next door, and enlivened her sisters\u2019 toilets by frequent telegrams from the window.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere goes the man with the tent! I see Mrs. Barker doing up the lunch in a hamper and a great basket. Now Mr. Laurence is looking up at the sky and the weathercock. I wish he would go too. There\u2019s Laurie, looking like a sailor, nice boy! Oh, mercy me! Here\u2019s a carriage full of people, a tall lady, a little girl, and two dreadful boys. One is lame, poor thing, he\u2019s got a crutch. Laurie didn\u2019t tell us that. Be quick, girls! It\u2019s getting late. Why, there is Ned Moffat, I do declare. Meg, isn\u2019t that the man who bowed to you one day when we were shopping?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo it is. How queer that he should come. I thought he was at the mountains. There is Sallie. I\u2019m glad she got back in time. Am I all right, Jo?\u201d cried Meg in a flutter.\r\n\r\n\u201cA regular daisy. Hold up your dress and put your hat on straight, it looks sentimental tipped that way and will fly off at the first puff. Now then, come on!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Jo, you are not going to wear that awful hat? It\u2019s too absurd! You shall not make a guy of yourself,\u201d remonstrated Meg, as Jo tied down with a red ribbon the broad-brimmed, old-fashioned leghorn Laurie had sent for a joke.\r\n\r\n\u201cI just will, though, for it\u2019s capital, so shady, light, and big. It will make fun, and I don\u2019t mind being a guy if I\u2019m comfortable.\u201d With that Jo marched straight away and the rest followed, a bright little band of sisters, all looking their best in summer suits, with happy faces under the jaunty hatbrims.\r\n\r\nLaurie ran to meet and present them to his friends in the most cordial manner. The lawn was the reception room, and for several minutes a lively scene was enacted there. Meg was grateful to see that Miss Kate, though twenty, was dressed with a simplicity which American girls would do well to imitate, and who was much flattered by Mr. Ned\u2019s assurances that he came especially to see her. Jo understood why Laurie \u2018primmed up his mouth\u2019 when speaking of Kate, for that young lady had a standoff-don\u2019t-touch-me air, which contrasted strongly with the free and easy demeanor of the other girls. Beth took an observation of the new boys and decided that the lame one was not \u2018dreadful\u2019, but gentle and feeble, and she would be kind to him on that account. Amy found Grace a well-mannered, merry, little person, and after staring dumbly at one another for a few minutes, they suddenly became very good friends.\r\n\r\nTents, lunch, and croquet utensils having been sent on beforehand, the party was soon embarked, and the two boats pushed off together, leaving Mr. Laurence waving his hat on the shore. Laurie and Jo rowed one boat, Mr. Brooke and Ned the other, while Fred Vaughn, the riotous twin, did his best to upset both by paddling about in a wherry like a disturbed water bug. Jo\u2019s funny hat deserved a vote of thanks, for it was of general utility. It broke the ice in the beginning by producing a laugh, it created quite a refreshing breeze, flapping to and fro as she rowed, and would make an excellent umbrella for the whole party, if a shower came up, she said. Miss Kate decided that she was \u2018odd\u2019, but rather clever, and smiled upon her from afar.\r\n\r\nMeg, in the other boat, was delightfully situated, face to face with the rowers, who both admired the prospect and feathered their oars with uncommon \u2018skill and dexterity\u2019. Mr. Brooke was a grave, silent young man, with handsome brown eyes and a pleasant voice. Meg liked his quiet manners and considered him a walking encyclopedia of useful knowledge. He never talked to her much, but he looked at her a good deal, and she felt sure that he did not regard her with aversion. Ned, being in college, of course put on all the airs which freshmen think it their bounden duty to assume. He was not very wise, but very good-natured, and altogether an excellent person to carry on a picnic. Sallie Gardiner was absorbed in keeping her white pique dress clean and chattering with the ubiquitous Fred, who kept Beth in constant terror by his pranks.\r\n\r\nIt was not far to Longmeadow, but the tent was pitched and the wickets down by the time they arrived. A pleasant green field, with three wide-spreading oaks in the middle and a smooth strip of turf for croquet.\r\n\r\n\u201cWelcome to Camp Laurence!\u201d said the young host, as they landed with exclamations of delight.\r\n\r\n\u201cBrooke is commander in chief, I am commissary general, the other fellows are staff officers, and you, ladies, are company. The tent is for your especial benefit and that oak is your drawing room, this is the messroom and the third is the camp kitchen. Now, let\u2019s have a game before it gets hot, and then we\u2019ll see about dinner.\u201d\r\n\r\nFrank, Beth, Amy, and Grace sat down to watch the game played by the other eight. Mr. Brooke chose Meg, Kate, and Fred. Laurie took Sallie, Jo, and Ned. The English played well, but the Americans played better, and contested every inch of the ground as strongly as if the spirit of \u201976 inspired them. Jo and Fred had several skirmishes and once narrowly escaped high words. Jo was through the last wicket and had missed the stroke, which failure ruffled her a good deal. Fred was close behind her and his turn came before hers. He gave a stroke, his ball hit the wicket, and stopped an inch on the wrong side. No one was very near, and running up to examine, he gave it a sly nudge with his toe, which put it just an inch on the right side.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m through! Now, Miss Jo, I\u2019ll settle you, and get in first,\u201d cried the young gentleman, swinging his mallet for another blow.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou pushed it. I saw you. It\u2019s my turn now,\u201d said Jo sharply.\r\n\r\n\u201cUpon my word, I didn\u2019t move it. It rolled a bit, perhaps, but that is allowed. So, stand off please, and let me have a go at the stake.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe don\u2019t cheat in America, but you can, if you choose,\u201d said Jo angrily.\r\n\r\n\u201cYankees are a deal the most tricky, everybody knows. There you go!\u201d returned Fred, croqueting her ball far away.\r\n\r\nJo opened her lips to say something rude, but checked herself in time, colored up to her forehead and stood a minute, hammering down a wicket with all her might, while Fred hit the stake and declared himself out with much exultation. She went off to get her ball, and was a long time finding it among the bushes, but she came back, looking cool and quiet, and waited her turn patiently. It took several strokes to regain the place she had lost, and when she got there, the other side had nearly won, for Kate\u2019s ball was the last but one and lay near the stake.\r\n\r\n\u201cBy George, it\u2019s all up with us! Goodbye, Kate. Miss Jo owes me one, so you are finished,\u201d cried Fred excitedly, as they all drew near to see the finish.\r\n\r\n\u201cYankees have a trick of being generous to their enemies,\u201d said Jo, with a look that made the lad redden, \u201cespecially when they beat them,\u201d she added, as, leaving Kate\u2019s ball untouched, she won the game by a clever stroke.\r\n\r\nLaurie threw up his hat, then remembered that it wouldn\u2019t do to exult over the defeat of his guests, and stopped in the middle of the cheer to whisper to his friend, \u201cGood for you, Jo! He did cheat, I saw him. We can\u2019t tell him so, but he won\u2019t do it again, take my word for it.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg drew her aside, under pretense of pinning up a loose braid, and said approvingly, \u201cIt was dreadfully provoking, but you kept your temper, and I\u2019m so glad, Jo.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t praise me, Meg, for I could box his ears this minute. I should certainly have boiled over if I hadn\u2019t stayed among the nettles till I got my rage under control enough to hold my tongue. It\u2019s simmering now, so I hope he\u2019ll keep out of my way,\u201d returned Jo, biting her lips as she glowered at Fred from under her big hat.\r\n\r\n\u201cTime for lunch,\u201d said Mr. Brooke, looking at his watch. \u201cCommissary general, will you make the fire and get water, while Miss March, Miss Sallie, and I spread the table? Who can make good coffee?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJo can,\u201d said Meg, glad to recommend her sister. So Jo, feeling that her late lessons in cookery were to do her honor, went to preside over the coffeepot, while the children collected dry sticks, and the boys made a fire and got water from a spring near by. Miss Kate sketched and Frank talked to Beth, who was making little mats of braided rushes to serve as plates.\r\n\r\nThe commander in chief and his aides soon spread the tablecloth with an inviting array of eatables and drinkables, prettily decorated with green leaves. Jo announced that the coffee was ready, and everyone settled themselves to a hearty meal, for youth is seldom dyspeptic, and exercise develops wholesome appetites. A very merry lunch it was, for everything seemed fresh and funny, and frequent peals of laughter startled a venerable horse who fed near by. There was a pleasing inequality in the table, which produced many mishaps to cups and plates, acorns dropped in the milk, little black ants partook of the refreshments without being invited, and fuzzy caterpillars swung down from the tree to see what was going on. Three white-headed children peeped over the fence, and an objectionable dog barked at them from the other side of the river with all his might and main.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s salt here,\u201d said Laurie, as he handed Jo a saucer of berries.\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you, I prefer spiders,\u201d she replied, fishing up two unwary little ones who had gone to a creamy death. \u201cHow dare you remind me of that horrid dinner party, when yours is so nice in every way?\u201d added Jo, as they both laughed and ate out of one plate, the china having run short.\r\n\r\n\u201cI had an uncommonly good time that day, and haven\u2019t got over it yet. This is no credit to me, you know, I don\u2019t do anything. It\u2019s you and Meg and Brooke who make it all go, and I\u2019m no end obliged to you. What shall we do when we can\u2019t eat anymore?\u201d asked Laurie, feeling that his trump card had been played when lunch was over.\r\n\r\n\u201cHave games till it\u2019s cooler. I brought Authors, and I dare say Miss Kate knows something new and nice. Go and ask her. She\u2019s company, and you ought to stay with her more.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAren\u2019t you company too? I thought she\u2019d suit Brooke, but he keeps talking to Meg, and Kate just stares at them through that ridiculous glass of hers. I\u2019m going, so you needn\u2019t try to preach propriety, for you can\u2019t do it, Jo.\u201d\r\n\r\nMiss Kate did know several new games, and as the girls would not, and the boys could not, eat any more, they all adjourned to the drawing room to play Rig-marole.\r\n\r\n\u201cOne person begins a story, any nonsense you like, and tells as long as he pleases, only taking care to stop short at some exciting point, when the next takes it up and does the same. It\u2019s very funny when well done, and makes a perfect jumble of tragical comical stuff to laugh over. Please start it, Mr. Brooke,\u201d said Kate, with a commanding air, which surprised Meg, who treated the tutor with as much respect as any other gentleman.\r\n\r\nLying on the grass at the feet of the two young ladies, Mr. Brooke obediently began the story, with the handsome brown eyes steadily fixed upon the sunshiny river.\r\n\r\n\u201cOnce on a time, a knight went out into the world to seek his fortune, for he had nothing but his sword and his shield. He traveled a long while, nearly eight-and-twenty years, and had a hard time of it, till he came to the palace of a good old king, who had offered a reward to anyone who could tame and train a fine but unbroken colt, of which he was very fond. The knight agreed to try, and got on slowly but surely, for the colt was a gallant fellow, and soon learned to love his new master, though he was freakish and wild. Every day, when he gave his lessons to this pet of the king\u2019s, the knight rode him through the city, and as he rode, he looked everywhere for a certain beautiful face, which he had seen many times in his dreams, but never found. One day, as he went prancing down a quiet street, he saw at the window of a ruinous castle the lovely face. He was delighted, inquired who lived in this old castle, and was told that several captive princesses were kept there by a spell, and spun all day to lay up money to buy their liberty. The knight wished intensely that he could free them, but he was poor and could only go by each day, watching for the sweet face and longing to see it out in the sunshine. At last he resolved to get into the castle and ask how he could help them. He went and knocked. The great door flew open, and he beheld...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA ravishingly lovely lady, who exclaimed, with a cry of rapture, \u2018At last! At last!\u2019\u201d continued Kate, who had read French novels, and admired the style. \u201c\u2019Tis she!\u2019 cried Count Gustave, and fell at her feet in an ecstasy of joy. \u2018Oh, rise!\u2019 she said, extending a hand of marble fairness. \u2018Never! Till you tell me how I may rescue you,\u2019 swore the knight, still kneeling. \u2018Alas, my cruel fate condemns me to remain here till my tyrant is destroyed.\u2019 \u2018Where is the villain?\u2019 \u2018In the mauve salon. Go, brave heart, and save me from despair.\u2019 \u2018I obey, and return victorious or dead!\u2019 With these thrilling words he rushed away, and flinging open the door of the mauve salon, was about to enter, when he received...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA stunning blow from the big Greek lexicon, which an old fellow in a black gown fired at him,\u201d said Ned. \u201cInstantly, Sir What\u2019s-his-name recovered himself, pitched the tyrant out of the window, and turned to join the lady, victorious, but with a bump on his brow, found the door locked, tore up the curtains, made a rope ladder, got halfway down when the ladder broke, and he went headfirst into the moat, sixty feet below. Could swim like a duck, paddled round the castle till he came to a little door guarded by two stout fellows, knocked their heads together till they cracked like a couple of nuts, then, by a trifling exertion of his prodigious strength, he smashed in the door, went up a pair of stone steps covered with dust a foot thick, toads as big as your fist, and spiders that would frighten you into hysterics, Miss March. At the top of these steps he came plump upon a sight that took his breath away and chilled his blood...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA tall figure, all in white with a veil over its face and a lamp in its wasted hand,\u201d went on Meg. \u201cIt beckoned, gliding noiselessly before him down a corridor as dark and cold as any tomb. Shadowy effigies in armor stood on either side, a dead silence reigned, the lamp burned blue, and the ghostly figure ever and anon turned its face toward him, showing the glitter of awful eyes through its white veil. They reached a curtained door, behind which sounded lovely music. He sprang forward to enter, but the specter plucked him back, and waved threateningly before him a...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSnuffbox,\u201d said Jo, in a sepulchral tone, which convulsed the audience. \u201c\u2018Thankee,\u2019 said the knight politely, as he took a pinch and sneezed seven times so violently that his head fell off. \u2018Ha! Ha!\u2019 laughed the ghost, and having peeped through the keyhole at the princesses spinning away for dear life, the evil spirit picked up her victim and put him in a large tin box, where there were eleven other knights packed together without their heads, like sardines, who all rose and began to...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDance a hornpipe,\u201d cut in Fred, as Jo paused for breath, \u201cand, as they danced, the rubbishy old castle turned to a man-of-war in full sail. \u2018Up with the jib, reef the tops\u2019l halliards, helm hard alee, and man the guns!\u2019 roared the captain, as a Portuguese pirate hove in sight, with a flag black as ink flying from her foremast. \u2018Go in and win, my hearties!\u2019 says the captain, and a tremendous fight began. Of course the British beat\u2014they always do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, they don\u2019t!\u201d cried Jo, aside.\r\n\r\n\u201cHaving taken the pirate captain prisoner, sailed slap over the schooner, whose decks were piled high with dead and whose lee scuppers ran blood, for the order had been \u2018Cutlasses, and die hard!\u2019 \u2018Bosun\u2019s mate, take a bight of the flying-jib sheet, and start this villain if he doesn\u2019t confess his sins double quick,\u2019 said the British captain. The Portuguese held his tongue like a brick, and walked the plank, while the jolly tars cheered like mad. But the sly dog dived, came up under the man-of-war, scuttled her, and down she went, with all sail set, \u2018To the bottom of the sea, sea, sea\u2019 where...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, gracious! What shall I say?\u201d cried Sallie, as Fred ended his rigmarole, in which he had jumbled together pell-mell nautical phrases and facts out of one of his favorite books. \u201cWell, they went to the bottom, and a nice mermaid welcomed them, but was much grieved on finding the box of headless knights, and kindly pickled them in brine, hoping to discover the mystery about them, for being a woman, she was curious. By-and-by a diver came down, and the mermaid said, \u2018I\u2019ll give you a box of pearls if you can take it up,\u2019 for she wanted to restore the poor things to life, and couldn\u2019t raise the heavy load herself. So the diver hoisted it up, and was much disappointed on opening it to find no pearls. He left it in a great lonely field, where it was found by a...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLittle goose girl, who kept a hundred fat geese in the field,\u201d said Amy, when Sallie\u2019s invention gave out. \u201cThe little girl was sorry for them, and asked an old woman what she should do to help them. \u2018Your geese will tell you, they know everything.\u2019 said the old woman. So she asked what she should use for new heads, since the old ones were lost, and all the geese opened their hundred mouths and screamed...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Cabbages!\u2019\u201d continued Laurie promptly. \u201c\u2018Just the thing,\u2019 said the girl, and ran to get twelve fine ones from her garden. She put them on, the knights revived at once, thanked her, and went on their way rejoicing, never knowing the difference, for there were so many other heads like them in the world that no one thought anything of it. The knight in whom I\u2019m interested went back to find the pretty face, and learned that the princesses had spun themselves free and all gone and married, but one. He was in a great state of mind at that, and mounting the colt, who stood by him through thick and thin, rushed to the castle to see which was left. Peeping over the hedge, he saw the queen of his affections picking flowers in her garden. \u2018Will you give me a rose?\u2019 said he. \u2018You must come and get it. I can\u2019t come to you, it isn\u2019t proper,\u2019 said she, as sweet as honey. He tried to climb over the hedge, but it seemed to grow higher and higher. Then he tried to push through, but it grew thicker and thicker, and he was in despair. So he patiently broke twig after twig till he had made a little hole through which he peeped, saying imploringly, \u2018Let me in! Let me in!\u2019 But the pretty princess did not seem to understand, for she picked her roses quietly, and left him to fight his way in. Whether he did or not, Frank will tell you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t. I\u2019m not playing, I never do,\u201d said Frank, dismayed at the sentimental predicament out of which he was to rescue the absurd couple. Beth had disappeared behind Jo, and Grace was asleep.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo the poor knight is to be left sticking in the hedge, is he?\u201d asked Mr. Brooke, still watching the river, and playing with the wild rose in his buttonhole.\r\n\r\n\u201cI guess the princess gave him a posy, and opened the gate after a while,\u201d said Laurie, smiling to himself, as he threw acorns at his tutor.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat a piece of nonsense we have made! With practice we might do something quite clever. Do you know Truth?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hope so,\u201d said Meg soberly.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe game, I mean?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat is it?\u201d said Fred.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, you pile up your hands, choose a number, and draw out in turn, and the person who draws at the number has to answer truly any question put by the rest. It\u2019s great fun.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLet\u2019s try it,\u201d said Jo, who liked new experiments.\r\n\r\nMiss Kate and Mr. Brooke, Meg, and Ned declined, but Fred, Sallie, Jo, and Laurie piled and drew, and the lot fell to Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cWho are your heroes?\u201d asked Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cGrandfather and Napoleon.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhich lady here do you think prettiest?\u201d said Sallie.\r\n\r\n\u201cMargaret.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhich do you like best?\u201d from Fred.\r\n\r\n\u201cJo, of course.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat silly questions you ask!\u201d And Jo gave a disdainful shrug as the rest laughed at Laurie\u2019s matter-of-fact tone.\r\n\r\n\u201cTry again. Truth isn\u2019t a bad game,\u201d said Fred.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a very good one for you,\u201d retorted Jo in a low voice. Her turn came next.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat is your greatest fault?\u201d asked Fred, by way of testing in her the virtue he lacked himself.\r\n\r\n\u201cA quick temper.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you most wish for?\u201d said Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cA pair of boot lacings,\u201d returned Jo, guessing and defeating his purpose.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a true answer. You must say what you really do want most.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGenius. Don\u2019t you wish you could give it to me, Laurie?\u201d And she slyly smiled in his disappointed face.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat virtues do you most admire in a man?\u201d asked Sallie.\r\n\r\n\u201cCourage and honesty.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow my turn,\u201d said Fred, as his hand came last.\r\n\r\n\u201cLet\u2019s give it to him,\u201d whispered Laurie to Jo, who nodded and asked at once...\r\n\r\n\u201cDidn\u2019t you cheat at croquet?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, yes, a little bit.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood! Didn\u2019t you take your story out of The Sea Lion?\u201d said Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cRather.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you think the English nation perfect in every respect?\u201d asked Sallie.\r\n\r\n\u201cI should be ashamed of myself if I didn\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s a true John Bull. Now, Miss Sallie, you shall have a chance without waiting to draw. I\u2019ll harrrow up your feelings first by asking if you don\u2019t think you are something of a flirt,\u201d said Laurie, as Jo nodded to Fred as a sign that peace was declared.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou impertinent boy! Of course I\u2019m not,\u201d exclaimed Sallie, with an air that proved the contrary.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you hate most?\u201d asked Fred.\r\n\r\n\u201cSpiders and rice pudding.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you like best?\u201d asked Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cDancing and French gloves.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I think Truth is a very silly play. Let\u2019s have a sensible game of Authors to refresh our minds,\u201d proposed Jo.\r\n\r\nNed, Frank, and the little girls joined in this, and while it went on, the three elders sat apart, talking. Miss Kate took out her sketch again, and Margaret watched her, while Mr. Brooke lay on the grass with a book, which he did not read.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow beautifully you do it! I wish I could draw,\u201d said Meg, with mingled admiration and regret in her voice.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy don\u2019t you learn? I should think you had taste and talent for it,\u201d replied Miss Kate graciously.\r\n\r\n\u201cI haven\u2019t time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYour mamma prefers other accomplishments, I fancy. So did mine, but I proved to her that I had talent by taking a few lessons privately, and then she was quite willing I should go on. Can\u2019t you do the same with your governess?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI have none.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI forgot young ladies in America go to school more than with us. Very fine schools they are, too, Papa says. You go to a private one, I suppose?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t go at all. I am a governess myself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, indeed!\u201d said Miss Kate, but she might as well have said, \u201cDear me, how dreadful!\u201d for her tone implied it, and something in her face made Meg color, and wish she had not been so frank.\r\n\r\nMr. Brooke looked up and said quickly, \u201cYoung ladies in America love independence as much as their ancestors did, and are admired and respected for supporting themselves.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes, of course it\u2019s very nice and proper in them to do so. We have many most respectable and worthy young women who do the same and are employed by the nobility, because, being the daughters of gentlemen, they are both well bred and accomplished, you know,\u201d said Miss Kate in a patronizing tone that hurt Meg\u2019s pride, and made her work seem not only more distasteful, but degrading.\r\n\r\n\u201cDid the German song suit, Miss March?\u201d inquired Mr. Brooke, breaking an awkward pause.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes! It was very sweet, and I\u2019m much obliged to whoever translated it for me.\u201d And Meg\u2019s downcast face brightened as she spoke.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you read German?\u201d asked Miss Kate with a look of surprise.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot very well. My father, who taught me, is away, and I don\u2019t get on very fast alone, for I\u2019ve no one to correct my pronunciation.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTry a little now. Here is Schiller\u2019s Mary Stuart and a tutor who loves to teach.\u201d And Mr. Brooke laid his book on her lap with an inviting smile.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s so hard I\u2019m afraid to try,\u201d said Meg, grateful, but bashful in the presence of the accomplished young lady beside her.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll read a bit to encourage you.\u201d And Miss Kate read one of the most beautiful passages in a perfectly correct but perfectly expressionless manner.\r\n\r\nMr. Brooke made no comment as she returned the book to Meg, who said innocently, \u201cI thought it was poetry.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSome of it is. Try this passage.\u201d\r\n\r\nThere was a queer smile about Mr. Brooke\u2019s mouth as he opened at poor Mary\u2019s lament.\r\n\r\nMeg obediently following the long grass-blade which her new tutor used to point with, read slowly and timidly, unconsciously making poetry of the hard words by the soft intonation of her musical voice. Down the page went the green guide, and presently, forgetting her listener in the beauty of the sad scene, Meg read as if alone, giving a little touch of tragedy to the words of the unhappy queen. If she had seen the brown eyes then, she would have stopped short, but she never looked up, and the lesson was not spoiled for her.\r\n\r\n\u201cVery well indeed!\u201d said Mr. Brooke, as she paused, quite ignoring her many mistakes, and looking as if he did indeed love to teach.\r\n\r\nMiss Kate put up her glass, and, having taken a survey of the little tableau before her, shut her sketch book, saying with condescension, \u201cYou\u2019ve a nice accent and in time will be a clever reader. I advise you to learn, for German is a valuable accomplishment to teachers. I must look after Grace, she is romping.\u201d And Miss Kate strolled away, adding to herself with a shrug, \u201cI didn\u2019t come to chaperone a governess, though she is young and pretty. What odd people these Yankees are. I\u2019m afraid Laurie will be quite spoiled among them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI forgot that English people rather turn up their noses at governesses and don\u2019t treat them as we do,\u201d said Meg, looking after the retreating figure with an annoyed expression.\r\n\r\n\u201cTutors also have rather a hard time of it there, as I know to my sorrow. There\u2019s no place like America for us workers, Miss Margaret.\u201d And Mr. Brooke looked so contented and cheerful that Meg was ashamed to lament her hard lot.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad I live in it then. I don\u2019t like my work, but I get a good deal of satisfaction out of it after all, so I won\u2019t complain. I only wished I liked teaching as you do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI think you would if you had Laurie for a pupil. I shall be very sorry to lose him next year,\u201d said Mr. Brooke, busily punching holes in the turf.\r\n\r\n\u201cGoing to college, I suppose?\u201d Meg\u2019s lips asked the question, but her eyes added, \u201cAnd what becomes of you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, it\u2019s high time he went, for he is ready, and as soon as he is off, I shall turn soldier. I am needed.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI am glad of that!\u201d exclaimed Meg. \u201cI should think every young man would want to go, though it is hard for the mothers and sisters who stay at home,\u201d she added sorrowfully.\r\n\r\n\u201cI have neither, and very few friends to care whether I live or die,\u201d said Mr. Brooke rather bitterly as he absently put the dead rose in the hole he had made and covered it up, like a little grave.\r\n\r\n\u201cLaurie and his grandfather would care a great deal, and we should all be very sorry to have any harm happen to you,\u201d said Meg heartily.\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you, that sounds pleasant,\u201d began Mr. Brooke, looking cheerful again, but before he could finish his speech, Ned, mounted on the old horse, came lumbering up to display his equestrian skill before the young ladies, and there was no more quiet that day.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you love to ride?\u201d asked Grace of Amy, as they stood resting after a race round the field with the others, led by Ned.\r\n\r\n\u201cI dote upon it. My sister, Meg, used to ride when Papa was rich, but we don\u2019t keep any horses now, except Ellen Tree,\u201d added Amy, laughing.\r\n\r\n\u201cTell me about Ellen Tree. Is it a donkey?\u201d asked Grace curiously.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, you see, Jo is crazy about horses and so am I, but we\u2019ve only got an old sidesaddle and no horse. Out in our garden is an apple tree that has a nice low branch, so Jo put the saddle on it, fixed some reins on the part that turns up, and we bounce away on Ellen Tree whenever we like.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow funny!\u201d laughed Grace. \u201cI have a pony at home, and ride nearly every day in the park with Fred and Kate. It\u2019s very nice, for my friends go too, and the Row is full of ladies and gentlemen.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDear, how charming! I hope I shall go abroad some day, but I\u2019d rather go to Rome than the Row,\u201d said Amy, who had not the remotest idea what the Row was and wouldn\u2019t have asked for the world.\r\n\r\nFrank, sitting just behind the little girls, heard what they were saying, and pushed his crutch away from him with an impatient gesture as he watched the active lads going through all sorts of comical gymnastics. Beth, who was collecting the scattered Author cards, looked up and said, in her shy yet friendly way, \u201cI\u2019m afraid you are tired. Can I do anything for you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTalk to me, please. It\u2019s dull, sitting by myself,\u201d answered Frank, who had evidently been used to being made much of at home.\r\n\r\nIf he asked her to deliver a Latin oration, it would not have seemed a more impossible task to bashful Beth, but there was no place to run to, no Jo to hide behind now, and the poor boy looked so wistfully at her that she bravely resolved to try.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you like to talk about?\u201d she asked, fumbling over the cards and dropping half as she tried to tie them up.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I like to hear about cricket and boating and hunting,\u201d said Frank, who had not yet learned to suit his amusements to his strength.\r\n\r\nMy heart! What shall I do? I don\u2019t know anything about them, thought Beth, and forgetting the boy\u2019s misfortune in her flurry, she said, hoping to make him talk, \u201cI never saw any hunting, but I suppose you know all about it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI did once, but I can never hunt again, for I got hurt leaping a confounded five-barred gate, so there are no more horses and hounds for me,\u201d said Frank with a sigh that made Beth hate herself for her innocent blunder.\r\n\r\n\u201cYour deer are much prettier than our ugly buffaloes,\u201d she said, turning to the prairies for help and feeling glad that she had read one of the boys\u2019 books in which Jo delighted.\r\n\r\nBuffaloes proved soothing and satisfactory, and in her eagerness to amuse another, Beth forgot herself, and was quite unconscious of her sisters\u2019 surprise and delight at the unusual spectacle of Beth talking away to one of the dreadful boys, against whom she had begged protection.\r\n\r\n\u201cBless her heart! She pities him, so she is good to him,\u201d said Jo, beaming at her from the croquet ground.\r\n\r\n\u201cI always said she was a little saint,\u201d added Meg, as if there could be no further doubt of it.\r\n\r\n\u201cI haven\u2019t heard Frank laugh so much for ever so long,\u201d said Grace to Amy, as they sat discussing dolls and making tea sets out of the acorn cups.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy sister Beth is a very fastidious girl, when she likes to be,\u201d said Amy, well pleased at Beth\u2019s success. She meant \u2018facinating\u2019, but as Grace didn\u2019t know the exact meaning of either word, fastidious sounded well and made a good impression.\r\n\r\nAn impromptu circus, fox and geese, and an amicable game of croquet finished the afternoon. At sunset the tent was struck, hampers packed, wickets pulled up, boats loaded, and the whole party floated down the river, singing at the tops of their voices. Ned, getting sentimental, warbled a serenade with the pensive refrain...\r\n\r\nAlone, alone, ah! Woe, alone,\r\n\r\nand at the lines...\r\n\r\nWe each are young, we each have a heart,\r\nOh, why should we stand thus coldly apart?\r\n\r\nhe looked at Meg with such a lackadaisical expression that she laughed outright and spoiled his song.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow can you be so cruel to me?\u201d he whispered, under cover of a lively chorus. \u201cYou\u2019ve kept close to that starched-up Englishwoman all day, and now you snub me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t mean to, but you looked so funny I really couldn\u2019t help it,\u201d replied Meg, passing over the first part of his reproach, for it was quite true that she had shunned him, remembering the Moffat party and the talk after it.\r\n\r\nNed was offended and turned to Sallie for consolation, saying to her rather pettishly, \u201cThere isn\u2019t a bit of flirt in that girl, is there?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a particle, but she\u2019s a dear,\u201d returned Sallie, defending her friend even while confessing her shortcomings.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe\u2019s not a stricken deer anyway,\u201d said Ned, trying to be witty, and succeeding as well as very young gentlemen usually do.\r\n\r\nOn the lawn where it had gathered, the little party separated with cordial good nights and good-byes, for the Vaughns were going to Canada. As the four sisters went home through the garden, Miss Kate looked after them, saying, without the patronizing tone in her voice, \u201cIn spite of their demonstrative manners, American girls are very nice when one knows them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI quite agree with you,\u201d said Mr. Brooke.\r\nCHAPTER THIRTEEN\r\nCASTLES IN THE AIR\r\n\r\nLaurie lay luxuriously swinging to and fro in his hammock one warm September afternoon, wondering what his neighbors were about, but too lazy to go and find out. He was in one of his moods, for the day had been both unprofitable and unsatisfactory, and he was wishing he could live it over again. The hot weather made him indolent, and he had shirked his studies, tried Mr. Brooke\u2019s patience to the utmost, displeased his grandfather by practicing half the afternoon, frightened the maidservants half out of their wits by mischievously hinting that one of his dogs was going mad, and, after high words with the stableman about some fancied neglect of his horse, he had flung himself into his hammock to fume over the stupidity of the world in general, till the peace of the lovely day quieted him in spite of himself. Staring up into the green gloom of the horse-chestnut trees above him, he dreamed dreams of all sorts, and was just imagining himself tossing on the ocean in a voyage round the world, when the sound of voices brought him ashore in a flash. Peeping through the meshes of the hammock, he saw the Marches coming out, as if bound on some expedition.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat in the world are those girls about now?\u201d thought Laurie, opening his sleepy eyes to take a good look, for there was something rather peculiar in the appearance of his neighbors. Each wore a large, flapping hat, a brown linen pouch slung over one shoulder, and carried a long staff. Meg had a cushion, Jo a book, Beth a basket, and Amy a portfolio. All walked quietly through the garden, out at the little back gate, and began to climb the hill that lay between the house and river.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, that\u2019s cool,\u201d said Laurie to himself, \u201cto have a picnic and never ask me! They can\u2019t be going in the boat, for they haven\u2019t got the key. Perhaps they forgot it. I\u2019ll take it to them, and see what\u2019s going on.\u201d\r\n\r\nThough possessed of half a dozen hats, it took him some time to find one, then there was a hunt for the key, which was at last discovered in his pocket, so that the girls were quite out of sight when he leaped the fence and ran after them. Taking the shortest way to the boathouse, he waited for them to appear, but no one came, and he went up the hill to take an observation. A grove of pines covered one part of it, and from the heart of this green spot came a clearer sound than the soft sigh of the pines or the drowsy chirp of the crickets.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s a landscape!\u201d thought Laurie, peeping through the bushes, and looking wide-awake and good-natured already.\r\n\r\nIt was a rather pretty little picture, for the sisters sat together in the shady nook, with sun and shadow flickering over them, the aromatic wind lifting their hair and cooling their hot cheeks, and all the little wood people going on with their affairs as if these were no strangers but old friends. Meg sat upon her cushion, sewing daintily with her white hands, and looking as fresh and sweet as a rose in her pink dress among the green. Beth was sorting the cones that lay thick under the hemlock near by, for she made pretty things with them. Amy was sketching a group of ferns, and Jo was knitting as she read aloud. A shadow passed over the boy\u2019s face as he watched them, feeling that he ought to go away because uninvited; yet lingering because home seemed very lonely and this quiet party in the woods most attractive to his restless spirit. He stood so still that a squirrel, busy with its harvesting, ran down a pine close beside him, saw him suddenly and skipped back, scolding so shrilly that Beth looked up, espied the wistful face behind the birches, and beckoned with a reassuring smile.\r\n\r\n\u201cMay I come in, please? Or shall I be a bother?\u201d he asked, advancing slowly.\r\n\r\nMeg lifted her eyebrows, but Jo scowled at her defiantly and said at once, \u201cOf course you may. We should have asked you before, only we thought you wouldn\u2019t care for such a girl\u2019s game as this.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI always like your games, but if Meg doesn\u2019t want me, I\u2019ll go away.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve no objection, if you do something. It\u2019s against the rules to be idle here,\u201d replied Meg gravely but graciously.\r\n\r\n\u201cMuch obliged. I\u2019ll do anything if you\u2019ll let me stop a bit, for it\u2019s as dull as the Desert of Sahara down there. Shall I sew, read, cone, draw, or do all at once? Bring on your bears. I\u2019m ready.\u201d And Laurie sat down with a submissive expression delightful to behold.\r\n\r\n\u201cFinish this story while I set my heel,\u201d said Jo, handing him the book.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes\u2019m.\u201d was the meek answer, as he began, doing his best to prove his gratitude for the favor of admission into the \u2018Busy Bee Society\u2019.\r\n\r\nThe story was not a long one, and when it was finished, he ventured to ask a few questions as a reward of merit.\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease, ma\u2019am, could I inquire if this highly instructive and charming institution is a new one?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWould you tell him?\u201d asked Meg of her sisters.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019ll laugh,\u201d said Amy warningly.\r\n\r\n\u201cWho cares?\u201d said Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cI guess he\u2019ll like it,\u201d added Beth.\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course I shall! I give you my word I won\u2019t laugh. Tell away, Jo, and don\u2019t be afraid.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe idea of being afraid of you! Well, you see we used to play Pilgrim\u2019s Progress, and we have been going on with it in earnest, all winter and summer.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I know,\u201d said Laurie, nodding wisely.\r\n\r\n\u201cWho told you?\u201d demanded Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cSpirits.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I did. I wanted to amuse him one night when you were all away, and he was rather dismal. He did like it, so don\u2019t scold, Jo,\u201d said Beth meekly.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou can\u2019t keep a secret. Never mind, it saves trouble now.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGo on, please,\u201d said Laurie, as Jo became absorbed in her work, looking a trifle displeased.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, didn\u2019t she tell you about this new plan of ours? Well, we have tried not to waste our holiday, but each has had a task and worked at it with a will. The vacation is nearly over, the stints are all done, and we are ever so glad that we didn\u2019t dawdle.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I should think so,\u201d and Laurie thought regretfully of his own idle days.\r\n\r\n\u201cMother likes to have us out-of-doors as much as possible, so we bring our work here and have nice times. For the fun of it we bring our things in these bags, wear the old hats, use poles to climb the hill, and play pilgrims, as we used to do years ago. We call this hill the Delectable Mountain, for we can look far away and see the country where we hope to live some time.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo pointed, and Laurie sat up to examine, for through an opening in the wood one could look cross the wide, blue river, the meadows on the other side, far over the outskirts of the great city, to the green hills that rose to meet the sky. The sun was low, and the heavens glowed with the splendor of an autumn sunset. Gold and purple clouds lay on the hilltops, and rising high into the ruddy light were silvery white peaks that shone like the airy spires of some Celestial City.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow beautiful that is!\u201d said Laurie softly, for he was quick to see and feel beauty of any kind.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s often so, and we like to watch it, for it is never the same, but always splendid,\u201d replied Amy, wishing she could paint it.\r\n\r\n\u201cJo talks about the country where we hope to live sometime\u2014the real country, she means, with pigs and chickens and haymaking. It would be nice, but I wish the beautiful country up there was real, and we could ever go to it,\u201d said Beth musingly.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere is a lovelier country even than that, where we shall go, by-and-by, when we are good enough,\u201d answered Meg with her sweetest voice.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt seems so long to wait, so hard to do. I want to fly away at once, as those swallows fly, and go in at that splendid gate.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ll get there, Beth, sooner or later, no fear of that,\u201d said Jo. \u201cI\u2019m the one that will have to fight and work, and climb and wait, and maybe never get in after all.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ll have me for company, if that\u2019s any comfort. I shall have to do a deal of traveling before I come in sight of your Celestial City. If I arrive late, you\u2019ll say a good word for me, won\u2019t you, Beth?\u201d\r\n\r\nSomething in the boy\u2019s face troubled his little friend, but she said cheerfully, with her quiet eyes on the changing clouds, \u201cIf people really want to go, and really try all their lives, I think they will get in, for I don\u2019t believe there are any locks on that door or any guards at the gate. I always imagine it is as it is in the picture, where the shining ones stretch out their hands to welcome poor Christian as he comes up from the river.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWouldn\u2019t it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true, and we could live in them?\u201d said Jo, after a little pause.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve made such quantities it would be hard to choose which I\u2019d have,\u201d said Laurie, lying flat and throwing cones at the squirrel who had betrayed him.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019d have to take your favorite one. What is it?\u201d asked Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf I tell mine, will you tell yours?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, if the girls will too.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe will. Now, Laurie.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAfter I\u2019d seen as much of the world as I want to, I\u2019d like to settle in Germany and have just as much music as I choose. I\u2019m to be a famous musician myself, and all creation is to rush to hear me. And I\u2019m never to be bothered about money or business, but just enjoy myself and live for what I like. That\u2019s my favorite castle. What\u2019s yours, Meg?\u201d\r\n\r\nMargaret seemed to find it a little hard to tell hers, and waved a brake before her face, as if to disperse imaginary gnats, while she said slowly, \u201cI should like a lovely house, full of all sorts of luxurious things\u2014nice food, pretty clothes, handsome furniture, pleasant people, and heaps of money. I am to be mistress of it, and manage it as I like, with plenty of servants, so I never need work a bit. How I should enjoy it! For I wouldn\u2019t be idle, but do good, and make everyone love me dearly.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWouldn\u2019t you have a master for your castle in the air?\u201d asked Laurie slyly.\r\n\r\n\u201cI said \u2018pleasant people\u2019, you know,\u201d and Meg carefully tied up her shoe as she spoke, so that no one saw her face.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy don\u2019t you say you\u2019d have a splendid, wise, good husband and some angelic little children? You know your castle wouldn\u2019t be perfect without,\u201d said blunt Jo, who had no tender fancies yet, and rather scorned romance, except in books.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019d have nothing but horses, inkstands, and novels in yours,\u201d answered Meg petulantly.\r\n\r\n\u201cWouldn\u2019t I though? I\u2019d have a stable full of Arabian steeds, rooms piled high with books, and I\u2019d write out of a magic inkstand, so that my works should be as famous as Laurie\u2019s music. I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle, something heroic or wonderful that won\u2019t be forgotten after I\u2019m dead. I don\u2019t know what, but I\u2019m on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all some day. I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous, that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMine is to stay at home safe with Father and Mother, and help take care of the family,\u201d said Beth contentedly.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you wish for anything else?\u201d asked Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cSince I had my little piano, I am perfectly satisfied. I only wish we may all keep well and be together, nothing else.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI have ever so many wishes, but the pet one is to be an artist, and go to Rome, and do fine pictures, and be the best artist in the whole world,\u201d was Amy\u2019s modest desire.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe\u2019re an ambitious set, aren\u2019t we? Every one of us, but Beth, wants to be rich and famous, and gorgeous in every respect. I do wonder if any of us will ever get our wishes,\u201d said Laurie, chewing grass like a meditative calf.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen,\u201d observed Jo mysteriously.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve got the key to mine, but I\u2019m not allowed to try it. Hang college!\u201d muttered Laurie with an impatient sigh.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s mine!\u201d and Amy waved her pencil.\r\n\r\n\u201cI haven\u2019t got any,\u201d said Meg forlornly.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, you have,\u201d said Laurie at once.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIn your face.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNonsense, that\u2019s of no use.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWait and see if it doesn\u2019t bring you something worth having,\u201d replied the boy, laughing at the thought of a charming little secret which he fancied he knew.\r\n\r\nMeg colored behind the brake, but asked no questions and looked across the river with the same expectant expression which Mr. Brooke had worn when he told the story of the knight.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf we are all alive ten years hence, let\u2019s meet, and see how many of us have got our wishes, or how much nearer we are then than now,\u201d said Jo, always ready with a plan.\r\n\r\n\u201cBless me! How old I shall be, twenty-seven!\u201d exclaimed Meg, who felt grown up already, having just reached seventeen.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou and I will be twenty-six, Teddy, Beth twenty-four, and Amy twenty-two. What a venerable party!\u201d said Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cI hope I shall have done something to be proud of by that time, but I\u2019m such a lazy dog, I\u2019m afraid I shall dawdle, Jo.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou need a motive, Mother says, and when you get it, she is sure you\u2019ll work splendidly.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIs she? By Jupiter, I will, if I only get the chance!\u201d cried Laurie, sitting up with sudden energy. \u201cI ought to be satisfied to please Grandfather, and I do try, but it\u2019s working against the grain, you see, and comes hard. He wants me to be an India merchant, as he was, and I\u2019d rather be shot. I hate tea and silk and spices, and every sort of rubbish his old ships bring, and I don\u2019t care how soon they go to the bottom when I own them. Going to college ought to satisfy him, for if I give him four years he ought to let me off from the business. But he\u2019s set, and I\u2019ve got to do just as he did, unless I break away and please myself, as my father did. If there was anyone left to stay with the old gentleman, I\u2019d do it tomorrow.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie spoke excitedly, and looked ready to carry his threat into execution on the slightest provocation, for he was growing up very fast and, in spite of his indolent ways, had a young man\u2019s hatred of subjection, a young man\u2019s restless longing to try the world for himself.\r\n\r\n\u201cI advise you to sail away in one of your ships, and never come home again till you have tried your own way,\u201d said Jo, whose imagination was fired by the thought of such a daring exploit, and whose sympathy was excited by what she called \u2018Teddy\u2019s Wrongs\u2019.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s not right, Jo. You mustn\u2019t talk in that way, and Laurie mustn\u2019t take your bad advice. You should do just what your grandfather wishes, my dear boy,\u201d said Meg in her most maternal tone. \u201cDo your best at college, and when he sees that you try to please him, I\u2019m sure he won\u2019t be hard on you or unjust to you. As you say, there is no one else to stay with and love him, and you\u2019d never forgive yourself if you left him without his permission. Don\u2019t be dismal or fret, but do your duty and you\u2019ll get your reward, as good Mr. Brooke has, by being respected and loved.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you know about him?\u201d asked Laurie, grateful for the good advice, but objecting to the lecture, and glad to turn the conversation from himself after his unusual outbreak.\r\n\r\n\u201cOnly what your grandpa told us about him, how he took good care of his own mother till she died, and wouldn\u2019t go abroad as tutor to some nice person because he wouldn\u2019t leave her. And how he provides now for an old woman who nursed his mother, and never tells anyone, but is just as generous and patient and good as he can be.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo he is, dear old fellow!\u201d said Laurie heartily, as Meg paused, looking flushed and earnest with her story. \u201cIt\u2019s like Grandpa to find out all about him without letting him know, and to tell all his goodness to others, so that they might like him. Brooke couldn\u2019t understand why your mother was so kind to him, asking him over with me and treating him in her beautiful friendly way. He thought she was just perfect, and talked about it for days and days, and went on about you all in flaming style. If ever I do get my wish, you see what I\u2019ll do for Brooke.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBegin to do something now by not plaguing his life out,\u201d said Meg sharply.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow do you know I do, Miss?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can always tell by his face when he goes away. If you have been good, he looks satisfied and walks briskly. If you have plagued him, he\u2019s sober and walks slowly, as if he wanted to go back and do his work better.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I like that? So you keep an account of my good and bad marks in Brooke\u2019s face, do you? I see him bow and smile as he passes your window, but I didn\u2019t know you\u2019d got up a telegraph.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe haven\u2019t. Don\u2019t be angry, and oh, don\u2019t tell him I said anything! It was only to show that I cared how you get on, and what is said here is said in confidence, you know,\u201d cried Meg, much alarmed at the thought of what might follow from her careless speech.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t tell tales,\u201d replied Laurie, with his \u2018high and mighty\u2019 air, as Jo called a certain expression which he occasionally wore. \u201cOnly if Brooke is going to be a thermometer, I must mind and have fair weather for him to report.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease don\u2019t be offended. I didn\u2019t mean to preach or tell tales or be silly. I only thought Jo was encouraging you in a feeling which you\u2019d be sorry for by-and-by. You are so kind to us, we feel as if you were our brother and say just what we think. Forgive me, I meant it kindly.\u201d And Meg offered her hand with a gesture both affectionate and timid.\r\n\r\nAshamed of his momentary pique, Laurie squeezed the kind little hand, and said frankly, \u201cI\u2019m the one to be forgiven. I\u2019m cross and have been out of sorts all day. I like to have you tell me my faults and be sisterly, so don\u2019t mind if I am grumpy sometimes. I thank you all the same.\u201d\r\n\r\nBent on showing that he was not offended, he made himself as agreeable as possible, wound cotton for Meg, recited poetry to please Jo, shook down cones for Beth, and helped Amy with her ferns, proving himself a fit person to belong to the \u2018Busy Bee Society\u2019. In the midst of an animated discussion on the domestic habits of turtles (one of those amiable creatures having strolled up from the river), the faint sound of a bell warned them that Hannah had put the tea \u2018to draw\u2019, and they would just have time to get home to supper.\r\n\r\n\u201cMay I come again?\u201d asked Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, if you are good, and love your book, as the boys in the primer are told to do,\u201d said Meg, smiling.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll try.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen you may come, and I\u2019ll teach you to knit as the Scotchmen do. There\u2019s a demand for socks just now,\u201d added Jo, waving hers like a big blue worsted banner as they parted at the gate.\r\n\r\nThat night, when Beth played to Mr. Laurence in the twilight, Laurie, standing in the shadow of the curtain, listened to the little David, whose simple music always quieted his moody spirit, and watched the old man, who sat with his gray head on his hand, thinking tender thoughts of the dead child he had loved so much. Remembering the conversation of the afternoon, the boy said to himself, with the resolve to make the sacrifice cheerfully, \u201cI\u2019ll let my castle go, and stay with the dear old gentleman while he needs me, for I am all he has.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER FOURTEEN\r\nSECRETS\r\n\r\nJo was very busy in the garret, for the October days began to grow chilly, and the afternoons were short. For two or three hours the sun lay warmly in the high window, showing Jo seated on the old sofa, writing busily, with her papers spread out upon a trunk before her, while Scrabble, the pet rat, promenaded the beams overhead, accompanied by his oldest son, a fine young fellow, who was evidently very proud of his whiskers. Quite absorbed in her work, Jo scribbled away till the last page was filled, when she signed her name with a flourish and threw down her pen, exclaiming...\r\n\r\n\u201cThere, I\u2019ve done my best! If this won\u2019t suit I shall have to wait till I can do better.\u201d\r\n\r\nLying back on the sofa, she read the manuscript carefully through, making dashes here and there, and putting in many exclamation points, which looked like little balloons. Then she tied it up with a smart red ribbon, and sat a minute looking at it with a sober, wistful expression, which plainly showed how earnest her work had been. Jo\u2019s desk up here was an old tin kitchen which hung against the wall. In it she kept her papers, and a few books, safely shut away from Scrabble, who, being likewise of a literary turn, was fond of making a circulating library of such books as were left in his way by eating the leaves. From this tin receptacle Jo produced another manuscript, and putting both in her pocket, crept quietly downstairs, leaving her friends to nibble on her pens and taste her ink.\r\n\r\nShe put on her hat and jacket as noiselessly as possible, and going to the back entry window, got out upon the roof of a low porch, swung herself down to the grassy bank, and took a roundabout way to the road. Once there, she composed herself, hailed a passing omnibus, and rolled away to town, looking very merry and mysterious.\r\n\r\nIf anyone had been watching her, he would have thought her movements decidedly peculiar, for on alighting, she went off at a great pace till she reached a certain number in a certain busy street. Having found the place with some difficulty, she went into the doorway, looked up the dirty stairs, and after standing stock still a minute, suddenly dived into the street and walked away as rapidly as she came. This maneuver she repeated several times, to the great amusement of a black-eyed young gentleman lounging in the window of a building opposite. On returning for the third time, Jo gave herself a shake, pulled her hat over her eyes, and walked up the stairs, looking as if she were going to have all her teeth out.\r\n\r\nThere was a dentist\u2019s sign, among others, which adorned the entrance, and after staring a moment at the pair of artificial jaws which slowly opened and shut to draw attention to a fine set of teeth, the young gentleman put on his coat, took his hat, and went down to post himself in the opposite doorway, saying with a smile and a shiver, \u201cIt\u2019s like her to come alone, but if she has a bad time she\u2019ll need someone to help her home.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn ten minutes Jo came running downstairs with a very red face and the general appearance of a person who had just passed through a trying ordeal of some sort. When she saw the young gentleman she looked anything but pleased, and passed him with a nod. But he followed, asking with an air of sympathy, \u201cDid you have a bad time?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot very.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou got through quickly.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, thank goodness!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy did you go alone?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDidn\u2019t want anyone to know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019re the oddest fellow I ever saw. How many did you have out?\u201d\r\n\r\nJo looked at her friend as if she did not understand him, then began to laugh as if mightily amused at something.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere are two which I want to have come out, but I must wait a week.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat are you laughing at? You are up to some mischief, Jo,\u201d said Laurie, looking mystified.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo are you. What were you doing, sir, up in that billiard saloon?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBegging your pardon, ma\u2019am, it wasn\u2019t a billiard saloon, but a gymnasium, and I was taking a lesson in fencing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad of that.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou can teach me, and then when we play Hamlet, you can be Laertes, and we\u2019ll make a fine thing of the fencing scene.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie burst out with a hearty boy\u2019s laugh, which made several passers-by smile in spite of themselves.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll teach you whether we play Hamlet or not. It\u2019s grand fun and will straighten you up capitally. But I don\u2019t believe that was your only reason for saying \u2018I\u2019m glad\u2019 in that decided way, was it now?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I was glad that you were not in the saloon, because I hope you never go to such places. Do you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot often.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish you wouldn\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s no harm, Jo. I have billiards at home, but it\u2019s no fun unless you have good players, so, as I\u2019m fond of it, I come sometimes and have a game with Ned Moffat or some of the other fellows.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, dear, I\u2019m so sorry, for you\u2019ll get to liking it better and better, and will waste time and money, and grow like those dreadful boys. I did hope you\u2019d stay respectable and be a satisfaction to your friends,\u201d said Jo, shaking her head.\r\n\r\n\u201cCan\u2019t a fellow take a little innocent amusement now and then without losing his respectability?\u201d asked Laurie, looking nettled.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat depends upon how and where he takes it. I don\u2019t like Ned and his set, and wish you\u2019d keep out of it. Mother won\u2019t let us have him at our house, though he wants to come. And if you grow like him she won\u2019t be willing to have us frolic together as we do now.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWon\u2019t she?\u201d asked Laurie anxiously.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, she can\u2019t bear fashionable young men, and she\u2019d shut us all up in bandboxes rather than have us associate with them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, she needn\u2019t get out her bandboxes yet. I\u2019m not a fashionable party and don\u2019t mean to be, but I do like harmless larks now and then, don\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, nobody minds them, so lark away, but don\u2019t get wild, will you? Or there will be an end of all our good times.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll be a double distilled saint.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t bear saints. Just be a simple, honest, respectable boy, and we\u2019ll never desert you. I don\u2019t know what I should do if you acted like Mr. King\u2019s son. He had plenty of money, but didn\u2019t know how to spend it, and got tipsy and gambled, and ran away, and forged his father\u2019s name, I believe, and was altogether horrid.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou think I\u2019m likely to do the same? Much obliged.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I don\u2019t\u2014oh, dear, no!\u2014but I hear people talking about money being such a temptation, and I sometimes wish you were poor. I shouldn\u2019t worry then.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you worry about me, Jo?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA little, when you look moody and discontented, as you sometimes do, for you\u2019ve got such a strong will, if you once get started wrong, I\u2019m afraid it would be hard to stop you.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie walked in silence a few minutes, and Jo watched him, wishing she had held her tongue, for his eyes looked angry, though his lips smiled as if at her warnings.\r\n\r\n\u201cAre you going to deliver lectures all the way home?\u201d he asked presently.\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course not. Why?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause if you are, I\u2019ll take a bus. If you\u2019re not, I\u2019d like to walk with you and tell you something very interesting.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI won\u2019t preach any more, and I\u2019d like to hear the news immensely.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cVery well, then, come on. It\u2019s a secret, and if I tell you, you must tell me yours.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI haven\u2019t got any,\u201d began Jo, but stopped suddenly, remembering that she had.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou know you have\u2014you can\u2019t hide anything, so up and \u2019fess, or I won\u2019t tell,\u201d cried Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cIs your secret a nice one?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, isn\u2019t it! All about people you know, and such fun! You ought to hear it, and I\u2019ve been aching to tell it this long time. Come, you begin.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ll not say anything about it at home, will you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a word.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd you won\u2019t tease me in private?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI never tease.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, you do. You get everything you want out of people. I don\u2019t know how you do it, but you are a born wheedler.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you. Fire away.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I\u2019ve left two stories with a newspaperman, and he\u2019s to give his answer next week,\u201d whispered Jo, in her confidant\u2019s ear.\r\n\r\n\u201cHurrah for Miss March, the celebrated American authoress!\u201d cried Laurie, throwing up his hat and catching it again, to the great delight of two ducks, four cats, five hens, and half a dozen Irish children, for they were out of the city now.\r\n\r\n\u201cHush! It won\u2019t come to anything, I dare say, but I couldn\u2019t rest till I had tried, and I said nothing about it because I didn\u2019t want anyone else to be disappointed.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt won\u2019t fail. Why, Jo, your stories are works of Shakespeare compared to half the rubbish that is published every day. Won\u2019t it be fun to see them in print, and shan\u2019t we feel proud of our authoress?\u201d\r\n\r\nJo\u2019s eyes sparkled, for it is always pleasant to be believed in, and a friend\u2019s praise is always sweeter than a dozen newspaper puffs.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere\u2019s your secret? Play fair, Teddy, or I\u2019ll never believe you again,\u201d she said, trying to extinguish the brilliant hopes that blazed up at a word of encouragement.\r\n\r\n\u201cI may get into a scrape for telling, but I didn\u2019t promise not to, so I will, for I never feel easy in my mind till I\u2019ve told you any plummy bit of news I get. I know where Meg\u2019s glove is.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIs that all?\u201d said Jo, looking disappointed, as Laurie nodded and twinkled with a face full of mysterious intelligence.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s quite enough for the present, as you\u2019ll agree when I tell you where it is.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTell, then.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie bent, and whispered three words in Jo\u2019s ear, which produced a comical change. She stood and stared at him for a minute, looking both surprised and displeased, then walked on, saying sharply, \u201cHow do you know?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSaw it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPocket.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll this time?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, isn\u2019t that romantic?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, it\u2019s horrid.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you like it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course I don\u2019t. It\u2019s ridiculous, it won\u2019t be allowed. My patience! What would Meg say?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou are not to tell anyone. Mind that.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t promise.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat was understood, and I trusted you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I won\u2019t for the present, anyway, but I\u2019m disgusted, and wish you hadn\u2019t told me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought you\u2019d be pleased.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAt the idea of anybody coming to take Meg away? No, thank you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ll feel better about it when somebody comes to take you away.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019d like to see anyone try it,\u201d cried Jo fiercely.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo should I!\u201d and Laurie chuckled at the idea.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t think secrets agree with me, I feel rumpled up in my mind since you told me that,\u201d said Jo rather ungratefully.\r\n\r\n\u201cRace down this hill with me, and you\u2019ll be all right,\u201d suggested Laurie.\r\n\r\nNo one was in sight, the smooth road sloped invitingly before her, and finding the temptation irresistible, Jo darted away, soon leaving hat and comb behind her and scattering hairpins as she ran. Laurie reached the goal first and was quite satisfied with the success of his treatment, for his Atlanta came panting up with flying hair, bright eyes, ruddy cheeks, and no signs of dissatisfaction in her face.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish I was a horse, then I could run for miles in this splendid air, and not lose my breath. It was capital, but see what a guy it\u2019s made me. Go, pick up my things, like a cherub, as you are,\u201d said Jo, dropping down under a maple tree, which was carpeting the bank with crimson leaves.\r\n\r\nLaurie leisurely departed to recover the lost property, and Jo bundled up her braids, hoping no one would pass by till she was tidy again. But someone did pass, and who should it be but Meg, looking particularly ladylike in her state and festival suit, for she had been making calls.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat in the world are you doing here?\u201d she asked, regarding her disheveled sister with well-bred surprise.\r\n\r\n\u201cGetting leaves,\u201d meekly answered Jo, sorting the rosy handful she had just swept up.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd hairpins,\u201d added Laurie, throwing half a dozen into Jo\u2019s lap. \u201cThey grow on this road, Meg, so do combs and brown straw hats.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou have been running, Jo. How could you? When will you stop such romping ways?\u201d said Meg reprovingly, as she settled her cuffs and smoothed her hair, with which the wind had taken liberties.\r\n\r\n\u201cNever till I\u2019m stiff and old and have to use a crutch. Don\u2019t try to make me grow up before my time, Meg. It\u2019s hard enough to have you change all of a sudden. Let me be a little girl as long as I can.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs she spoke, Jo bent over the leaves to hide the trembling of her lips, for lately she had felt that Margaret was fast getting to be a woman, and Laurie\u2019s secret made her dread the separation which must surely come some time and now seemed very near. He saw the trouble in her face and drew Meg\u2019s attention from it by asking quickly, \u201cWhere have you been calling, all so fine?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAt the Gardiners\u2019, and Sallie has been telling me all about Belle Moffat\u2019s wedding. It was very splendid, and they have gone to spend the winter in Paris. Just think how delightful that must be!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you envy her, Meg?\u201d said Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m afraid I do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad of it!\u201d muttered Jo, tying on her hat with a jerk.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy?\u201d asked Meg, looking surprised.\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause if you care much about riches, you will never go and marry a poor man,\u201d said Jo, frowning at Laurie, who was mutely warning her to mind what she said.\r\n\r\n\u201cI shall never \u2018go and marry\u2019 anyone,\u201d observed Meg, walking on with great dignity while the others followed, laughing, whispering, skipping stones, and \u2018behaving like children\u2019, as Meg said to herself, though she might have been tempted to join them if she had not had her best dress on.\r\n\r\nFor a week or two, Jo behaved so queerly that her sisters were quite bewildered. She rushed to the door when the postman rang, was rude to Mr. Brooke whenever they met, would sit looking at Meg with a woe-begone face, occasionally jumping up to shake and then kiss her in a very mysterious manner. Laurie and she were always making signs to one another, and talking about \u2018Spread Eagles\u2019 till the girls declared they had both lost their wits. On the second Saturday after Jo got out of the window, Meg, as she sat sewing at her window, was scandalized by the sight of Laurie chasing Jo all over the garden and finally capturing her in Amy\u2019s bower. What went on there, Meg could not see, but shrieks of laughter were heard, followed by the murmur of voices and a great flapping of newspapers.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat shall we do with that girl? She never will behave like a young lady,\u201d sighed Meg, as she watched the race with a disapproving face.\r\n\r\n\u201cI hope she won\u2019t. She is so funny and dear as she is,\u201d said Beth, who had never betrayed that she was a little hurt at Jo\u2019s having secrets with anyone but her.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s very trying, but we never can make her commy la fo,\u201d added Amy, who sat making some new frills for herself, with her curls tied up in a very becoming way, two agreeable things that made her feel unusually elegant and ladylike.\r\n\r\nIn a few minutes Jo bounced in, laid herself on the sofa, and affected to read.\r\n\r\n\u201cHave you anything interesting there?\u201d asked Meg, with condescension.\r\n\r\n\u201cNothing but a story, won\u2019t amount to much, I guess,\u201d returned Jo, carefully keeping the name of the paper out of sight.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019d better read it aloud. That will amuse us and keep you out of mischief,\u201d said Amy in her most grown-up tone.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the name?\u201d asked Beth, wondering why Jo kept her face behind the sheet.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Rival Painters.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat sounds well. Read it,\u201d said Meg.\r\n\r\nWith a loud \u201cHem!\u201d and a long breath, Jo began to read very fast. The girls listened with interest, for the tale was romantic, and somewhat pathetic, as most of the characters died in the end. \u201cI like that about the splendid picture,\u201d was Amy\u2019s approving remark, as Jo paused.\r\n\r\n\u201cI prefer the lovering part. Viola and Angelo are two of our favorite names, isn\u2019t that queer?\u201d said Meg, wiping her eyes, for the lovering part was tragical.\r\n\r\n\u201cWho wrote it?\u201d asked Beth, who had caught a glimpse of Jo\u2019s face.\r\n\r\nThe reader suddenly sat up, cast away the paper, displaying a flushed countenance, and with a funny mixture of solemnity and excitement replied in a loud voice, \u201cYour sister.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou?\u201d cried Meg, dropping her work.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s very good,\u201d said Amy critically.\r\n\r\n\u201cI knew it! I knew it! Oh, my Jo, I am so proud!\u201d and Beth ran to hug her sister and exult over this splendid success.\r\n\r\nDear me, how delighted they all were, to be sure! How Meg wouldn\u2019t believe it till she saw the words. \u201cMiss Josephine March,\u201d actually printed in the paper. How graciously Amy criticized the artistic parts of the story, and offered hints for a sequel, which unfortunately couldn\u2019t be carried out, as the hero and heroine were dead. How Beth got excited, and skipped and sang with joy. How Hannah came in to exclaim, \u201cSakes alive, well I never!\u201d in great astonishment at \u2018that Jo\u2019s doin\u2019s\u2019. How proud Mrs. March was when she knew it. How Jo laughed, with tears in her eyes, as she declared she might as well be a peacock and done with it, and how the \u2018Spread Eagle\u2019 might be said to flap his wings triumphantly over the House of March, as the paper passed from hand to hand.\r\n\r\n\u201cTell us about it.\u201d \u201cWhen did it come?\u201d \u201cHow much did you get for it?\u201d \u201cWhat will Father say?\u201d \u201cWon\u2019t Laurie laugh?\u201d cried the family, all in one breath as they clustered about Jo, for these foolish, affectionate people made a jubilee of every little household joy.\r\n\r\n\u201cStop jabbering, girls, and I\u2019ll tell you everything,\u201d said Jo, wondering if Miss Burney felt any grander over her Evelina than she did over her \u2018Rival Painters\u2019. Having told how she disposed of her tales, Jo added, \u201cAnd when I went to get my answer, the man said he liked them both, but didn\u2019t pay beginners, only let them print in his paper, and noticed the stories. It was good practice, he said, and when the beginners improved, anyone would pay. So I let him have the two stories, and today this was sent to me, and Laurie caught me with it and insisted on seeing it, so I let him. And he said it was good, and I shall write more, and he\u2019s going to get the next paid for, and I am so happy, for in time I may be able to support myself and help the girls.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo\u2019s breath gave out here, and wrapping her head in the paper, she bedewed her little story with a few natural tears, for to be independent and earn the praise of those she loved were the dearest wishes of her heart, and this seemed to be the first step toward that happy end.\r\nCHAPTER FIFTEEN\r\nA TELEGRAM\r\n\r\n\u201cNovember is the most disagreeable month in the whole year,\u201d said Margaret, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s the reason I was born in it,\u201d observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf something very pleasant should happen now, we should think it a delightful month,\u201d said Beth, who took a hopeful view of everything, even November.\r\n\r\n\u201cI dare say, but nothing pleasant ever does happen in this family,\u201d said Meg, who was out of sorts. \u201cWe go grubbing along day after day, without a bit of change, and very little fun. We might as well be in a treadmill.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy patience, how blue we are!\u201d cried Jo. \u201cI don\u2019t much wonder, poor dear, for you see other girls having splendid times, while you grind, grind, year in and year out. Oh, don\u2019t I wish I could manage things for you as I do for my heroines! You\u2019re pretty enough and good enough already, so I\u2019d have some rich relation leave you a fortune unexpectedly. Then you\u2019d dash out as an heiress, scorn everyone who has slighted you, go abroad, and come home my Lady Something in a blaze of splendor and elegance.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPeople don\u2019t have fortunes left them in that style nowadays, men have to work and women marry for money. It\u2019s a dreadfully unjust world,\u201d said Meg bitterly.\r\n\r\n\u201cJo and I are going to make fortunes for you all. Just wait ten years, and see if we don\u2019t,\u201d said Amy, who sat in a corner making mud pies, as Hannah called her little clay models of birds, fruit, and faces.\r\n\r\n\u201cCan\u2019t wait, and I\u2019m afraid I haven\u2019t much faith in ink and dirt, though I\u2019m grateful for your good intentions.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg sighed, and turned to the frostbitten garden again. Jo groaned and leaned both elbows on the table in a despondent attitude, but Amy spatted away energetically, and Beth, who sat at the other window, said, smiling, \u201cTwo pleasant things are going to happen right away. Marmee is coming down the street, and Laurie is tramping through the garden as if he had something nice to tell.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn they both came, Mrs. March with her usual question, \u201cAny letter from Father, girls?\u201d and Laurie to say in his persuasive way, \u201cWon\u2019t some of you come for a drive? I\u2019ve been working away at mathematics till my head is in a muddle, and I\u2019m going to freshen my wits by a brisk turn. It\u2019s a dull day, but the air isn\u2019t bad, and I\u2019m going to take Brooke home, so it will be gay inside, if it isn\u2019t out. Come, Jo, you and Beth will go, won\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course we will.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMuch obliged, but I\u2019m busy.\u201d And Meg whisked out her workbasket, for she had agreed with her mother that it was best, for her at least, not to drive too often with the young gentleman.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe three will be ready in a minute,\u201d cried Amy, running away to wash her hands.\r\n\r\n\u201cCan I do anything for you, Madam Mother?\u201d asked Laurie, leaning over Mrs. March\u2019s chair with the affectionate look and tone he always gave her.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, thank you, except call at the office, if you\u2019ll be so kind, dear. It\u2019s our day for a letter, and the postman hasn\u2019t been. Father is as regular as the sun, but there\u2019s some delay on the way, perhaps.\u201d\r\n\r\nA sharp ring interrupted her, and a minute after Hannah came in with a letter.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s one of them horrid telegraph things, mum,\u201d she said, handling it as if she was afraid it would explode and do some damage.\r\n\r\nAt the word \u2018telegraph\u2019, Mrs. March snatched it, read the two lines it contained, and dropped back into her chair as white as if the little paper had sent a bullet to her heart. Laurie dashed downstairs for water, while Meg and Hannah supported her, and Jo read aloud, in a frightened voice...\r\n\r\nMrs. March:\r\nYour husband is very ill. Come at once.\r\nS. HALE\r\nBlank Hospital, Washington.\r\n\r\nHow still the room was as they listened breathlessly, how strangely the day darkened outside, and how suddenly the whole world seemed to change, as the girls gathered about their mother, feeling as if all the happiness and support of their lives was about to be taken from them.\r\n\r\nMrs. March was herself again directly, read the message over, and stretched out her arms to her daughters, saying, in a tone they never forgot, \u201cI shall go at once, but it may be too late. Oh, children, children, help me to bear it!\u201d\r\n\r\nFor several minutes there was nothing but the sound of sobbing in the room, mingled with broken words of comfort, tender assurances of help, and hopeful whispers that died away in tears. Poor Hannah was the first to recover, and with unconscious wisdom she set all the rest a good example, for with her, work was panacea for most afflictions.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Lord keep the dear man! I won\u2019t waste no time a-cryin\u2019, but git your things ready right away, mum,\u201d she said heartily, as she wiped her face on her apron, gave her mistress a warm shake of the hand with her own hard one, and went away to work like three women in one.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe\u2019s right, there\u2019s no time for tears now. Be calm, girls, and let me think.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey tried to be calm, poor things, as their mother sat up, looking pale but steady, and put away her grief to think and plan for them.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere\u2019s Laurie?\u201d she asked presently, when she had collected her thoughts and decided on the first duties to be done.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere, ma\u2019am. Oh, let me do something!\u201d cried the boy, hurrying from the next room whither he had withdrawn, feeling that their first sorrow was too sacred for even his friendly eyes to see.\r\n\r\n\u201cSend a telegram saying I will come at once. The next train goes early in the morning. I\u2019ll take that.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat else? The horses are ready. I can go anywhere, do anything,\u201d he said, looking ready to fly to the ends of the earth.\r\n\r\n\u201cLeave a note at Aunt March\u2019s. Jo, give me that pen and paper.\u201d\r\n\r\nTearing off the blank side of one of her newly copied pages, Jo drew the table before her mother, well knowing that money for the long, sad journey must be borrowed, and feeling as if she could do anything to add a little to the sum for her father.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow go, dear, but don\u2019t kill yourself driving at a desperate pace. There is no need of that.\u201d\r\n\r\nMrs. March\u2019s warning was evidently thrown away, for five minutes later Laurie tore by the window on his own fleet horse, riding as if for his life.\r\n\r\n\u201cJo, run to the rooms, and tell Mrs. King that I can\u2019t come. On the way get these things. I\u2019ll put them down, they\u2019ll be needed and I must go prepared for nursing. Hospital stores are not always good. Beth, go and ask Mr. Laurence for a couple of bottles of old wine. I\u2019m not too proud to beg for Father. He shall have the best of everything. Amy, tell Hannah to get down the black trunk, and Meg, come and help me find my things, for I\u2019m half bewildered.\u201d\r\n\r\nWriting, thinking, and directing all at once might well bewilder the poor lady, and Meg begged her to sit quietly in her room for a little while, and let them work. Everyone scattered like leaves before a gust of wind, and the quiet, happy household was broken up as suddenly as if the paper had been an evil spell.\r\n\r\nMr. Laurence came hurrying back with Beth, bringing every comfort the kind old gentleman could think of for the invalid, and friendliest promises of protection for the girls during the mother\u2019s absence, which comforted her very much. There was nothing he didn\u2019t offer, from his own dressing gown to himself as escort. But the last was impossible. Mrs. March would not hear of the old gentleman\u2019s undertaking the long journey, yet an expression of relief was visible when he spoke of it, for anxiety ill fits one for traveling. He saw the look, knit his heavy eyebrows, rubbed his hands, and marched abruptly away, saying he\u2019d be back directly. No one had time to think of him again till, as Meg ran through the entry, with a pair of rubbers in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, she came suddenly upon Mr. Brooke.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m very sorry to hear of this, Miss March,\u201d he said, in the kind, quiet tone which sounded very pleasantly to her perturbed spirit. \u201cI came to offer myself as escort to your mother. Mr. Laurence has commissions for me in Washington, and it will give me real satisfaction to be of service to her there.\u201d\r\n\r\nDown dropped the rubbers, and the tea was very near following, as Meg put out her hand, with a face so full of gratitude that Mr. Brooke would have felt repaid for a much greater sacrifice than the trifling one of time and comfort which he was about to take.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow kind you all are! Mother will accept, I\u2019m sure, and it will be such a relief to know that she has someone to take care of her. Thank you very, very much!\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg spoke earnestly, and forgot herself entirely till something in the brown eyes looking down at her made her remember the cooling tea, and lead the way into the parlor, saying she would call her mother.\r\n\r\nEverything was arranged by the time Laurie returned with a note from Aunt March, enclosing the desired sum, and a few lines repeating what she had often said before, that she had always told them it was absurd for March to go into the army, always predicted that no good would come of it, and she hoped they would take her advice the next time. Mrs. March put the note in the fire, the money in her purse, and went on with her preparations, with her lips folded tightly in a way which Jo would have understood if she had been there.\r\n\r\nThe short afternoon wore away. All other errands were done, and Meg and her mother busy at some necessary needlework, while Beth and Amy got tea, and Hannah finished her ironing with what she called a \u2018slap and a bang\u2019, but still Jo did not come. They began to get anxious, and Laurie went off to find her, for no one knew what freak Jo might take into her head. He missed her, however, and she came walking in with a very queer expression of countenance, for there was a mixture of fun and fear, satisfaction and regret in it, which puzzled the family as much as did the roll of bills she laid before her mother, saying with a little choke in her voice, \u201cThat\u2019s my contribution toward making Father comfortable and bringing him home!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy dear, where did you get it? Twenty-five dollars! Jo, I hope you haven\u2019t done anything rash?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, it\u2019s mine honestly. I didn\u2019t beg, borrow, or steal it. I earned it, and I don\u2019t think you\u2019ll blame me, for I only sold what was my own.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs she spoke, Jo took off her bonnet, and a general outcry arose, for all her abundant hair was cut short.\r\n\r\n\u201cYour hair! Your beautiful hair!\u201d \u201cOh, Jo, how could you? Your one beauty.\u201d \u201cMy dear girl, there was no need of this.\u201d \u201cShe doesn\u2019t look like my Jo any more, but I love her dearly for it!\u201d\r\n\r\nAs everyone exclaimed, and Beth hugged the cropped head tenderly, Jo assumed an indifferent air, which did not deceive anyone a particle, and said, rumpling up the brown bush and trying to look as if she liked it, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t affect the fate of the nation, so don\u2019t wail, Beth. It will be good for my vanity, I was getting too proud of my wig. It will do my brains good to have that mop taken off. My head feels deliciously light and cool, and the barber said I could soon have a curly crop, which will be boyish, becoming, and easy to keep in order. I\u2019m satisfied, so please take the money and let\u2019s have supper.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTell me all about it, Jo. I am not quite satisfied, but I can\u2019t blame you, for I know how willingly you sacrificed your vanity, as you call it, to your love. But, my dear, it was not necessary, and I\u2019m afraid you will regret it one of these days,\u201d said Mrs. March.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I won\u2019t!\u201d returned Jo stoutly, feeling much relieved that her prank was not entirely condemned.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat made you do it?\u201d asked Amy, who would as soon have thought of cutting off her head as her pretty hair.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I was wild to do something for Father,\u201d replied Jo, as they gathered about the table, for healthy young people can eat even in the midst of trouble. \u201cI hate to borrow as much as Mother does, and I knew Aunt March would croak, she always does, if you ask for a ninepence. Meg gave all her quarterly salary toward the rent, and I only got some clothes with mine, so I felt wicked, and was bound to have some money, if I sold the nose off my face to get it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou needn\u2019t feel wicked, my child! You had no winter things and got the simplest with your own hard earnings,\u201d said Mrs. March with a look that warmed Jo\u2019s heart.\r\n\r\n\u201cI hadn\u2019t the least idea of selling my hair at first, but as I went along I kept thinking what I could do, and feeling as if I\u2019d like to dive into some of the rich stores and help myself. In a barber\u2019s window I saw tails of hair with the prices marked, and one black tail, not so thick as mine, was forty dollars. It came to me all of a sudden that I had one thing to make money out of, and without stopping to think, I walked in, asked if they bought hair, and what they would give for mine.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t see how you dared to do it,\u201d said Beth in a tone of awe.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, he was a little man who looked as if he merely lived to oil his hair. He rather stared at first, as if he wasn\u2019t used to having girls bounce into his shop and ask him to buy their hair. He said he didn\u2019t care about mine, it wasn\u2019t the fashionable color, and he never paid much for it in the first place. The work put into it made it dear, and so on. It was getting late, and I was afraid if it wasn\u2019t done right away that I shouldn\u2019t have it done at all, and you know when I start to do a thing, I hate to give it up. So I begged him to take it, and told him why I was in such a hurry. It was silly, I dare say, but it changed his mind, for I got rather excited, and told the story in my topsy-turvy way, and his wife heard, and said so kindly, \u2018Take it, Thomas, and oblige the young lady. I\u2019d do as much for our Jimmy any day if I had a spire of hair worth selling.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho was Jimmy?\u201d asked Amy, who liked to have things explained as they went along.\r\n\r\n\u201cHer son, she said, who was in the army. How friendly such things make strangers feel, don\u2019t they? She talked away all the time the man clipped, and diverted my mind nicely.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDidn\u2019t you feel dreadfully when the first cut came?\u201d asked Meg, with a shiver.\r\n\r\n\u201cI took a last look at my hair while the man got his things, and that was the end of it. I never snivel over trifles like that. I will confess, though, I felt queer when I saw the dear old hair laid out on the table, and felt only the short rough ends of my head. It almost seemed as if I\u2019d an arm or leg off. The woman saw me look at it, and picked out a long lock for me to keep. I\u2019ll give it to you, Marmee, just to remember past glories by, for a crop is so comfortable I don\u2019t think I shall ever have a mane again.\u201d\r\n\r\nMrs. March folded the wavy chestnut lock, and laid it away with a short gray one in her desk. She only said, \u201cThank you, deary,\u201d but something in her face made the girls change the subject, and talk as cheerfully as they could about Mr. Brooke\u2019s kindness, the prospect of a fine day tomorrow, and the happy times they would have when Father came home to be nursed.\r\n\r\nNo one wanted to go to bed when at ten o\u2019clock Mrs. March put by the last finished job, and said, \u201cCome girls.\u201d Beth went to the piano and played the father\u2019s favorite hymn. All began bravely, but broke down one by one till Beth was left alone, singing with all her heart, for to her music was always a sweet consoler.\r\n\r\n\u201cGo to bed and don\u2019t talk, for we must be up early and shall need all the sleep we can get. Good night, my darlings,\u201d said Mrs. March, as the hymn ended, for no one cared to try another.\r\n\r\nThey kissed her quietly, and went to bed as silently as if the dear invalid lay in the next room. Beth and Amy soon fell asleep in spite of the great trouble, but Meg lay awake, thinking the most serious thoughts she had ever known in her short life. Jo lay motionless, and her sister fancied that she was asleep, till a stifled sob made her exclaim, as she touched a wet cheek...\r\n\r\n\u201cJo, dear, what is it? Are you crying about father?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, not now.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy... My hair!\u201d burst out poor Jo, trying vainly to smother her emotion in the pillow.\r\n\r\nIt did not seem at all comical to Meg, who kissed and caressed the afflicted heroine in the tenderest manner.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m not sorry,\u201d protested Jo, with a choke. \u201cI\u2019d do it again tomorrow, if I could. It\u2019s only the vain part of me that goes and cries in this silly way. Don\u2019t tell anyone, it\u2019s all over now. I thought you were asleep, so I just made a little private moan for my one beauty. How came you to be awake?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t sleep, I\u2019m so anxious,\u201d said Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cThink about something pleasant, and you\u2019ll soon drop off.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI tried it, but felt wider awake than ever.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat did you think of?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHandsome faces\u2014eyes particularly,\u201d answered Meg, smiling to herself in the dark.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat color do you like best?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBrown, that is, sometimes. Blue are lovely.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo laughed, and Meg sharply ordered her not to talk, then amiably promised to make her hair curl, and fell asleep to dream of living in her castle in the air.\r\n\r\nThe clocks were striking midnight and the rooms were very still as a figure glided quietly from bed to bed, smoothing a coverlet here, settling a pillow there, and pausing to look long and tenderly at each unconscious face, to kiss each with lips that mutely blessed, and to pray the fervent prayers which only mothers utter. As she lifted the curtain to look out into the dreary night, the moon broke suddenly from behind the clouds and shone upon her like a bright, benignant face, which seemed to whisper in the silence, \u201cBe comforted, dear soul! There is always light behind the clouds.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER SIXTEEN\r\nLETTERS\r\n\r\nIn the cold gray dawn the sisters lit their lamp and read their chapter with an earnestness never felt before. For now the shadow of a real trouble had come, the little books were full of help and comfort, and as they dressed, they agreed to say goodbye cheerfully and hopefully, and send their mother on her anxious journey unsaddened by tears or complaints from them. Everything seemed very strange when they went down, so dim and still outside, so full of light and bustle within. Breakfast at that early hour seemed odd, and even Hannah\u2019s familiar face looked unnatural as she flew about her kitchen with her nightcap on. The big trunk stood ready in the hall, Mother\u2019s cloak and bonnet lay on the sofa, and Mother herself sat trying to eat, but looking so pale and worn with sleeplessness and anxiety that the girls found it very hard to keep their resolution. Meg\u2019s eyes kept filling in spite of herself, Jo was obliged to hide her face in the kitchen roller more than once, and the little girls wore a grave, troubled expression, as if sorrow was a new experience to them.\r\n\r\nNobody talked much, but as the time drew very near and they sat waiting for the carriage, Mrs. March said to the girls, who were all busied about her, one folding her shawl, another smoothing out the strings of her bonnet, a third putting on her overshoes, and a fourth fastening up her travelling bag...\r\n\r\n\u201cChildren, I leave you to Hannah\u2019s care and Mr. Laurence\u2019s protection. Hannah is faithfulness itself, and our good neighbor will guard you as if you were his own. I have no fears for you, yet I am anxious that you should take this trouble rightly. Don\u2019t grieve and fret when I am gone, or think that you can be idle and comfort yourselves by being idle and trying to forget. Go on with your work as usual, for work is a blessed solace. Hope and keep busy, and whatever happens, remember that you never can be fatherless.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Mother.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMeg, dear, be prudent, watch over your sisters, consult Hannah, and in any perplexity, go to Mr. Laurence. Be patient, Jo, don\u2019t get despondent or do rash things, write to me often, and be my brave girl, ready to help and cheer all. Beth, comfort yourself with your music, and be faithful to the little home duties, and you, Amy, help all you can, be obedient, and keep happy safe at home.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe will, Mother! We will!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe rattle of an approaching carriage made them all start and listen. That was the hard minute, but the girls stood it well. No one cried, no one ran away or uttered a lamentation, though their hearts were very heavy as they sent loving messages to Father, remembering, as they spoke that it might be too late to deliver them. They kissed their mother quietly, clung about her tenderly, and tried to wave their hands cheerfully when she drove away.\r\n\r\nLaurie and his grandfather came over to see her off, and Mr. Brooke looked so strong and sensible and kind that the girls christened him \u2018Mr. Greatheart\u2019 on the spot.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood-by, my darlings! God bless and keep us all!\u201d whispered Mrs. March, as she kissed one dear little face after the other, and hurried into the carriage.\r\n\r\nAs she rolled away, the sun came out, and looking back, she saw it shining on the group at the gate like a good omen. They saw it also, and smiled and waved their hands, and the last thing she beheld as she turned the corner was the four bright faces, and behind them like a bodyguard, old Mr. Laurence, faithful Hannah, and devoted Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow kind everyone is to us!\u201d she said, turning to find fresh proof of it in the respectful sympathy of the young man\u2019s face.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t see how they can help it,\u201d returned Mr. Brooke, laughing so infectiously that Mrs. March could not help smiling. And so the journey began with the good omens of sunshine, smiles, and cheerful words.\r\n\r\n\u201cI feel as if there had been an earthquake,\u201d said Jo, as their neighbors went home to breakfast, leaving them to rest and refresh themselves.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt seems as if half the house was gone,\u201d added Meg forlornly.\r\n\r\nBeth opened her lips to say something, but could only point to the pile of nicely mended hose which lay on Mother\u2019s table, showing that even in her last hurried moments she had thought and worked for them. It was a little thing, but it went straight to their hearts, and in spite of their brave resolutions, they all broke down and cried bitterly.\r\n\r\nHannah wisely allowed them to relieve their feelings, and when the shower showed signs of clearing up, she came to the rescue, armed with a coffeepot.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, my dear young ladies, remember what your ma said, and don\u2019t fret. Come and have a cup of coffee all round, and then let\u2019s fall to work and be a credit to the family.\u201d\r\n\r\nCoffee was a treat, and Hannah showed great tact in making it that morning. No one could resist her persuasive nods, or the fragrant invitation issuing from the nose of the coffee pot. They drew up to the table, exchanged their handkerchiefs for napkins, and in ten minutes were all right again.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Hope and keep busy\u2019, that\u2019s the motto for us, so let\u2019s see who will remember it best. I shall go to Aunt March, as usual. Oh, won\u2019t she lecture though!\u201d said Jo, as she sipped with returning spirit.\r\n\r\n\u201cI shall go to my Kings, though I\u2019d much rather stay at home and attend to things here,\u201d said Meg, wishing she hadn\u2019t made her eyes so red.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo need of that. Beth and I can keep house perfectly well,\u201d put in Amy, with an important air.\r\n\r\n\u201cHannah will tell us what to do, and we\u2019ll have everything nice when you come home,\u201d added Beth, getting out her mop and dish tub without delay.\r\n\r\n\u201cI think anxiety is very interesting,\u201d observed Amy, eating sugar pensively.\r\n\r\nThe girls couldn\u2019t help laughing, and felt better for it, though Meg shook her head at the young lady who could find consolation in a sugar bowl.\r\n\r\nThe sight of the turnovers made Jo sober again; and when the two went out to their daily tasks, they looked sorrowfully back at the window where they were accustomed to see their mother\u2019s face. It was gone, but Beth had remembered the little household ceremony, and there she was, nodding away at them like a rosyfaced mandarin.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s so like my Beth!\u201d said Jo, waving her hat, with a grateful face. \u201cGoodbye, Meggy, I hope the Kings won\u2019t strain today. Don\u2019t fret about Father, dear,\u201d she added, as they parted.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd I hope Aunt March won\u2019t croak. Your hair is becoming, and it looks very boyish and nice,\u201d returned Meg, trying not to smile at the curly head, which looked comically small on her tall sister\u2019s shoulders.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s my only comfort.\u201d And, touching her hat a la Laurie, away went Jo, feeling like a shorn sheep on a wintry day.\r\n\r\nNews from their father comforted the girls very much, for though dangerously ill, the presence of the best and tenderest of nurses had already done him good. Mr. Brooke sent a bulletin every day, and as the head of the family, Meg insisted on reading the dispatches, which grew more cheerful as the week passed. At first, everyone was eager to write, and plump envelopes were carefully poked into the letter box by one or other of the sisters, who felt rather important with their Washington correspondence. As one of these packets contained characteristic notes from the party, we will rob an imaginary mail, and read them.\r\n\r\nMy dearest Mother:\r\n\r\nIt is impossible to tell you how happy your last letter made us, for the news was so good we couldn\u2019t help laughing and crying over it. How very kind Mr. Brooke is, and how fortunate that Mr. Laurence\u2019s business detains him near you so long, since he is so useful to you and Father. The girls are all as good as gold. Jo helps me with the sewing, and insists on doing all sorts of hard jobs. I should be afraid she might overdo, if I didn\u2019t know her \u2018moral fit\u2019 wouldn\u2019t last long. Beth is as regular about her tasks as a clock, and never forgets what you told her. She grieves about Father, and looks sober except when she is at her little piano. Amy minds me nicely, and I take great care of her. She does her own hair, and I am teaching her to make buttonholes and mend her stockings. She tries very hard, and I know you will be pleased with her improvement when you come. Mr. Laurence watches over us like a motherly old hen, as Jo says, and Laurie is very kind and neighborly. He and Jo keep us merry, for we get pretty blue sometimes, and feel like orphans, with you so far away. Hannah is a perfect saint. She does not scold at all, and always calls me Miss Margaret, which is quite proper, you know, and treats me with respect. We are all well and busy, but we long, day and night, to have you back. Give my dearest love to Father, and believe me, ever your own...\r\n\r\nMEG\r\n\r\nThis note, prettily written on scented paper, was a great contrast to the next, which was scribbled on a big sheet of thin foreign paper, ornamented with blots and all manner of flourishes and curly-tailed letters.\r\n\r\nMy precious Marmee:\r\n\r\nThree cheers for dear Father! Brooke was a trump to telegraph right off, and let us know the minute he was better. I rushed up garret when the letter came, and tried to thank God for being so good to us, but I could only cry, and say, \u201cI\u2019m glad! I\u2019m glad!\u201d Didn\u2019t that do as well as a regular prayer? For I felt a great many in my heart. We have such funny times, and now I can enjoy them, for everyone is so desperately good, it\u2019s like living in a nest of turtledoves. You\u2019d laugh to see Meg head the table and try to be motherish. She gets prettier every day, and I\u2019m in love with her sometimes. The children are regular archangels, and I\u2014well, I\u2019m Jo, and never shall be anything else. Oh, I must tell you that I came near having a quarrel with Laurie. I freed my mind about a silly little thing, and he was offended. I was right, but didn\u2019t speak as I ought, and he marched home, saying he wouldn\u2019t come again till I begged pardon. I declared I wouldn\u2019t and got mad. It lasted all day. I felt bad and wanted you very much. Laurie and I are both so proud, it\u2019s hard to beg pardon. But I thought he\u2019d come to it, for I was in the right. He didn\u2019t come, and just at night I remembered what you said when Amy fell into the river. I read my little book, felt better, resolved not to let the sun set on my anger, and ran over to tell Laurie I was sorry. I met him at the gate, coming for the same thing. We both laughed, begged each other\u2019s pardon, and felt all good and comfortable again.\r\n\r\nI made a \u2018pome\u2019 yesterday, when I was helping Hannah wash, and as Father likes my silly little things, I put it in to amuse him. Give him my lovingest hug that ever was, and kiss yourself a dozen times for your...\r\n\r\nTOPSY-TURVY JO\r\n\r\nA SONG FROM THE SUDS\r\n\r\nQueen of my tub, I merrily sing,\r\nWhile the white foam rises high,\r\nAnd sturdily wash and rinse and wring,\r\nAnd fasten the clothes to dry.\r\nThen out in the free fresh air they swing,\r\nUnder the sunny sky.\r\n\r\nI wish we could wash from our hearts and souls\r\nThe stains of the week away,\r\nAnd let water and air by their magic make\r\nOurselves as pure as they.\r\nThen on the earth there would be indeed,\r\nA glorious washing day!\r\n\r\nAlong the path of a useful life,\r\nWill heart\u2019s-ease ever bloom.\r\nThe busy mind has no time to think\r\nOf sorrow or care or gloom.\r\nAnd anxious thoughts may be swept away,\r\nAs we bravely wield a broom.\r\n\r\nI am glad a task to me is given,\r\nTo labor at day by day,\r\nFor it brings me health and strength and hope,\r\nAnd I cheerfully learn to say,\r\n\u201cHead, you may think, Heart, you may feel,\r\nBut, Hand, you shall work alway!\u201d\r\n\r\nDear Mother,\r\n\r\nThere is only room for me to send my love, and some pressed pansies from the root I have been keeping safe in the house for Father to see. I read every morning, try to be good all day, and sing myself to sleep with Father\u2019s tune. I can\u2019t sing \u2018LAND OF THE LEAL\u2019 now, it makes me cry. Everyone is very kind, and we are as happy as we can be without you. Amy wants the rest of the page, so I must stop. I didn\u2019t forget to cover the holders, and I wind the clock and air the rooms every day.\r\n\r\nKiss dear Father on the cheek he calls mine. Oh, do come soon to your loving...\r\n\r\nLITTLE BETH\r\n\r\nMa Chere Mamma,\r\n\r\nWe are all well I do my lessons always and never corroberate the girls\u2014Meg says I mean contradick so I put in both words and you can take the properest. Meg is a great comfort to me and lets me have jelly every night at tea its so good for me Jo says because it keeps me sweet tempered. Laurie is not as respeckful as he ought to be now I am almost in my teens, he calls me Chick and hurts my feelings by talking French to me very fast when I say Merci or Bon jour as Hattie King does. The sleeves of my blue dress were all worn out, and Meg put in new ones, but the full front came wrong and they are more blue than the dress. I felt bad but did not fret I bear my troubles well but I do wish Hannah would put more starch in my aprons and have buckwheats every day. Can\u2019t she? Didn\u2019t I make that interrigation point nice? Meg says my punchtuation and spelling are disgraceful and I am mortyfied but dear me I have so many things to do, I can\u2019t stop. Adieu, I send heaps of love to Papa. Your affectionate daughter...\r\n\r\nAMY CURTIS MARCH\r\n\r\nDear Mis March,\r\n\r\nI jes drop a line to say we git on fust rate. The girls is clever and fly round right smart. Miss Meg is going to make a proper good housekeeper. She hes the liking for it, and gits the hang of things surprisin quick. Jo doos beat all for goin ahead, but she don\u2019t stop to cal\u2019k\u2019late fust, and you never know where she\u2019s like to bring up. She done out a tub of clothes on Monday, but she starched \u2019em afore they was wrenched, and blued a pink calico dress till I thought I should a died a laughin. Beth is the best of little creeters, and a sight of help to me, bein so forehanded and dependable. She tries to learn everything, and really goes to market beyond her years, likewise keeps accounts, with my help, quite wonderful. We have got on very economical so fur. I don\u2019t let the girls hev coffee only once a week, accordin to your wish, and keep em on plain wholesome vittles. Amy does well without frettin, wearin her best clothes and eatin sweet stuff. Mr. Laurie is as full of didoes as usual, and turns the house upside down frequent, but he heartens the girls, so I let em hev full swing. The old gentleman sends heaps of things, and is rather wearin, but means wal, and it aint my place to say nothin. My bread is riz, so no more at this time. I send my duty to Mr. March, and hope he\u2019s seen the last of his Pewmonia.\r\n\r\nYours respectful,\r\nHannah Mullet\r\n\r\nHead Nurse of Ward No. 2,\r\n\r\nAll serene on the Rappahannock, troops in fine condition, commisary department well conducted, the Home Guard under Colonel Teddy always on duty, Commander in Chief General Laurence reviews the army daily, Quartermaster Mullet keeps order in camp, and Major Lion does picket duty at night. A salute of twenty-four guns was fired on receipt of good news from Washington, and a dress parade took place at headquarters. Commander in chief sends best wishes, in which he is heartily joined by...\r\n\r\nCOLONEL TEDDY\r\n\r\nDear Madam:\r\n\r\nThe little girls are all well. Beth and my boy report daily. Hannah is a model servant, and guards pretty Meg like a dragon. Glad the fine weather holds. Pray make Brooke useful, and draw on me for funds if expenses exceed your estimate. Don\u2019t let your husband want anything. Thank God he is mending.\r\n\r\nYour sincere friend and servant, JAMES LAURENCE\r\nCHAPTER SEVENTEEN\r\nLITTLE FAITHFUL\r\n\r\nFor a week the amount of virtue in the old house would have supplied the neighborhood. It was really amazing, for everyone seemed in a heavenly frame of mind, and self-denial was all the fashion. Relieved of their first anxiety about their father, the girls insensibly relaxed their praiseworthy efforts a little, and began to fall back into old ways. They did not forget their motto, but hoping and keeping busy seemed to grow easier, and after such tremendous exertions, they felt that Endeavor deserved a holiday, and gave it a good many.\r\n\r\nJo caught a bad cold through neglect to cover the shorn head enough, and was ordered to stay at home till she was better, for Aunt March didn\u2019t like to hear people read with colds in their heads. Jo liked this, and after an energetic rummage from garret to cellar, subsided on the sofa to nurse her cold with arsenicum and books. Amy found that housework and art did not go well together, and returned to her mud pies. Meg went daily to her pupils, and sewed, or thought she did, at home, but much time was spent in writing long letters to her mother, or reading the Washington dispatches over and over. Beth kept on, with only slight relapses into idleness or grieving.\r\n\r\nAll the little duties were faithfully done each day, and many of her sisters\u2019 also, for they were forgetful, and the house seemed like a clock whose pendulum was gone a-visiting. When her heart got heavy with longings for Mother or fears for Father, she went away into a certain closet, hid her face in the folds of a dear old gown, and made her little moan and prayed her little prayer quietly by herself. Nobody knew what cheered her up after a sober fit, but everyone felt how sweet and helpful Beth was, and fell into a way of going to her for comfort or advice in their small affairs.\r\n\r\nAll were unconscious that this experience was a test of character, and when the first excitement was over, felt that they had done well and deserved praise. So they did, but their mistake was in ceasing to do well, and they learned this lesson through much anxiety and regret.\r\n\r\n\u201cMeg, I wish you\u2019d go and see the Hummels. You know Mother told us not to forget them.\u201d said Beth, ten days after Mrs. March\u2019s departure.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m too tired to go this afternoon,\u201d replied Meg, rocking comfortably as she sewed.\r\n\r\n\u201cCan\u2019t you, Jo?\u201d asked Beth.\r\n\r\n\u201cToo stormy for me with my cold.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought it was almost well.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s well enough for me to go out with Laurie, but not well enough to go to the Hummels\u2019,\u201d said Jo, laughing, but looking a little ashamed of her inconsistency.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy don\u2019t you go yourself?\u201d asked Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cI have been every day, but the baby is sick, and I don\u2019t know what to do for it. Mrs. Hummel goes away to work, and Lottchen takes care of it. But it gets sicker and sicker, and I think you or Hannah ought to go.\u201d\r\n\r\nBeth spoke earnestly, and Meg promised she would go tomorrow.\r\n\r\n\u201cAsk Hannah for some nice little mess, and take it round, Beth, the air will do you good,\u201d said Jo, adding apologetically, \u201cI\u2019d go but I want to finish my writing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy head aches and I\u2019m tired, so I thought maybe some of you would go,\u201d said Beth.\r\n\r\n\u201cAmy will be in presently, and she will run down for us,\u201d suggested Meg.\r\n\r\nSo Beth lay down on the sofa, the others returned to their work, and the Hummels were forgotten. An hour passed. Amy did not come, Meg went to her room to try on a new dress, Jo was absorbed in her story, and Hannah was sound asleep before the kitchen fire, when Beth quietly put on her hood, filled her basket with odds and ends for the poor children, and went out into the chilly air with a heavy head and a grieved look in her patient eyes. It was late when she came back, and no one saw her creep upstairs and shut herself into her mother\u2019s room. Half an hour after, Jo went to \u2018Mother\u2019s closet\u2019 for something, and there found little Beth sitting on the medicine chest, looking very grave, with red eyes and a camphor bottle in her hand.\r\n\r\n\u201cChristopher Columbus! What\u2019s the matter?\u201d cried Jo, as Beth put out her hand as if to warn her off, and asked quickly. . .\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ve had the scarlet fever, haven\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYears ago, when Meg did. Why?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen I\u2019ll tell you. Oh, Jo, the baby\u2019s dead!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat baby?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMrs. Hummel\u2019s. It died in my lap before she got home,\u201d cried Beth with a sob.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy poor dear, how dreadful for you! I ought to have gone,\u201d said Jo, taking her sister in her arms as she sat down in her mother\u2019s big chair, with a remorseful face.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt wasn\u2019t dreadful, Jo, only so sad! I saw in a minute it was sicker, but Lottchen said her mother had gone for a doctor, so I took Baby and let Lotty rest. It seemed asleep, but all of a sudden if gave a little cry and trembled, and then lay very still. I tried to warm its feet, and Lotty gave it some milk, but it didn\u2019t stir, and I knew it was dead.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t cry, dear! What did you do?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI just sat and held it softly till Mrs. Hummel came with the doctor. He said it was dead, and looked at Heinrich and Minna, who have sore throats. \u2018Scarlet fever, ma\u2019am. Ought to have called me before,\u2019 he said crossly. Mrs. Hummel told him she was poor, and had tried to cure baby herself, but now it was too late, and she could only ask him to help the others and trust to charity for his pay. He smiled then, and was kinder, but it was very sad, and I cried with them till he turned round all of a sudden, and told me to go home and take belladonna right away, or I\u2019d have the fever.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, you won\u2019t!\u201d cried Jo, hugging her close, with a frightened look. \u201cOh, Beth, if you should be sick I never could forgive myself! What shall we do?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t be frightened, I guess I shan\u2019t have it badly. I looked in Mother\u2019s book, and saw that it begins with headache, sore throat, and queer feelings like mine, so I did take some belladonna, and I feel better,\u201d said Beth, laying her cold hands on her hot forehead and trying to look well.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf Mother was only at home!\u201d exclaimed Jo, seizing the book, and feeling that Washington was an immense way off. She read a page, looked at Beth, felt her head, peeped into her throat, and then said gravely, \u201cYou\u2019ve been over the baby every day for more than a week, and among the others who are going to have it, so I\u2019m afraid you are going to have it, Beth. I\u2019ll call Hannah, she knows all about sickness.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t let Amy come. She never had it, and I should hate to give it to her. Can\u2019t you and Meg have it over again?\u201d asked Beth, anxiously.\r\n\r\n\u201cI guess not. Don\u2019t care if I do. Serve me right, selfish pig, to let you go, and stay writing rubbish myself!\u201d muttered Jo, as she went to consult Hannah.\r\n\r\nThe good soul was wide awake in a minute, and took the lead at once, assuring that there was no need to worry; every one had scarlet fever, and if rightly treated, nobody died, all of which Jo believed, and felt much relieved as they went up to call Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow I\u2019ll tell you what we\u2019ll do,\u201d said Hannah, when she had examined and questioned Beth, \u201cwe will have Dr. Bangs, just to take a look at you, dear, and see that we start right. Then we\u2019ll send Amy off to Aunt March\u2019s for a spell, to keep her out of harm\u2019s way, and one of you girls can stay at home and amuse Beth for a day or two.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI shall stay, of course, I\u2019m oldest,\u201d began Meg, looking anxious and self-reproachful.\r\n\r\n\u201cI shall, because it\u2019s my fault she is sick. I told Mother I\u2019d do the errands, and I haven\u2019t,\u201d said Jo decidedly.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhich will you have, Beth? There ain\u2019t no need of but one,\u201d aid Hannah.\r\n\r\n\u201cJo, please.\u201d And Beth leaned her head against her sister with a contented look, which effectually settled that point.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll go and tell Amy,\u201d said Meg, feeling a little hurt, yet rather relieved on the whole, for she did not like nursing, and Jo did.\r\n\r\nAmy rebelled outright, and passionately declared that she had rather have the fever than go to Aunt March. Meg reasoned, pleaded, and commanded, all in vain. Amy protested that she would not go, and Meg left her in despair to ask Hannah what should be done. Before she came back, Laurie walked into the parlor to find Amy sobbing, with her head in the sofa cushions. She told her story, expecting to be consoled, but Laurie only put his hands in his pockets and walked about the room, whistling softly, as he knit his brows in deep thought. Presently he sat down beside her, and said, in his most wheedlesome tone, \u201cNow be a sensible little woman, and do as they say. No, don\u2019t cry, but hear what a jolly plan I\u2019ve got. You go to Aunt March\u2019s, and I\u2019ll come and take you out every day, driving or walking, and we\u2019ll have capital times. Won\u2019t that be better than moping here?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t wish to be sent off as if I was in the way,\u201d began Amy, in an injured voice.\r\n\r\n\u201cBless your heart, child, it\u2019s to keep you well. You don\u2019t want to be sick, do you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I\u2019m sure I don\u2019t, but I dare say I shall be, for I\u2019ve been with Beth all the time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s the very reason you ought to go away at once, so that you may escape it. Change of air and care will keep you well, I dare say, or if it does not entirely, you will have the fever more lightly. I advise you to be off as soon as you can, for scarlet fever is no joke, miss.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut it\u2019s dull at Aunt March\u2019s, and she is so cross,\u201d said Amy, looking rather frightened.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt won\u2019t be dull with me popping in every day to tell you how Beth is, and take you out gallivanting. The old lady likes me, and I\u2019ll be as sweet as possible to her, so she won\u2019t peck at us, whatever we do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWill you take me out in the trotting wagon with Puck?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOn my honor as a gentleman.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd come every single day?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSee if I don\u2019t!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd bring me back the minute Beth is well?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe identical minute.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd go to the theater, truly?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA dozen theaters, if we may.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell\u2014I guess I will,\u201d said Amy slowly.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood girl! Call Meg, and tell her you\u2019ll give in,\u201d said Laurie, with an approving pat, which annoyed Amy more than the \u2018giving in\u2019.\r\n\r\nMeg and Jo came running down to behold the miracle which had been wrought, and Amy, feeling very precious and self-sacrificing, promised to go, if the doctor said Beth was going to be ill.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow is the little dear?\u201d asked Laurie, for Beth was his especial pet, and he felt more anxious about her than he liked to show.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe is lying down on Mother\u2019s bed, and feels better. The baby\u2019s death troubled her, but I dare say she has only got cold. Hannah says she thinks so, but she looks worried, and that makes me fidgety,\u201d answered Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat a trying world it is!\u201d said Jo, rumpling up her hair in a fretful way. \u201cNo sooner do we get out of one trouble than down comes another. There doesn\u2019t seem to be anything to hold on to when Mother\u2019s gone, so I\u2019m all at sea.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, don\u2019t make a porcupine of yourself, it isn\u2019t becoming. Settle your wig, Jo, and tell me if I shall telegraph to your mother, or do anything?\u201d asked Laurie, who never had been reconciled to the loss of his friend\u2019s one beauty.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat is what troubles me,\u201d said Meg. \u201cI think we ought to tell her if Beth is really ill, but Hannah says we mustn\u2019t, for Mother can\u2019t leave Father, and it will only make them anxious. Beth won\u2019t be sick long, and Hannah knows just what to do, and Mother said we were to mind her, so I suppose we must, but it doesn\u2019t seem quite right to me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHum, well, I can\u2019t say. Suppose you ask Grandfather after the doctor has been.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe will. Jo, go and get Dr. Bangs at once,\u201d commanded Meg. \u201cWe can\u2019t decide anything till he has been.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStay where you are, Jo. I\u2019m errand boy to this establishment,\u201d said Laurie, taking up his cap.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m afraid you are busy,\u201d began Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I\u2019ve done my lessons for the day.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you study in vacation time?\u201d asked Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cI follow the good example my neighbors set me,\u201d was Laurie\u2019s answer, as he swung himself out of the room.\r\n\r\n\u201cI have great hopes for my boy,\u201d observed Jo, watching him fly over the fence with an approving smile.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe does very well, for a boy,\u201d was Meg\u2019s somewhat ungracious answer, for the subject did not interest her.\r\n\r\nDr. Bangs came, said Beth had symptoms of the fever, but he thought she would have it lightly, though he looked sober over the Hummel story. Amy was ordered off at once, and provided with something to ward off danger, she departed in great state, with Jo and Laurie as escort.\r\n\r\nAunt March received them with her usual hospitality.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you want now?\u201d she asked, looking sharply over her spectacles, while the parrot, sitting on the back of her chair, called out...\r\n\r\n\u201cGo away. No boys allowed here.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie retired to the window, and Jo told her story.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo more than I expected, if you are allowed to go poking about among poor folks. Amy can stay and make herself useful if she isn\u2019t sick, which I\u2019ve no doubt she will be, looks like it now. Don\u2019t cry, child, it worries me to hear people sniff.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy was on the point of crying, but Laurie slyly pulled the parrot\u2019s tail, which caused Polly to utter an astonished croak and call out, \u201cBless my boots!\u201d in such a funny way, that she laughed instead.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you hear from your mother?\u201d asked the old lady gruffly.\r\n\r\n\u201cFather is much better,\u201d replied Jo, trying to keep sober.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, is he? Well, that won\u2019t last long, I fancy. March never had any stamina,\u201d was the cheerful reply.\r\n\r\n\u201cHa, ha! Never say die, take a pinch of snuff, goodbye, goodbye!\u201d squalled Polly, dancing on her perch, and clawing at the old lady\u2019s cap as Laurie tweaked him in the rear.\r\n\r\n\u201cHold your tongue, you disrespectful old bird! And, Jo, you\u2019d better go at once. It isn\u2019t proper to be gadding about so late with a rattlepated boy like...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHold your tongue, you disrespectful old bird!\u201d cried Polly, tumbling off the chair with a bounce, and running to peck the \u2018rattlepated\u2019 boy, who was shaking with laughter at the last speech.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t think I can bear it, but I\u2019ll try,\u201d thought Amy, as she was left alone with Aunt March.\r\n\r\n\u201cGet along, you fright!\u201d screamed Polly, and at that rude speech Amy could not restrain a sniff.\r\nCHAPTER EIGHTEEN\r\nDARK DAYS\r\n\r\nBeth did have the fever, and was much sicker than anyone but Hannah and the doctor suspected. The girls knew nothing about illness, and Mr. Laurence was not allowed to see her, so Hannah had everything her own way, and busy Dr. Bangs did his best, but left a good deal to the excellent nurse. Meg stayed at home, lest she should infect the Kings, and kept house, feeling very anxious and a little guilty when she wrote letters in which no mention was made of Beth\u2019s illness. She could not think it right to deceive her mother, but she had been bidden to mind Hannah, and Hannah wouldn\u2019t hear of \u2018Mrs. March bein\u2019 told, and worried just for sech a trifle.\u2019\r\n\r\nJo devoted herself to Beth day and night, not a hard task, for Beth was very patient, and bore her pain uncomplainingly as long as she could control herself. But there came a time when during the fever fits she began to talk in a hoarse, broken voice, to play on the coverlet as if on her beloved little piano, and try to sing with a throat so swollen that there was no music left, a time when she did not know the familiar faces around her, but addressed them by wrong names, and called imploringly for her mother. Then Jo grew frightened, Meg begged to be allowed to write the truth, and even Hannah said she \u2018would think of it, though there was no danger yet\u2019. A letter from Washington added to their trouble, for Mr. March had had a relapse, and could not think of coming home for a long while.\r\n\r\nHow dark the days seemed now, how sad and lonely the house, and how heavy were the hearts of the sisters as they worked and waited, while the shadow of death hovered over the once happy home. Then it was that Margaret, sitting alone with tears dropping often on her work, felt how rich she had been in things more precious than any luxuries money could buy\u2014in love, protection, peace, and health, the real blessings of life. Then it was that Jo, living in the darkened room, with that suffering little sister always before her eyes and that pathetic voice sounding in her ears, learned to see the beauty and the sweetness of Beth\u2019s nature, to feel how deep and tender a place she filled in all hearts, and to acknowledge the worth of Beth\u2019s unselfish ambition to live for others, and make home happy by that exercise of those simple virtues which all may possess, and which all should love and value more than talent, wealth, or beauty. And Amy, in her exile, longed eagerly to be at home, that she might work for Beth, feeling now that no service would be hard or irksome, and remembering, with regretful grief, how many neglected tasks those willing hands had done for her. Laurie haunted the house like a restless ghost, and Mr. Laurence locked the grand piano, because he could not bear to be reminded of the young neighbor who used to make the twilight pleasant for him. Everyone missed Beth. The milkman, baker, grocer, and butcher inquired how she did, poor Mrs. Hummel came to beg pardon for her thoughtlessness and to get a shroud for Minna, the neighbors sent all sorts of comforts and good wishes, and even those who knew her best were surprised to find how many friends shy little Beth had made.\r\n\r\nMeanwhile she lay on her bed with old Joanna at her side, for even in her wanderings she did not forget her forlorn protege. She longed for her cats, but would not have them brought, lest they should get sick, and in her quiet hours she was full of anxiety about Jo. She sent loving messages to Amy, bade them tell her mother that she would write soon, and often begged for pencil and paper to try to say a word, that Father might not think she had neglected him. But soon even these intervals of consciousness ended, and she lay hour after hour, tossing to and fro, with incoherent words on her lips, or sank into a heavy sleep which brought her no refreshment. Dr. Bangs came twice a day, Hannah sat up at night, Meg kept a telegram in her desk all ready to send off at any minute, and Jo never stirred from Beth\u2019s side.\r\n\r\nThe first of December was a wintry day indeed to them, for a bitter wind blew, snow fell fast, and the year seemed getting ready for its death. When Dr. Bangs came that morning, he looked long at Beth, held the hot hand in both his own for a minute, and laid it gently down, saying, in a low voice to Hannah, \u201cIf Mrs. March can leave her husband she\u2019d better be sent for.\u201d\r\n\r\nHannah nodded without speaking, for her lips twitched nervously, Meg dropped down into a chair as the strength seemed to go out of her limbs at the sound of those words, and Jo, standing with a pale face for a minute, ran to the parlor, snatched up the telegram, and throwing on her things, rushed out into the storm. She was soon back, and while noiselessly taking off her cloak, Laurie came in with a letter, saying that Mr. March was mending again. Jo read it thankfully, but the heavy weight did not seem lifted off her heart, and her face was so full of misery that Laurie asked quickly, \u201cWhat is it? Is Beth worse?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve sent for Mother,\u201d said Jo, tugging at her rubber boots with a tragic expression.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood for you, Jo! Did you do it on your own responsibility?\u201d asked Laurie, as he seated her in the hall chair and took off the rebellious boots, seeing how her hands shook.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo. The doctor told us to.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Jo, it\u2019s not so bad as that?\u201d cried Laurie, with a startled face.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, it is. She doesn\u2019t know us, she doesn\u2019t even talk about the flocks of green doves, as she calls the vine leaves on the wall. She doesn\u2019t look like my Beth, and there\u2019s nobody to help us bear it. Mother and father both gone, and God seems so far away I can\u2019t find Him.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs the tears streamed fast down poor Jo\u2019s cheeks, she stretched out her hand in a helpless sort of way, as if groping in the dark, and Laurie took it in his, whispering as well as he could with a lump in his throat, \u201cI\u2019m here. Hold on to me, Jo, dear!\u201d\r\n\r\nShe could not speak, but she did \u2018hold on\u2019, and the warm grasp of the friendly human hand comforted her sore heart, and seemed to lead her nearer to the Divine arm which alone could uphold her in her trouble.\r\n\r\nLaurie longed to say something tender and comfortable, but no fitting words came to him, so he stood silent, gently stroking her bent head as her mother used to do. It was the best thing he could have done, far more soothing than the most eloquent words, for Jo felt the unspoken sympathy, and in the silence learned the sweet solace which affection administers to sorrow. Soon she dried the tears which had relieved her, and looked up with a grateful face.\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you, Teddy, I\u2019m better now. I don\u2019t feel so forlorn, and will try to bear it if it comes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cKeep hoping for the best, that will help you, Jo. Soon your mother will be here, and then everything will be all right.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m so glad Father is better. Now she won\u2019t feel so bad about leaving him. Oh, me! It does seem as if all the troubles came in a heap, and I got the heaviest part on my shoulders,\u201d sighed Jo, spreading her wet handkerchief over her knees to dry.\r\n\r\n\u201cDoesn\u2019t Meg pull fair?\u201d asked Laurie, looking indignant.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes, she tries to, but she can\u2019t love Bethy as I do, and she won\u2019t miss her as I shall. Beth is my conscience, and I can\u2019t give her up. I can\u2019t! I can\u2019t!\u201d\r\n\r\nDown went Jo\u2019s face into the wet handkerchief, and she cried despairingly, for she had kept up bravely till now and never shed a tear. Laurie drew his hand across his eyes, but could not speak till he had subdued the choky feeling in his throat and steadied his lips. It might be unmanly, but he couldn\u2019t help it, and I am glad of it. Presently, as Jo\u2019s sobs quieted, he said hopefully, \u201cI don\u2019t think she will die. She\u2019s so good, and we all love her so much, I don\u2019t believe God will take her away yet.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe good and dear people always do die,\u201d groaned Jo, but she stopped crying, for her friend\u2019s words cheered her up in spite of her own doubts and fears.\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor girl, you\u2019re worn out. It isn\u2019t like you to be forlorn. Stop a bit. I\u2019ll hearten you up in a jiffy.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie went off two stairs at a time, and Jo laid her wearied head down on Beth\u2019s little brown hood, which no one had thought of moving from the table where she left it. It must have possessed some magic, for the submissive spirit of its gentle owner seemed to enter into Jo, and when Laurie came running down with a glass of wine, she took it with a smile, and said bravely, \u201cI drink\u2014 Health to my Beth! You are a good doctor, Teddy, and such a comfortable friend. How can I ever pay you?\u201d she added, as the wine refreshed her body, as the kind words had done her troubled mind.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll send my bill, by-and-by, and tonight I\u2019ll give you something that will warm the cockles of your heart better than quarts of wine,\u201d said Laurie, beaming at her with a face of suppressed satisfaction at something.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat is it?\u201d cried Jo, forgetting her woes for a minute in her wonder.\r\n\r\n\u201cI telegraphed to your mother yesterday, and Brooke answered she\u2019d come at once, and she\u2019ll be here tonight, and everything will be all right. Aren\u2019t you glad I did it?\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie spoke very fast, and turned red and excited all in a minute, for he had kept his plot a secret, for fear of disappointing the girls or harming Beth. Jo grew quite white, flew out of her chair, and the moment he stopped speaking she electrified him by throwing her arms round his neck, and crying out, with a joyful cry, \u201cOh, Laurie! Oh, Mother! I am so glad!\u201d She did not weep again, but laughed hysterically, and trembled and clung to her friend as if she was a little bewildered by the sudden news.\r\n\r\nLaurie, though decidedly amazed, behaved with great presence of mind. He patted her back soothingly, and finding that she was recovering, followed it up by a bashful kiss or two, which brought Jo round at once. Holding on to the banisters, she put him gently away, saying breathlessly, \u201cOh, don\u2019t! I didn\u2019t mean to, it was dreadful of me, but you were such a dear to go and do it in spite of Hannah that I couldn\u2019t help flying at you. Tell me all about it, and don\u2019t give me wine again, it makes me act so.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t mind,\u201d laughed Laurie, as he settled his tie. \u201cWhy, you see I got fidgety, and so did Grandpa. We thought Hannah was overdoing the authority business, and your mother ought to know. She\u2019d never forgive us if Beth... Well, if anything happened, you know. So I got grandpa to say it was high time we did something, and off I pelted to the office yesterday, for the doctor looked sober, and Hannah most took my head off when I proposed a telegram. I never can bear to be \u2018lorded over\u2019, so that settled my mind, and I did it. Your mother will come, I know, and the late train is in at two A.M. I shall go for her, and you\u2019ve only got to bottle up your rapture, and keep Beth quiet till that blessed lady gets here.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLaurie, you\u2019re an angel! How shall I ever thank you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFly at me again. I rather liked it,\u201d said Laurie, looking mischievous, a thing he had not done for a fortnight.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, thank you. I\u2019ll do it by proxy, when your grandpa comes. Don\u2019t tease, but go home and rest, for you\u2019ll be up half the night. Bless you, Teddy, bless you!\u201d\r\n\r\nJo had backed into a corner, and as she finished her speech, she vanished precipitately into the kitchen, where she sat down upon a dresser and told the assembled cats that she was \u201chappy, oh, so happy!\u201d while Laurie departed, feeling that he had made a rather neat thing of it.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s the interferingest chap I ever see, but I forgive him and do hope Mrs. March is coming right away,\u201d said Hannah, with an air of relief, when Jo told the good news.\r\n\r\nMeg had a quiet rapture, and then brooded over the letter, while Jo set the sickroom in order, and Hannah \u201cknocked up a couple of pies in case of company unexpected\u201d. A breath of fresh air seemed to blow through the house, and something better than sunshine brightened the quiet rooms. Everything appeared to feel the hopeful change. Beth\u2019s bird began to chirp again, and a half-blown rose was discovered on Amy\u2019s bush in the window. The fires seemed to burn with unusual cheeriness, and every time the girls met, their pale faces broke into smiles as they hugged one another, whispering encouragingly, \u201cMother\u2019s coming, dear! Mother\u2019s coming!\u201d Every one rejoiced but Beth. She lay in that heavy stupor, alike unconscious of hope and joy, doubt and danger. It was a piteous sight, the once rosy face so changed and vacant, the once busy hands so weak and wasted, the once smiling lips quite dumb, and the once pretty, well-kept hair scattered rough and tangled on the pillow. All day she lay so, only rousing now and then to mutter, \u201cWater!\u201d with lips so parched they could hardly shape the word. All day Jo and Meg hovered over her, watching, waiting, hoping, and trusting in God and Mother, and all day the snow fell, the bitter wind raged, and the hours dragged slowly by. But night came at last, and every time the clock struck, the sisters, still sitting on either side of the bed, looked at each other with brightening eyes, for each hour brought help nearer. The doctor had been in to say that some change, for better or worse, would probably take place about midnight, at which time he would return.\r\n\r\nHannah, quite worn out, lay down on the sofa at the bed\u2019s foot and fell fast asleep, Mr. Laurence marched to and fro in the parlor, feeling that he would rather face a rebel battery than Mrs. March\u2019s countenance as she entered. Laurie lay on the rug, pretending to rest, but staring into the fire with the thoughtful look which made his black eyes beautifully soft and clear.\r\n\r\nThe girls never forgot that night, for no sleep came to them as they kept their watch, with that dreadful sense of powerlessness which comes to us in hours like those.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf God spares Beth, I never will complain again,\u201d whispered Meg earnestly.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf God spares Beth, I\u2019ll try to love and serve Him all my life,\u201d answered Jo, with equal fervor.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish I had no heart, it aches so,\u201d sighed Meg, after a pause.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf life is often as hard as this, I don\u2019t see how we ever shall get through it,\u201d added her sister despondently.\r\n\r\nHere the clock struck twelve, and both forgot themselves in watching Beth, for they fancied a change passed over her wan face. The house was still as death, and nothing but the wailing of the wind broke the deep hush. Weary Hannah slept on, and no one but the sisters saw the pale shadow which seemed to fall upon the little bed. An hour went by, and nothing happened except Laurie\u2019s quiet departure for the station. Another hour, still no one came, and anxious fears of delay in the storm, or accidents by the way, or, worst of all, a great grief at Washington, haunted the girls.\r\n\r\nIt was past two, when Jo, who stood at the window thinking how dreary the world looked in its winding sheet of snow, heard a movement by the bed, and turning quickly, saw Meg kneeling before their mother\u2019s easy chair with her face hidden. A dreadful fear passed coldly over Jo, as she thought, \u201cBeth is dead, and Meg is afraid to tell me.\u201d\r\n\r\nShe was back at her post in an instant, and to her excited eyes a great change seemed to have taken place. The fever flush and the look of pain were gone, and the beloved little face looked so pale and peaceful in its utter repose that Jo felt no desire to weep or to lament. Leaning low over this dearest of her sisters, she kissed the damp forehead with her heart on her lips, and softly whispered, \u201cGood-by, my Beth. Good-by!\u201d\r\n\r\nAs if awaked by the stir, Hannah started out of her sleep, hurried to the bed, looked at Beth, felt her hands, listened at her lips, and then, throwing her apron over her head, sat down to rock to and fro, exclaiming, under her breath, \u201cThe fever\u2019s turned, she\u2019s sleepin\u2019 nat\u2019ral, her skin\u2019s damp, and she breathes easy. Praise be given! Oh, my goodness me!\u201d\r\n\r\nBefore the girls could believe the happy truth, the doctor came to confirm it. He was a homely man, but they thought his face quite heavenly when he smiled and said, with a fatherly look at them, \u201cYes, my dears, I think the little girl will pull through this time. Keep the house quiet, let her sleep, and when she wakes, give her...\u201d\r\n\r\nWhat they were to give, neither heard, for both crept into the dark hall, and, sitting on the stairs, held each other close, rejoicing with hearts too full for words. When they went back to be kissed and cuddled by faithful Hannah, they found Beth lying, as she used to do, with her cheek pillowed on her hand, the dreadful pallor gone, and breathing quietly, as if just fallen asleep.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf Mother would only come now!\u201d said Jo, as the winter night began to wane.\r\n\r\n\u201cSee,\u201d said Meg, coming up with a white, half-opened rose, \u201cI thought this would hardly be ready to lay in Beth\u2019s hand tomorrow if she\u2014went away from us. But it has blossomed in the night, and now I mean to put it in my vase here, so that when the darling wakes, the first thing she sees will be the little rose, and Mother\u2019s face.\u201d\r\n\r\nNever had the sun risen so beautifully, and never had the world seemed so lovely as it did to the heavy eyes of Meg and Jo, as they looked out in the early morning, when their long, sad vigil was done.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt looks like a fairy world,\u201d said Meg, smiling to herself, as she stood behind the curtain, watching the dazzling sight.\r\n\r\n\u201cHark!\u201d cried Jo, starting to her feet.\r\n\r\nYes, there was a sound of bells at the door below, a cry from Hannah, and then Laurie\u2019s voice saying in a joyful whisper, \u201cGirls, she\u2019s come! She\u2019s come!\u201d\r\nCHAPTER NINETEEN\r\nAMY\u2019S WILL\r\n\r\nWhile these things were happening at home, Amy was having hard times at Aunt March\u2019s. She felt her exile deeply, and for the first time in her life, realized how much she was beloved and petted at home. Aunt March never petted any one; she did not approve of it, but she meant to be kind, for the well-behaved little girl pleased her very much, and Aunt March had a soft place in her old heart for her nephew\u2019s children, though she didn\u2019t think it proper to confess it. She really did her best to make Amy happy, but, dear me, what mistakes she made. Some old people keep young at heart in spite of wrinkles and gray hairs, can sympathize with children\u2019s little cares and joys, make them feel at home, and can hide wise lessons under pleasant plays, giving and receiving friendship in the sweetest way. But Aunt March had not this gift, and she worried Amy very much with her rules and orders, her prim ways, and long, prosy talks. Finding the child more docile and amiable than her sister, the old lady felt it her duty to try and counteract, as far as possible, the bad effects of home freedom and indulgence. So she took Amy by the hand, and taught her as she herself had been taught sixty years ago, a process which carried dismay to Amy\u2019s soul, and made her feel like a fly in the web of a very strict spider.\r\n\r\nShe had to wash the cups every morning, and polish up the old-fashioned spoons, the fat silver teapot, and the glasses till they shone. Then she must dust the room, and what a trying job that was. Not a speck escaped Aunt March\u2019s eye, and all the furniture had claw legs and much carving, which was never dusted to suit. Then Polly had to be fed, the lap dog combed, and a dozen trips upstairs and down to get things or deliver orders, for the old lady was very lame and seldom left her big chair. After these tiresome labors, she must do her lessons, which was a daily trial of every virtue she possessed. Then she was allowed one hour for exercise or play, and didn\u2019t she enjoy it?\r\n\r\nLaurie came every day, and wheedled Aunt March till Amy was allowed to go out with him, when they walked and rode and had capital times. After dinner, she had to read aloud, and sit still while the old lady slept, which she usually did for an hour, as she dropped off over the first page. Then patchwork or towels appeared, and Amy sewed with outward meekness and inward rebellion till dusk, when she was allowed to amuse herself as she liked till teatime. The evenings were the worst of all, for Aunt March fell to telling long stories about her youth, which were so unutterably dull that Amy was always ready to go to bed, intending to cry over her hard fate, but usually going to sleep before she had squeezed out more than a tear or two.\r\n\r\nIf it had not been for Laurie, and old Esther, the maid, she felt that she never could have got through that dreadful time. The parrot alone was enough to drive her distracted, for he soon felt that she did not admire him, and revenged himself by being as mischievous as possible. He pulled her hair whenever she came near him, upset his bread and milk to plague her when she had newly cleaned his cage, made Mop bark by pecking at him while Madam dozed, called her names before company, and behaved in all respects like an reprehensible old bird. Then she could not endure the dog, a fat, cross beast who snarled and yelped at her when she made his toilet, and who lay on his back with all his legs in the air and a most idiotic expression of countenance when he wanted something to eat, which was about a dozen times a day. The cook was bad-tempered, the old coachman was deaf, and Esther the only one who ever took any notice of the young lady.\r\n\r\nEsther was a Frenchwoman, who had lived with \u2018Madame\u2019, as she called her mistress, for many years, and who rather tyrannized over the old lady, who could not get along without her. Her real name was Estelle, but Aunt March ordered her to change it, and she obeyed, on condition that she was never asked to change her religion. She took a fancy to Mademoiselle, and amused her very much with odd stories of her life in France, when Amy sat with her while she got up Madame\u2019s laces. She also allowed her to roam about the great house, and examine the curious and pretty things stored away in the big wardrobes and the ancient chests, for Aunt March hoarded like a magpie. Amy\u2019s chief delight was an Indian cabinet, full of queer drawers, little pigeonholes, and secret places, in which were kept all sorts of ornaments, some precious, some merely curious, all more or less antique. To examine and arrange these things gave Amy great satisfaction, especially the jewel cases, in which on velvet cushions reposed the ornaments which had adorned a belle forty years ago. There was the garnet set which Aunt March wore when she came out, the pearls her father gave her on her wedding day, her lover\u2019s diamonds, the jet mourning rings and pins, the queer lockets, with portraits of dead friends and weeping willows made of hair inside, the baby bracelets her one little daughter had worn, Uncle March\u2019s big watch, with the red seal so many childish hands had played with, and in a box all by itself lay Aunt March\u2019s wedding ring, too small now for her fat finger, but put carefully away like the most precious jewel of them all.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhich would Mademoiselle choose if she had her will?\u201d asked Esther, who always sat near to watch over and lock up the valuables.\r\n\r\n\u201cI like the diamonds best, but there is no necklace among them, and I\u2019m fond of necklaces, they are so becoming. I should choose this if I might,\u201d replied Amy, looking with great admiration at a string of gold and ebony beads from which hung a heavy cross of the same.\r\n\r\n\u201cI, too, covet that, but not as a necklace. Ah, no! To me it is a rosary, and as such I should use it like a good catholic,\u201d said Esther, eyeing the handsome thing wistfully.\r\n\r\n\u201cIs it meant to use as you use the string of good-smelling wooden beads hanging over your glass?\u201d asked Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cTruly, yes, to pray with. It would be pleasing to the saints if one used so fine a rosary as this, instead of wearing it as a vain bijou.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou seem to take a great deal of comfort in your prayers, Esther, and always come down looking quiet and satisfied. I wish I could.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf Mademoiselle was a Catholic, she would find true comfort, but as that is not to be, it would be well if you went apart each day to meditate and pray, as did the good mistress whom I served before Madame. She had a little chapel, and in it found solacement for much trouble.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWould it be right for me to do so too?\u201d asked Amy, who in her loneliness felt the need of help of some sort, and found that she was apt to forget her little book, now that Beth was not there to remind her of it.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt would be excellent and charming, and I shall gladly arrange the little dressing room for you if you like it. Say nothing to Madame, but when she sleeps go you and sit alone a while to think good thoughts, and pray the dear God preserve your sister.\u201d\r\n\r\nEsther was truly pious, and quite sincere in her advice, for she had an affectionate heart, and felt much for the sisters in their anxiety. Amy liked the idea, and gave her leave to arrange the light closet next her room, hoping it would do her good.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish I knew where all these pretty things would go when Aunt March dies,\u201d she said, as she slowly replaced the shining rosary and shut the jewel cases one by one.\r\n\r\n\u201cTo you and your sisters. I know it, Madame confides in me. I witnessed her will, and it is to be so,\u201d whispered Esther smiling.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow nice! But I wish she\u2019d let us have them now. Procrastination is not agreeable,\u201d observed Amy, taking a last look at the diamonds.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is too soon yet for the young ladies to wear these things. The first one who is affianced will have the pearls, Madame has said it, and I have a fancy that the little turquoise ring will be given to you when you go, for Madame approves your good behavior and charming manners.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you think so? Oh, I\u2019ll be a lamb, if I can only have that lovely ring! It\u2019s ever so much prettier than Kitty Bryant\u2019s. I do like Aunt March after all.\u201d And Amy tried on the blue ring with a delighted face and a firm resolve to earn it.\r\n\r\nFrom that day she was a model of obedience, and the old lady complacently admired the success of her training. Esther fitted up the closet with a little table, placed a footstool before it, and over it a picture taken from one of the shut-up rooms. She thought it was of no great value, but, being appropriate, she borrowed it, well knowing that Madame would never know it, nor care if she did. It was, however, a very valuable copy of one of the famous pictures of the world, and Amy\u2019s beauty-loving eyes were never tired of looking up at the sweet face of the Divine Mother, while her tender thoughts of her own were busy at her heart. On the table she laid her little testament and hymnbook, kept a vase always full of the best flowers Laurie brought her, and came every day to \u2018sit alone\u2019 thinking good thoughts, and praying the dear God to preserve her sister. Esther had given her a rosary of black beads with a silver cross, but Amy hung it up and did not use it, feeling doubtful as to its fitness for Protestant prayers.\r\n\r\nThe little girl was very sincere in all this, for being left alone outside the safe home nest, she felt the need of some kind hand to hold by so sorely that she instinctively turned to the strong and tender Friend, whose fatherly love most closely surrounds His little children. She missed her mother\u2019s help to understand and rule herself, but having been taught where to look, she did her best to find the way and walk in it confidingly. But, Amy was a young pilgrim, and just now her burden seemed very heavy. She tried to forget herself, to keep cheerful, and be satisfied with doing right, though no one saw or praised her for it. In her first effort at being very, very good, she decided to make her will, as Aunt March had done, so that if she did fall ill and die, her possessions might be justly and generously divided. It cost her a pang even to think of giving up the little treasures which in her eyes were as precious as the old lady\u2019s jewels.\r\n\r\nDuring one of her play hours she wrote out the important document as well as she could, with some help from Esther as to certain legal terms, and when the good-natured Frenchwoman had signed her name, Amy felt relieved and laid it by to show Laurie, whom she wanted as a second witness. As it was a rainy day, she went upstairs to amuse herself in one of the large chambers, and took Polly with her for company. In this room there was a wardrobe full of old-fashioned costumes with which Esther allowed her to play, and it was her favorite amusement to array herself in the faded brocades, and parade up and down before the long mirror, making stately curtsies, and sweeping her train about with a rustle which delighted her ears. So busy was she on this day that she did not hear Laurie\u2019s ring nor see his face peeping in at her as she gravely promenaded to and fro, flirting her fan and tossing her head, on which she wore a great pink turban, contrasting oddly with her blue brocade dress and yellow quilted petticoat. She was obliged to walk carefully, for she had on high-heeled shoes, and, as Laurie told Jo afterward, it was a comical sight to see her mince along in her gay suit, with Polly sidling and bridling just behind her, imitating her as well as he could, and occasionally stopping to laugh or exclaim, \u201cAin\u2019t we fine? Get along, you fright! Hold your tongue! Kiss me, dear! Ha! Ha!\u201d\r\n\r\nHaving with difficulty restrained an explosion of merriment, lest it should offend her majesty, Laurie tapped and was graciously received.\r\n\r\n\u201cSit down and rest while I put these things away, then I want to consult you about a very serious matter,\u201d said Amy, when she had shown her splendor and driven Polly into a corner. \u201cThat bird is the trial of my life,\u201d she continued, removing the pink mountain from her head, while Laurie seated himself astride a chair.\r\n\r\n\u201cYesterday, when Aunt was asleep and I was trying to be as still as a mouse, Polly began to squall and flap about in his cage, so I went to let him out, and found a big spider there. I poked it out, and it ran under the bookcase. Polly marched straight after it, stooped down and peeped under the bookcase, saying, in his funny way, with a cock of his eye, \u2018Come out and take a walk, my dear.\u2019 I couldn\u2019t help laughing, which made Poll swear, and Aunt woke up and scolded us both.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDid the spider accept the old fellow\u2019s invitation?\u201d asked Laurie, yawning.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, out it came, and away ran Polly, frightened to death, and scrambled up on Aunt\u2019s chair, calling out, \u2018Catch her! Catch her! Catch her!\u2019 as I chased the spider.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s a lie! Oh, lor!\u201d cried the parrot, pecking at Laurie\u2019s toes.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019d wring your neck if you were mine, you old torment,\u201d cried Laurie, shaking his fist at the bird, who put his head on one side and gravely croaked, \u201cAllyluyer! bless your buttons, dear!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow I\u2019m ready,\u201d said Amy, shutting the wardrobe and taking a piece of paper out of her pocket. \u201cI want you to read that, please, and tell me if it is legal and right. I felt I ought to do it, for life is uncertain and I don\u2019t want any ill feeling over my tomb.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie bit his lips, and turning a little from the pensive speaker, read the following document, with praiseworthy gravity, considering the spelling:\r\n\r\nMY LAST WILL AND TESTIMENT\r\n\r\nI, Amy Curtis March, being in my sane mind, go give and bequeethe all my earthly property\u2014viz. to wit:\u2014namely\r\n\r\nTo my father, my best pictures, sketches, maps, and works of art, including frames. Also my $100, to do what he likes with.\r\n\r\nTo my mother, all my clothes, except the blue apron with pockets\u2014also my likeness, and my medal, with much love.\r\n\r\nTo my dear sister Margaret, I give my turkquoise ring (if I get it), also my green box with the doves on it, also my piece of real lace for her neck, and my sketch of her as a memorial of her \u2018little girl\u2019.\r\n\r\nTo Jo I leave my breastpin, the one mended with sealing wax, also my bronze inkstand\u2014she lost the cover\u2014and my most precious plaster rabbit, because I am sorry I burned up her story.\r\n\r\nTo Beth (if she lives after me) I give my dolls and the little bureau, my fan, my linen collars and my new slippers if she can wear them being thin when she gets well. And I herewith also leave her my regret that I ever made fun of old Joanna.\r\n\r\nTo my friend and neighbor Theodore Laurence I bequeethe my paper mashay portfolio, my clay model of a horse though he did say it hadn\u2019t any neck. Also in return for his great kindness in the hour of affliction any one of my artistic works he likes, Noter Dame is the best.\r\n\r\nTo our venerable benefactor Mr. Laurence I leave my purple box with a looking glass in the cover which will be nice for his pens and remind him of the departed girl who thanks him for his favors to her family, especially Beth.\r\n\r\nI wish my favorite playmate Kitty Bryant to have the blue silk apron and my gold-bead ring with a kiss.\r\n\r\nTo Hannah I give the bandbox she wanted and all the patchwork I leave hoping she \u2018will remember me, when it you see\u2019.\r\n\r\nAnd now having disposed of my most valuable property I hope all will be satisfied and not blame the dead. I forgive everyone, and trust we may all meet when the trump shall sound. Amen.\r\n\r\nTo this will and testiment I set my hand and seal on this 20th day of Nov. Anni Domino 1861.\r\n\r\nAmy Curtis March\r\n\r\nWitnesses:\r\n\r\nEstelle Valnor, Theodore Laurence.\r\n\r\nThe last name was written in pencil, and Amy explained that he was to rewrite it in ink and seal it up for her properly.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat put it into your head? Did anyone tell you about Beth\u2019s giving away her things?\u201d asked Laurie soberly, as Amy laid a bit of red tape, with sealing wax, a taper, and a standish before him.\r\n\r\nShe explained and then asked anxiously, \u201cWhat about Beth?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m sorry I spoke, but as I did, I\u2019ll tell you. She felt so ill one day that she told Jo she wanted to give her piano to Meg, her cats to you, and the poor old doll to Jo, who would love it for her sake. She was sorry she had so little to give, and left locks of hair to the rest of us, and her best love to Grandpa. She never thought of a will.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie was signing and sealing as he spoke, and did not look up till a great tear dropped on the paper. Amy\u2019s face was full of trouble, but she only said, \u201cDon\u2019t people put sort of postscripts to their wills, sometimes?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, \u2018codicils\u2019, they call them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPut one in mine then, that I wish all my curls cut off, and given round to my friends. I forgot it, but I want it done though it will spoil my looks.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie added it, smiling at Amy\u2019s last and greatest sacrifice. Then he amused her for an hour, and was much interested in all her trials. But when he came to go, Amy held him back to whisper with trembling lips, \u201cIs there really any danger about Beth?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m afraid there is, but we must hope for the best, so don\u2019t cry, dear.\u201d And Laurie put his arm about her with a brotherly gesture which was very comforting.\r\n\r\nWhen he had gone, she went to her little chapel, and sitting in the twilight, prayed for Beth, with streaming tears and an aching heart, feeling that a million turquoise rings would not console her for the loss of her gentle little sister.\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY\r\nCONFIDENTIAL\r\n\r\nI don\u2019t think I have any words in which to tell the meeting of the mother and daughters. Such hours are beautiful to live, but very hard to describe, so I will leave it to the imagination of my readers, merely saying that the house was full of genuine happiness, and that Meg\u2019s tender hope was realized, for when Beth woke from that long, healing sleep, the first objects on which her eyes fell were the little rose and Mother\u2019s face. Too weak to wonder at anything, she only smiled and nestled close in the loving arms about her, feeling that the hungry longing was satisfied at last. Then she slept again, and the girls waited upon their mother, for she would not unclasp the thin hand which clung to hers even in sleep.\r\n\r\nHannah had \u2018dished up\u2019 an astonishing breakfast for the traveler, finding it impossible to vent her excitement in any other way, and Meg and Jo fed their mother like dutiful young storks, while they listened to her whispered account of Father\u2019s state, Mr. Brooke\u2019s promise to stay and nurse him, the delays which the storm occasioned on the homeward journey, and the unspeakable comfort Laurie\u2019s hopeful face had given her when she arrived, worn out with fatigue, anxiety, and cold.\r\n\r\nWhat a strange yet pleasant day that was. So brilliant and gay without, for all the world seemed abroad to welcome the first snow. So quiet and reposeful within, for everyone slept, spent with watching, and a Sabbath stillness reigned through the house, while nodding Hannah mounted guard at the door. With a blissful sense of burdens lifted off, Meg and Jo closed their weary eyes, and lay at rest, like storm-beaten boats safe at anchor in a quiet harbor. Mrs. March would not leave Beth\u2019s side, but rested in the big chair, waking often to look at, touch, and brood over her child, like a miser over some recovered treasure.\r\n\r\nLaurie meanwhile posted off to comfort Amy, and told his story so well that Aunt March actually \u2018sniffed\u2019 herself, and never once said \u201cI told you so\u201d. Amy came out so strong on this occasion that I think the good thoughts in the little chapel really began to bear fruit. She dried her tears quickly, restrained her impatience to see her mother, and never even thought of the turquoise ring, when the old lady heartily agreed in Laurie\u2019s opinion, that she behaved \u2018like a capital little woman\u2019. Even Polly seemed impressed, for he called her a good girl, blessed her buttons, and begged her to \u201ccome and take a walk, dear\u201d, in his most affable tone. She would very gladly have gone out to enjoy the bright wintry weather, but discovering that Laurie was dropping with sleep in spite of manful efforts to conceal the fact, she persuaded him to rest on the sofa, while she wrote a note to her mother. She was a long time about it, and when she returned, he was stretched out with both arms under his head, sound asleep, while Aunt March had pulled down the curtains and sat doing nothing in an unusual fit of benignity.\r\n\r\nAfter a while, they began to think he was not going to wake up till night, and I\u2019m not sure that he would, had he not been effectually roused by Amy\u2019s cry of joy at sight of her mother. There probably were a good many happy little girls in and about the city that day, but it is my private opinion that Amy was the happiest of all, when she sat in her mother\u2019s lap and told her trials, receiving consolation and compensation in the shape of approving smiles and fond caresses. They were alone together in the chapel, to which her mother did not object when its purpose was explained to her.\r\n\r\n\u201cOn the contrary, I like it very much, dear,\u201d looking from the dusty rosary to the well-worn little book, and the lovely picture with its garland of evergreen. \u201cIt is an excellent plan to have some place where we can go to be quiet, when things vex or grieve us. There are a good many hard times in this life of ours, but we can always bear them if we ask help in the right way. I think my little girl is learning this.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Mother, and when I go home I mean to have a corner in the big closet to put my books and the copy of that picture which I\u2019ve tried to make. The woman\u2019s face is not good, it\u2019s too beautiful for me to draw, but the baby is done better, and I love it very much. I like to think He was a little child once, for then I don\u2019t seem so far away, and that helps me.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs Amy pointed to the smiling Christ child on his Mother\u2019s knee, Mrs. March saw something on the lifted hand that made her smile. She said nothing, but Amy understood the look, and after a minute\u2019s pause, she added gravely, \u201cI wanted to speak to you about this, but I forgot it. Aunt gave me the ring today. She called me to her and kissed me, and put it on my finger, and said I was a credit to her, and she\u2019d like to keep me always. She gave that funny guard to keep the turquoise on, as it\u2019s too big. I\u2019d like to wear them Mother, can I?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey are very pretty, but I think you\u2019re rather too young for such ornaments, Amy,\u201d said Mrs. March, looking at the plump little hand, with the band of sky-blue stones on the forefinger, and the quaint guard formed of two tiny golden hands clasped together.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll try not to be vain,\u201d said Amy. \u201cI don\u2019t think I like it only because it\u2019s so pretty, but I want to wear it as the girl in the story wore her bracelet, to remind me of something.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you mean Aunt March?\u201d asked her mother, laughing.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, to remind me not to be selfish.\u201d Amy looked so earnest and sincere about it that her mother stopped laughing, and listened respectfully to the little plan.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve thought a great deal lately about my \u2018bundle of naughties\u2019, and being selfish is the largest one in it, so I\u2019m going to try hard to cure it, if I can. Beth isn\u2019t selfish, and that\u2019s the reason everyone loves her and feels so bad at the thoughts of losing her. People wouldn\u2019t feel so bad about me if I was sick, and I don\u2019t deserve to have them, but I\u2019d like to be loved and missed by a great many friends, so I\u2019m going to try and be like Beth all I can. I\u2019m apt to forget my resolutions, but if I had something always about me to remind me, I guess I should do better. May we try this way?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, but I have more faith in the corner of the big closet. Wear your ring, dear, and do your best. I think you will prosper, for the sincere wish to be good is half the battle. Now I must go back to Beth. Keep up your heart, little daughter, and we will soon have you home again.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat evening while Meg was writing to her father to report the traveler\u2019s safe arrival, Jo slipped upstairs into Beth\u2019s room, and finding her mother in her usual place, stood a minute twisting her fingers in her hair, with a worried gesture and an undecided look.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat is it, deary?\u201d asked Mrs. March, holding out her hand, with a face which invited confidence.\r\n\r\n\u201cI want to tell you something, Mother.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAbout Meg?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow quickly you guessed! Yes, it\u2019s about her, and though it\u2019s a little thing, it fidgets me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBeth is asleep. Speak low, and tell me all about it. That Moffat hasn\u2019t been here, I hope?\u201d asked Mrs. March rather sharply.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo. I should have shut the door in his face if he had,\u201d said Jo, settling herself on the floor at her mother\u2019s feet. \u201cLast summer Meg left a pair of gloves over at the Laurences\u2019 and only one was returned. We forgot about it, till Teddy told me that Mr. Brooke owned that he liked Meg but didn\u2019t dare say so, she was so young and he so poor. Now, isn\u2019t it a dreadful state of things?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you think Meg cares for him?\u201d asked Mrs. March, with an anxious look.\r\n\r\n\u201cMercy me! I don\u2019t know anything about love and such nonsense!\u201d cried Jo, with a funny mixture of interest and contempt. \u201cIn novels, the girls show it by starting and blushing, fainting away, growing thin, and acting like fools. Now Meg does not do anything of the sort. She eats and drinks and sleeps like a sensible creature, she looks straight in my face when I talk about that man, and only blushes a little bit when Teddy jokes about lovers. I forbid him to do it, but he doesn\u2019t mind me as he ought.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen you fancy that Meg is not interested in John?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho?\u201d cried Jo, staring.\r\n\r\n\u201cMr. Brooke. I call him \u2018John\u2019 now. We fell into the way of doing so at the hospital, and he likes it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, dear! I know you\u2019ll take his part. He\u2019s been good to Father, and you won\u2019t send him away, but let Meg marry him, if she wants to. Mean thing! To go petting Papa and helping you, just to wheedle you into liking him.\u201d And Jo pulled her hair again with a wrathful tweak.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy dear, don\u2019t get angry about it, and I will tell you how it happened. John went with me at Mr. Laurence\u2019s request, and was so devoted to poor Father that we couldn\u2019t help getting fond of him. He was perfectly open and honorable about Meg, for he told us he loved her, but would earn a comfortable home before he asked her to marry him. He only wanted our leave to love her and work for her, and the right to make her love him if he could. He is a truly excellent young man, and we could not refuse to listen to him, but I will not consent to Meg\u2019s engaging herself so young.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course not. It would be idiotic! I knew there was mischief brewing. I felt it, and now it\u2019s worse than I imagined. I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis odd arrangement made Mrs. March smile, but she said gravely, \u201cJo, I confide in you and don\u2019t wish you to say anything to Meg yet. When John comes back, and I see them together, I can judge better of her feelings toward him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShe\u2019ll see those handsome eyes that she talks about, and then it will be all up with her. She\u2019s got such a soft heart, it will melt like butter in the sun if anyone looks sentimentlly at her. She read the short reports he sent more than she did your letters, and pinched me when I spoke of it, and likes brown eyes, and doesn\u2019t think John an ugly name, and she\u2019ll go and fall in love, and there\u2019s an end of peace and fun, and cozy times together. I see it all! They\u2019ll go lovering around the house, and we shall have to dodge. Meg will be absorbed and no good to me any more. Brooke will scratch up a fortune somehow, carry her off, and make a hole in the family, and I shall break my heart, and everything will be abominably uncomfortable. Oh, dear me! Why weren\u2019t we all boys, then there wouldn\u2019t be any bother.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo leaned her chin on her knees in a disconsolate attitude and shook her fist at the reprehensible John. Mrs. March sighed, and Jo looked up with an air of relief.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t like it, Mother? I\u2019m glad of it. Let\u2019s send him about his business, and not tell Meg a word of it, but all be happy together as we always have been.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI did wrong to sigh, Jo. It is natural and right you should all go to homes of your own in time, but I do want to keep my girls as long as I can, and I am sorry that this happened so soon, for Meg is only seventeen and it will be some years before John can make a home for her. Your father and I have agreed that she shall not bind herself in any way, nor be married, before twenty. If she and John love one another, they can wait, and test the love by doing so. She is conscientious, and I have no fear of her treating him unkindly. My pretty, tender hearted girl! I hope things will go happily with her.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHadn\u2019t you rather have her marry a rich man?\u201d asked Jo, as her mother\u2019s voice faltered a little over the last words.\r\n\r\n\u201cMoney is a good and useful thing, Jo, and I hope my girls will never feel the need of it too bitterly, nor be tempted by too much. I should like to know that John was firmly established in some good business, which gave him an income large enough to keep free from debt and make Meg comfortable. I\u2019m not ambitious for a splendid fortune, a fashionable position, or a great name for my girls. If rank and money come with love and virtue, also, I should accept them gratefully, and enjoy your good fortune, but I know, by experience, how much genuine happiness can be had in a plain little house, where the daily bread is earned, and some privations give sweetness to the few pleasures. I am content to see Meg begin humbly, for if I am not mistaken, she will be rich in the possession of a good man\u2019s heart, and that is better than a fortune.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI understand, Mother, and quite agree, but I\u2019m disappointed about Meg, for I\u2019d planned to have her marry Teddy by-and-by and sit in the lap of luxury all her days. Wouldn\u2019t it be nice?\u201d asked Jo, looking up with a brighter face.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe is younger than she, you know,\u201d began Mrs. March, but Jo broke in...\r\n\r\n\u201cOnly a little, he\u2019s old for his age, and tall, and can be quite grown-up in his manners if he likes. Then he\u2019s rich and generous and good, and loves us all, and I say it\u2019s a pity my plan is spoiled.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m afraid Laurie is hardly grown-up enough for Meg, and altogether too much of a weathercock just now for anyone to depend on. Don\u2019t make plans, Jo, but let time and their own hearts mate your friends. We can\u2019t meddle safely in such matters, and had better not get \u2018romantic rubbish\u2019 as you call it, into our heads, lest it spoil our friendship.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I won\u2019t, but I hate to see things going all crisscross and getting snarled up, when a pull here and a snip there would straighten it out. I wish wearing flatirons on our heads would keep us from growing up. But buds will be roses, and kittens cats, more\u2019s the pity!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s that about flatirons and cats?\u201d asked Meg, as she crept into the room with the finished letter in her hand.\r\n\r\n\u201cOnly one of my stupid speeches. I\u2019m going to bed. Come, Peggy,\u201d said Jo, unfolding herself like an animated puzzle.\r\n\r\n\u201cQuite right, and beautifully written. Please add that I send my love to John,\u201d said Mrs. March, as she glanced over the letter and gave it back.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you call him \u2018John\u2019?\u201d asked Meg, smiling, with her innocent eyes looking down into her mother\u2019s.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, he has been like a son to us, and we are very fond of him,\u201d replied Mrs. March, returning the look with a keen one.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad of that, he is so lonely. Good night, Mother, dear. It is so inexpressibly comfortable to have you here,\u201d was Meg\u2019s answer.\r\n\r\nThe kiss her mother gave her was a very tender one, and as she went away, Mrs. March said, with a mixture of satisfaction and regret, \u201cShe does not love John yet, but will soon learn to.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-ONE\r\nLAURIE MAKES MISCHIEF, AND JO MAKES PEACE\r\n\r\nJo\u2019s face was a study next day, for the secret rather weighed upon her, and she found it hard not to look mysterious and important. Meg observed it, but did not trouble herself to make inquiries, for she had learned that the best way to manage Jo was by the law of contraries, so she felt sure of being told everything if she did not ask. She was rather surprised, therefore, when the silence remained unbroken, and Jo assumed a patronizing air, which decidedly aggravated Meg, who in turn assumed an air of dignified reserve and devoted herself to her mother. This left Jo to her own devices, for Mrs. March had taken her place as nurse, and bade her rest, exercise, and amuse herself after her long confinement. Amy being gone, Laurie was her only refuge, and much as she enjoyed his society, she rather dreaded him just then, for he was an incorrigible tease, and she feared he would coax the secret from her.\r\n\r\nShe was quite right, for the mischief-loving lad no sooner suspected a mystery than he set himself to find it out, and led Jo a trying life of it. He wheedled, bribed, ridiculed, threatened, and scolded; affected indifference, that he might surprise the truth from her; declared he knew, then that he didn\u2019t care; and at last, by dint of perseverance, he satisfied himself that it concerned Meg and Mr. Brooke. Feeling indignant that he was not taken into his tutor\u2019s confidence, he set his wits to work to devise some proper retaliation for the slight.\r\n\r\nMeg meanwhile had apparently forgotten the matter and was absorbed in preparations for her father\u2019s return, but all of a sudden a change seemed to come over her, and, for a day or two, she was quite unlike herself. She started when spoken to, blushed when looked at, was very quiet, and sat over her sewing, with a timid, troubled look on her face. To her mother\u2019s inquiries she answered that she was quite well, and Jo\u2019s she silenced by begging to be let alone.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe feels it in the air\u2014love, I mean\u2014and she\u2019s going very fast. She\u2019s got most of the symptoms\u2014is twittery and cross, doesn\u2019t eat, lies awake, and mopes in corners. I caught her singing that song he gave her, and once she said \u2018John\u2019, as you do, and then turned as red as a poppy. Whatever shall we do?\u201d said Jo, looking ready for any measures, however violent.\r\n\r\n\u201cNothing but wait. Let her alone, be kind and patient, and Father\u2019s coming will settle everything,\u201d replied her mother.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s a note to you, Meg, all sealed up. How odd! Teddy never seals mine,\u201d said Jo next day, as she distributed the contents of the little post office.\r\n\r\nMrs. March and Jo were deep in their own affairs, when a sound from Meg made them look up to see her staring at her note with a frightened face.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy child, what is it?\u201d cried her mother, running to her, while Jo tried to take the paper which had done the mischief.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s all a mistake, he didn\u2019t send it. Oh, Jo, how could you do it?\u201d and Meg hid her face in her hands, crying as if her heart were quite broken.\r\n\r\n\u201cMe! I\u2019ve done nothing! What\u2019s she talking about?\u201d cried Jo, bewildered.\r\n\r\nMeg\u2019s mild eyes kindled with anger as she pulled a crumpled note from her pocket and threw it at Jo, saying reproachfully, \u201cYou wrote it, and that bad boy helped you. How could you be so rude, so mean, and cruel to us both?\u201d\r\n\r\nJo hardly heard her, for she and her mother were reading the note, which was written in a peculiar hand.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy Dearest Margaret,\r\n\r\n\u201cI can no longer restrain my passion, and must know my fate before I return. I dare not tell your parents yet, but I think they would consent if they knew that we adored one another. Mr. Laurence will help me to some good place, and then, my sweet girl, you will make me happy. I implore you to say nothing to your family yet, but to send one word of hope through Laurie to,\r\n\r\n\u201cYour devoted John.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, the little villain! That\u2019s the way he meant to pay me for keeping my word to Mother. I\u2019ll give him a hearty scolding and bring him over to beg pardon,\u201d cried Jo, burning to execute immediate justice. But her mother held her back, saying, with a look she seldom wore...\r\n\r\n\u201cStop, Jo, you must clear yourself first. You have played so many pranks that I am afraid you have had a hand in this.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOn my word, Mother, I haven\u2019t! I never saw that note before, and don\u2019t know anything about it, as true as I live!\u201d said Jo, so earnestly that they believed her. \u201cIf I had taken part in it I\u2019d have done it better than this, and have written a sensible note. I should think you\u2019d have known Mr. Brooke wouldn\u2019t write such stuff as that,\u201d she added, scornfully tossing down the paper.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s like his writing,\u201d faltered Meg, comparing it with the note in her hand.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Meg, you didn\u2019t answer it?\u201d cried Mrs. March quickly.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I did!\u201d and Meg hid her face again, overcome with shame.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s a scrape! Do let me bring that wicked boy over to explain and be lectured. I can\u2019t rest till I get hold of him.\u201d And Jo made for the door again.\r\n\r\n\u201cHush! Let me handle this, for it is worse than I thought. Margaret, tell me the whole story,\u201d commanded Mrs. March, sitting down by Meg, yet keeping hold of Jo, lest she should fly off.\r\n\r\n\u201cI received the first letter from Laurie, who didn\u2019t look as if he knew anything about it,\u201d began Meg, without looking up. \u201cI was worried at first and meant to tell you, then I remembered how you liked Mr. Brooke, so I thought you wouldn\u2019t mind if I kept my little secret for a few days. I\u2019m so silly that I liked to think no one knew, and while I was deciding what to say, I felt like the girls in books, who have such things to do. Forgive me, Mother, I\u2019m paid for my silliness now. I never can look him in the face again.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat did you say to him?\u201d asked Mrs. March.\r\n\r\n\u201cI only said I was too young to do anything about it yet, that I didn\u2019t wish to have secrets from you, and he must speak to father. I was very grateful for his kindness, and would be his friend, but nothing more, for a long while.\u201d\r\n\r\nMrs. March smiled, as if well pleased, and Jo clapped her hands, exclaiming, with a laugh, \u201cYou are almost equal to Caroline Percy, who was a pattern of prudence! Tell on, Meg. What did he say to that?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe writes in a different way entirely, telling me that he never sent any love letter at all, and is very sorry that my roguish sister, Jo, should take liberties with our names. It\u2019s very kind and respectful, but think how dreadful for me!\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg leaned against her mother, looking the image of despair, and Jo tramped about the room, calling Laurie names. All of a sudden she stopped, caught up the two notes, and after looking at them closely, said decidedly, \u201cI don\u2019t believe Brooke ever saw either of these letters. Teddy wrote both, and keeps yours to crow over me with because I wouldn\u2019t tell him my secret.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t have any secrets, Jo. Tell it to Mother and keep out of trouble, as I should have done,\u201d said Meg warningly.\r\n\r\n\u201cBless you, child! Mother told me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat will do, Jo. I\u2019ll comfort Meg while you go and get Laurie. I shall sift the matter to the bottom, and put a stop to such pranks at once.\u201d\r\n\r\nAway ran Jo, and Mrs. March gently told Meg Mr. Brooke\u2019s real feelings. \u201cNow, dear, what are your own? Do you love him enough to wait till he can make a home for you, or will you keep yourself quite free for the present?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve been so scared and worried, I don\u2019t want to have anything to do with lovers for a long while, perhaps never,\u201d answered Meg petulantly. \u201cIf John doesn\u2019t know anything about this nonsense, don\u2019t tell him, and make Jo and Laurie hold their tongues. I won\u2019t be deceived and plagued and made a fool of. It\u2019s a shame!\u201d\r\n\r\nSeeing Meg\u2019s usually gentle temper was roused and her pride hurt by this mischievous joke, Mrs. March soothed her by promises of entire silence and great discretion for the future. The instant Laurie\u2019s step was heard in the hall, Meg fled into the study, and Mrs. March received the culprit alone. Jo had not told him why he was wanted, fearing he wouldn\u2019t come, but he knew the minute he saw Mrs. March\u2019s face, and stood twirling his hat with a guilty air which convicted him at once. Jo was dismissed, but chose to march up and down the hall like a sentinel, having some fear that the prisoner might bolt. The sound of voices in the parlor rose and fell for half an hour, but what happened during that interview the girls never knew.\r\n\r\nWhen they were called in, Laurie was standing by their mother with such a penitent face that Jo forgave him on the spot, but did not think it wise to betray the fact. Meg received his humble apology, and was much comforted by the assurance that Brooke knew nothing of the joke.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll never tell him to my dying day, wild horses shan\u2019t drag it out of me, so you\u2019ll forgive me, Meg, and I\u2019ll do anything to show how out-and-out sorry I am,\u201d he added, looking very much ashamed of himself.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll try, but it was a very ungentlemanly thing to do, I didn\u2019t think you could be so sly and malicious, Laurie,\u201d replied Meg, trying to hide her maidenly confusion under a gravely reproachful air.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was altogether abominable, and I don\u2019t deserve to be spoken to for a month, but you will, though, won\u2019t you?\u201d And Laurie folded his hands together with such and imploring gesture, as he spoke in his irresistibly persuasive tone, that it was impossible to frown upon him in spite of his scandalous behavior.\r\n\r\nMeg pardoned him, and Mrs. March\u2019s grave face relaxed, in spite of her efforts to keep sober, when she heard him declare that he would atone for his sins by all sorts of penances, and abase himself like a worm before the injured damsel.\r\n\r\nJo stood aloof, meanwhile, trying to harden her heart against him, and succeeding only in primming up her face into an expression of entire disapprobation. Laurie looked at her once or twice, but as she showed no sign of relenting, he felt injured, and turned his back on her till the others were done with him, when he made her a low bow and walked off without a word.\r\n\r\nAs soon as he had gone, she wished she had been more forgiving, and when Meg and her mother went upstairs, she felt lonely and longed for Teddy. After resisting for some time, she yielded to the impulse, and armed with a book to return, went over to the big house.\r\n\r\n\u201cIs Mr. Laurence in?\u201d asked Jo, of a housemaid, who was coming downstairs.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Miss, but I don\u2019t believe he\u2019s seeable just yet.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy not? Is he ill?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLa, no Miss, but he\u2019s had a scene with Mr. Laurie, who is in one of his tantrums about something, which vexes the old gentleman, so I dursn\u2019t go nigh him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere is Laurie?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShut up in his room, and he won\u2019t answer, though I\u2019ve been a-tapping. I don\u2019t know what\u2019s to become of the dinner, for it\u2019s ready, and there\u2019s no one to eat it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll go and see what the matter is. I\u2019m not afraid of either of them.\u201d\r\n\r\nUp went Jo, and knocked smartly on the door of Laurie\u2019s little study.\r\n\r\n\u201cStop that, or I\u2019ll open the door and make you!\u201d called out the young gentleman in a threatening tone.\r\n\r\nJo immediately knocked again. The door flew open, and in she bounced before Laurie could recover from his surprise. Seeing that he really was out of temper, Jo, who knew how to manage him, assumed a contrite expression, and going artistically down upon her knees, said meekly, \u201cPlease forgive me for being so cross. I came to make it up, and can\u2019t go away till I have.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s all right. Get up, and don\u2019t be a goose, Jo,\u201d was the cavalier reply to her petition.\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you, I will. Could I ask what\u2019s the matter? You don\u2019t look exactly easy in your mind.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve been shaken, and I won\u2019t bear it!\u201d growled Laurie indignantly.\r\n\r\n\u201cWho did it?\u201d demanded Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cGrandfather. If it had been anyone else I\u2019d have...\u201d And the injured youth finished his sentence by an energetic gesture of the right arm.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s nothing. I often shake you, and you don\u2019t mind,\u201d said Jo soothingly.\r\n\r\n\u201cPooh! You\u2019re a girl, and it\u2019s fun, but I\u2019ll allow no man to shake me!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t think anyone would care to try it, if you looked as much like a thundercloud as you do now. Why were you treated so?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJust because I wouldn\u2019t say what your mother wanted me for. I\u2019d promised not to tell, and of course I wasn\u2019t going to break my word.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCouldn\u2019t you satisfy your grandpa in any other way?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, he would have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I\u2019d have told my part of the scrape, if I could without bringing Meg in. As I couldn\u2019t, I held my tongue, and bore the scolding till the old gentleman collared me. Then I bolted, for fear I should forget myself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt wasn\u2019t nice, but he\u2019s sorry, I know, so go down and make up. I\u2019ll help you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHanged if I do! I\u2019m not going to be lectured and pummelled by everyone, just for a bit of a frolic. I was sorry about Meg, and begged pardon like a man, but I won\u2019t do it again, when I wasn\u2019t in the wrong.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe didn\u2019t know that.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe ought to trust me, and not act as if I was a baby. It\u2019s no use, Jo, he\u2019s got to learn that I\u2019m able to take care of myself, and don\u2019t need anyone\u2019s apron string to hold on by.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat pepper pots you are!\u201d sighed Jo. \u201cHow do you mean to settle this affair?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, he ought to beg pardon, and believe me when I say I can\u2019t tell him what the fuss\u2019s about.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBless you! He won\u2019t do that.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI won\u2019t go down till he does.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, Teddy, be sensible. Let it pass, and I\u2019ll explain what I can. You can\u2019t stay here, so what\u2019s the use of being melodramatic?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t intend to stay here long, anyway. I\u2019ll slip off and take a journey somewhere, and when Grandpa misses me he\u2019ll come round fast enough.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI dare say, but you ought not to go and worry him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t preach. I\u2019ll go to Washington and see Brooke. It\u2019s gay there, and I\u2019ll enjoy myself after the troubles.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat fun you\u2019d have! I wish I could run off too,\u201d said Jo, forgetting her part of mentor in lively visions of martial life at the capital.\r\n\r\n\u201cCome on, then! Why not? You go and surprise your father, and I\u2019ll stir up old Brooke. It would be a glorious joke. Let\u2019s do it, Jo. We\u2019ll leave a letter saying we are all right, and trot off at once. I\u2019ve got money enough. It will do you good, and no harm, as you go to your father.\u201d\r\n\r\nFor a moment Jo looked as if she would agree, for wild as the plan was, it just suited her. She was tired of care and confinement, longed for change, and thoughts of her father blended temptingly with the novel charms of camps and hospitals, liberty and fun. Her eyes kindled as they turned wistfully toward the window, but they fell on the old house opposite, and she shook her head with sorrowful decision.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf I was a boy, we\u2019d run away together, and have a capital time, but as I\u2019m a miserable girl, I must be proper and stop at home. Don\u2019t tempt me, Teddy, it\u2019s a crazy plan.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s the fun of it,\u201d began Laurie, who had got a willful fit on him and was possessed to break out of bounds in some way.\r\n\r\n\u201cHold your tongue!\u201d cried Jo, covering her ears. \u201c\u2018Prunes and prisms\u2019 are my doom, and I may as well make up my mind to it. I came here to moralize, not to hear things that make me skip to think of.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI know Meg would wet-blanket such a proposal, but I thought you had more spirit,\u201d began Laurie insinuatingly.\r\n\r\n\u201cBad boy, be quiet! Sit down and think of your own sins, don\u2019t go making me add to mine. If I get your grandpa to apologize for the shaking, will you give up running away?\u201d asked Jo seriously.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, but you won\u2019t do it,\u201d answered Laurie, who wished to make up, but felt that his outraged dignity must be appeased first.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf I can manage the young one, I can the old one,\u201d muttered Jo, as she walked away, leaving Laurie bent over a railroad map with his head propped up on both hands.\r\n\r\n\u201cCome in!\u201d and Mr. Laurence\u2019s gruff voice sounded gruffer than ever, as Jo tapped at his door.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s only me, Sir, come to return a book,\u201d she said blandly, as she entered.\r\n\r\n\u201cWant any more?\u201d asked the old gentleman, looking grim and vexed, but trying not to show it.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, please. I like old Sam so well, I think I\u2019ll try the second volume,\u201d returned Jo, hoping to propitiate him by accepting a second dose of Boswell\u2019s Johnson, as he had recommended that lively work.\r\n\r\nThe shaggy eyebrows unbent a little as he rolled the steps toward the shelf where the Johnsonian literature was placed. Jo skipped up, and sitting on the top step, affected to be searching for her book, but was really wondering how best to introduce the dangerous object of her visit. Mr. Laurence seemed to suspect that something was brewing in her mind, for after taking several brisk turns about the room, he faced round on her, speaking so abruptly that Rasselas tumbled face downward on the floor.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat has that boy been about? Don\u2019t try to shield him. I know he has been in mischief by the way he acted when he came home. I can\u2019t get a word from him, and when I threatened to shake the truth out of him he bolted upstairs and locked himself into his room.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe did wrong, but we forgave him, and all promised not to say a word to anyone,\u201d began Jo reluctantly.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat won\u2019t do. He shall not shelter himself behind a promise from you softhearted girls. If he\u2019s done anything amiss, he shall confess, beg pardon, and be punished. Out with it, Jo. I won\u2019t be kept in the dark.\u201d\r\n\r\nMr. Laurence looked so alarming and spoke so sharply that Jo would have gladly run away, if she could, but she was perched aloft on the steps, and he stood at the foot, a lion in the path, so she had to stay and brave it out.\r\n\r\n\u201cIndeed, Sir, I cannot tell. Mother forbade it. Laurie has confessed, asked pardon, and been punished quite enough. We don\u2019t keep silence to shield him, but someone else, and it will make more trouble if you interfere. Please don\u2019t. It was partly my fault, but it\u2019s all right now. So let\u2019s forget it, and talk about the Rambler or something pleasant.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHang the Rambler! Come down and give me your word that this harum-scarum boy of mine hasn\u2019t done anything ungrateful or impertinent. If he has, after all your kindness to him, I\u2019ll thrash him with my own hands.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe threat sounded awful, but did not alarm Jo, for she knew the irascible old gentleman would never lift a finger against his grandson, whatever he might say to the contrary. She obediently descended, and made as light of the prank as she could without betraying Meg or forgetting the truth.\r\n\r\n\u201cHum... ha... well, if the boy held his tongue because he promised, and not from obstinacy, I\u2019ll forgive him. He\u2019s a stubborn fellow and hard to manage,\u201d said Mr. Laurence, rubbing up his hair till it looked as if he had been out in a gale, and smoothing the frown from his brow with an air of relief.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo am I, but a kind word will govern me when all the king\u2019s horses and all the king\u2019s men couldn\u2019t,\u201d said Jo, trying to say a kind word for her friend, who seemed to get out of one scrape only to fall into another.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou think I\u2019m not kind to him, hey?\u201d was the sharp answer.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, dear no, Sir. You are rather too kind sometimes, and then just a trifle hasty when he tries your patience. Don\u2019t you think you are?\u201d\r\n\r\nJo was determined to have it out now, and tried to look quite placid, though she quaked a little after her bold speech. To her great relief and surprise, the old gentleman only threw his spectacles onto the table with a rattle and exclaimed frankly, \u201cYou\u2019re right, girl, I am! I love the boy, but he tries my patience past bearing, and I know how it will end, if we go on so.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll tell you, he\u2019ll run away.\u201d Jo was sorry for that speech the minute it was made. She meant to warn him that Laurie would not bear much restraint, and hoped he would be more forebearing with the lad.\r\n\r\nMr. Laurence\u2019s ruddy face changed suddenly, and he sat down, with a troubled glance at the picture of a handsome man, which hung over his table. It was Laurie\u2019s father, who had run away in his youth, and married against the imperious old man\u2019s will. Jo fancied he remembered and regretted the past, and she wished she had held her tongue.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe won\u2019t do it unless he is very much worried, and only threatens it sometimes, when he gets tired of studying. I often think I should like to, especially since my hair was cut, so if you ever miss us, you may advertise for two boys and look among the ships bound for India.\u201d\r\n\r\nShe laughed as she spoke, and Mr. Laurence looked relieved, evidently taking the whole as a joke.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou hussy, how dare you talk in that way? Where\u2019s your respect for me, and your proper bringing up? Bless the boys and girls! What torments they are, yet we can\u2019t do without them,\u201d he said, pinching her cheeks good-humoredly. \u201cGo and bring that boy down to his dinner, tell him it\u2019s all right, and advise him not to put on tragedy airs with his grandfather. I won\u2019t bear it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe won\u2019t come, Sir. He feels badly because you didn\u2019t believe him when he said he couldn\u2019t tell. I think the shaking hurt his feelings very much.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo tried to look pathetic but must have failed, for Mr. Laurence began to laugh, and she knew the day was won.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m sorry for that, and ought to thank him for not shaking me, I suppose. What the dickens does the fellow expect?\u201d and the old gentleman looked a trifle ashamed of his own testiness.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf I were you, I\u2019d write him an apology, Sir. He says he won\u2019t come down till he has one, and talks about Washington, and goes on in an absurd way. A formal apology will make him see how foolish he is, and bring him down quite amiable. Try it. He likes fun, and this way is better than talking. I\u2019ll carry it up, and teach him his duty.\u201d\r\n\r\nMr. Laurence gave her a sharp look, and put on his spectacles, saying slowly, \u201cYou\u2019re a sly puss, but I don\u2019t mind being managed by you and Beth. Here, give me a bit of paper, and let us have done with this nonsense.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe note was written in the terms which one gentleman would use to another after offering some deep insult. Jo dropped a kiss on the top of Mr. Laurence\u2019s bald head, and ran up to slip the apology under Laurie\u2019s door, advising him through the keyhole to be submissive, decorous, and a few other agreeable impossibilities. Finding the door locked again, she left the note to do its work, and was going quietly away, when the young gentleman slid down the banisters, and waited for her at the bottom, saying, with his most virtuous expression of countenance, \u201cWhat a good fellow you are, Jo! Did you get blown up?\u201d he added, laughing.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, he was pretty mild, on the whole.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAh! I got it all round. Even you cast me off over there, and I felt just ready to go to the deuce,\u201d he began apologetically.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t talk that way, turn over a new leaf and begin again, Teddy, my son.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI keep turning over new leaves, and spoiling them, as I used to spoil my copybooks, and I make so many beginnings there never will be an end,\u201d he said dolefully.\r\n\r\n\u201cGo and eat your dinner, you\u2019ll feel better after it. Men always croak when they are hungry,\u201d and Jo whisked out at the front door after that.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s a \u2018label\u2019 on my \u2018sect\u2019,\u201d answered Laurie, quoting Amy, as he went to partake of humble pie dutifully with his grandfather, who was quite saintly in temper and overwhelmingly respectful in manner all the rest of the day.\r\n\r\nEveryone thought the matter ended and the little cloud blown over, but the mischief was done, for though others forgot it, Meg remembered. She never alluded to a certain person, but she thought of him a good deal, dreamed dreams more than ever, and once Jo, rummaging her sister\u2019s desk for stamps, found a bit of paper scribbled over with the words, \u2018Mrs. John Brooke\u2019, whereat she groaned tragically and cast it into the fire, feeling that Laurie\u2019s prank had hastened the evil day for her.\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-TWO\r\nPLEASANT MEADOWS\r\n\r\nLike sunshine after a storm were the peaceful weeks which followed. The invalids improved rapidly, and Mr. March began to talk of returning early in the new year. Beth was soon able to lie on the study sofa all day, amusing herself with the well-beloved cats at first, and in time with doll\u2019s sewing, which had fallen sadly behind-hand. Her once active limbs were so stiff and feeble that Jo took her for a daily airing about the house in her strong arms. Meg cheerfully blackened and burned her white hands cooking delicate messes for \u2018the dear\u2019, while Amy, a loyal slave of the ring, celebrated her return by giving away as many of her treasures as she could prevail on her sisters to accept.\r\n\r\nAs Christmas approached, the usual mysteries began to haunt the house, and Jo frequently convulsed the family by proposing utterly impossible or magnificently absurd ceremonies, in honor of this unusually merry Christmas. Laurie was equally impracticable, and would have had bonfires, skyrockets, and triumphal arches, if he had had his own way. After many skirmishes and snubbings, the ambitious pair were considered effectually quenched and went about with forlorn faces, which were rather belied by explosions of laughter when the two got together.\r\n\r\nSeveral days of unusually mild weather fitly ushered in a splendid Christmas Day. Hannah \u2018felt in her bones\u2019 that it was going to be an unusually fine day, and she proved herself a true prophetess, for everybody and everything seemed bound to produce a grand success. To begin with, Mr. March wrote that he should soon be with them, then Beth felt uncommonly well that morning, and, being dressed in her mother\u2019s gift, a soft crimson merino wrapper, was borne in high triumph to the window to behold the offering of Jo and Laurie. The Unquenchables had done their best to be worthy of the name, for like elves they had worked by night and conjured up a comical surprise. Out in the garden stood a stately snow maiden, crowned with holly, bearing a basket of fruit and flowers in one hand, a great roll of music in the other, a perfect rainbow of an Afghan round her chilly shoulders, and a Christmas carol issuing from her lips on a pink paper streamer.\r\n\r\nTHE JUNGFRAU TO BETH\r\n\r\nGod bless you, dear Queen Bess!\r\nMay nothing you dismay,\r\nBut health and peace and happiness\r\nBe yours, this Christmas day.\r\n\r\nHere\u2019s fruit to feed our busy bee,\r\nAnd flowers for her nose.\r\nHere\u2019s music for her pianee,\r\nAn afghan for her toes,\r\n\r\nA portrait of Joanna, see,\r\nBy Raphael No. 2,\r\nWho laboured with great industry\r\nTo make it fair and true.\r\n\r\nAccept a ribbon red, I beg,\r\nFor Madam Purrer\u2019s tail,\r\nAnd ice cream made by lovely Peg,\r\nA Mont Blanc in a pail.\r\n\r\nTheir dearest love my makers laid\r\nWithin my breast of snow.\r\nAccept it, and the Alpine maid,\r\nFrom Laurie and from Jo.\r\n\r\nHow Beth laughed when she saw it, how Laurie ran up and down to bring in the gifts, and what ridiculous speeches Jo made as she presented them.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m so full of happiness, that if Father was only here, I couldn\u2019t hold one drop more,\u201d said Beth, quite sighing with contentment as Jo carried her off to the study to rest after the excitement, and to refresh herself with some of the delicious grapes the \u2018Jungfrau\u2019 had sent her.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo am I,\u201d added Jo, slapping the pocket wherein reposed the long-desired Undine and Sintram.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m sure I am,\u201d echoed Amy, poring over the engraved copy of the Madonna and Child, which her mother had given her in a pretty frame.\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course I am!\u201d cried Meg, smoothing the silvery folds of her first silk dress, for Mr. Laurence had insisted on giving it. \u201cHow can I be otherwise?\u201d said Mrs. March gratefully, as her eyes went from her husband\u2019s letter to Beth\u2019s smiling face, and her hand caressed the brooch made of gray and golden, chestnut and dark brown hair, which the girls had just fastened on her breast.\r\n\r\nNow and then, in this workaday world, things do happen in the delightful storybook fashion, and what a comfort it is. Half an hour after everyone had said they were so happy they could only hold one drop more, the drop came. Laurie opened the parlor door and popped his head in very quietly. He might just as well have turned a somersault and uttered an Indian war whoop, for his face was so full of suppressed excitement and his voice so treacherously joyful that everyone jumped up, though he only said, in a queer, breathless voice, \u201cHere\u2019s another Christmas present for the March family.\u201d\r\n\r\nBefore the words were well out of his mouth, he was whisked away somehow, and in his place appeared a tall man, muffled up to the eyes, leaning on the arm of another tall man, who tried to say something and couldn\u2019t. Of course there was a general stampede, and for several minutes everybody seemed to lose their wits, for the strangest things were done, and no one said a word.\r\n\r\nMr. March became invisible in the embrace of four pairs of loving arms. Jo disgraced herself by nearly fainting away, and had to be doctored by Laurie in the china closet. Mr. Brooke kissed Meg entirely by mistake, as he somewhat incoherently explained. And Amy, the dignified, tumbled over a stool, and never stopping to get up, hugged and cried over her father\u2019s boots in the most touching manner. Mrs. March was the first to recover herself, and held up her hand with a warning, \u201cHush! Remember Beth.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut it was too late. The study door flew open, the little red wrapper appeared on the threshold, joy put strength into the feeble limbs, and Beth ran straight into her father\u2019s arms. Never mind what happened just after that, for the full hearts overflowed, washing away the bitterness of the past and leaving only the sweetness of the present.\r\n\r\nIt was not at all romantic, but a hearty laugh set everybody straight again, for Hannah was discovered behind the door, sobbing over the fat turkey, which she had forgotten to put down when she rushed up from the kitchen. As the laugh subsided, Mrs. March began to thank Mr. Brooke for his faithful care of her husband, at which Mr. Brooke suddenly remembered that Mr. March needed rest, and seizing Laurie, he precipitately retired. Then the two invalids were ordered to repose, which they did, by both sitting in one big chair and talking hard.\r\n\r\nMr. March told how he had longed to surprise them, and how, when the fine weather came, he had been allowed by his doctor to take advantage of it, how devoted Brooke had been, and how he was altogether a most estimable and upright young man. Why Mr. March paused a minute just there, and after a glance at Meg, who was violently poking the fire, looked at his wife with an inquiring lift of the eyebrows, I leave you to imagine. Also why Mrs. March gently nodded her head and asked, rather abruptly, if he wouldn\u2019t like to have something to eat. Jo saw and understood the look, and she stalked grimly away to get wine and beef tea, muttering to herself as she slammed the door, \u201cI hate estimable young men with brown eyes!\u201d\r\n\r\nThere never was such a Christmas dinner as they had that day. The fat turkey was a sight to behold, when Hannah sent him up, stuffed, browned, and decorated. So was the plum pudding, which melted in one\u2019s mouth, likewise the jellies, in which Amy reveled like a fly in a honeypot. Everything turned out well, which was a mercy, Hannah said, \u201cFor my mind was that flustered, Mum, that it\u2019s a merrycle I didn\u2019t roast the pudding, and stuff the turkey with raisins, let alone bilin\u2019 of it in a cloth.\u201d\r\n\r\nMr. Laurence and his grandson dined with them, also Mr. Brooke, at whom Jo glowered darkly, to Laurie\u2019s infinite amusement. Two easy chairs stood side by side at the head of the table, in which sat Beth and her father, feasting modestly on chicken and a little fruit. They drank healths, told stories, sang songs, \u2018reminisced\u2019, as the old folks say, and had a thoroughly good time. A sleigh ride had been planned, but the girls would not leave their father, so the guests departed early, and as twilight gathered, the happy family sat together round the fire.\r\n\r\n\u201cJust a year ago we were groaning over the dismal Christmas we expected to have. Do you remember?\u201d asked Jo, breaking a short pause which had followed a long conversation about many things.\r\n\r\n\u201cRather a pleasant year on the whole!\u201d said Meg, smiling at the fire, and congratulating herself on having treated Mr. Brooke with dignity.\r\n\r\n\u201cI think it\u2019s been a pretty hard one,\u201d observed Amy, watching the light shine on her ring with thoughtful eyes.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad it\u2019s over, because we\u2019ve got you back,\u201d whispered Beth, who sat on her father\u2019s knee.\r\n\r\n\u201cRather a rough road for you to travel, my little pilgrims, especially the latter part of it. But you have got on bravely, and I think the burdens are in a fair way to tumble off very soon,\u201d said Mr. March, looking with fatherly satisfaction at the four young faces gathered round him.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow do you know? Did Mother tell you?\u201d asked Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot much. Straws show which way the wind blows, and I\u2019ve made several discoveries today.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, tell us what they are!\u201d cried Meg, who sat beside him.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere is one.\u201d And taking up the hand which lay on the arm of his chair, he pointed to the roughened forefinger, a burn on the back, and two or three little hard spots on the palm. \u201cI remember a time when this hand was white and smooth, and your first care was to keep it so. It was very pretty then, but to me it is much prettier now, for in this seeming blemishes I read a little history. A burnt offering has been made to vanity, this hardened palm has earned something better than blisters, and I\u2019m sure the sewing done by these pricked fingers will last a long time, so much good will went into the stitches. Meg, my dear, I value the womanly skill which keeps home happy more than white hands or fashionable accomplishments. I\u2019m proud to shake this good, industrious little hand, and hope I shall not soon be asked to give it away.\u201d\r\n\r\nIf Meg had wanted a reward for hours of patient labor, she received it in the hearty pressure of her father\u2019s hand and the approving smile he gave her.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat about Jo? Please say something nice, for she has tried so hard and been so very, very good to me,\u201d said Beth in her father\u2019s ear.\r\n\r\nHe laughed and looked across at the tall girl who sat opposite, with an unusually mild expression in her face.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn spite of the curly crop, I don\u2019t see the \u2018son Jo\u2019 whom I left a year ago,\u201d said Mr. March. \u201cI see a young lady who pins her collar straight, laces her boots neatly, and neither whistles, talks slang, nor lies on the rug as she used to do. Her face is rather thin and pale just now, with watching and anxiety, but I like to look at it, for it has grown gentler, and her voice is lower. She doesn\u2019t bounce, but moves quietly, and takes care of a certain little person in a motherly way which delights me. I rather miss my wild girl, but if I get a strong, helpful, tenderhearted woman in her place, I shall feel quite satisfied. I don\u2019t know whether the shearing sobered our black sheep, but I do know that in all Washington I couldn\u2019t find anything beautiful enough to be bought with the five-and-twenty dollars my good girl sent me.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo\u2019s keen eyes were rather dim for a minute, and her thin face grew rosy in the firelight as she received her father\u2019s praise, feeling that she did deserve a portion of it.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, Beth,\u201d said Amy, longing for her turn, but ready to wait.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s so little of her, I\u2019m afraid to say much, for fear she will slip away altogether, though she is not so shy as she used to be,\u201d began their father cheerfully. But recollecting how nearly he had lost her, he held her close, saying tenderly, with her cheek against his own, \u201cI\u2019ve got you safe, my Beth, and I\u2019ll keep you so, please God.\u201d\r\n\r\nAfter a minute\u2019s silence, he looked down at Amy, who sat on the cricket at his feet, and said, with a caress of the shining hair...\r\n\r\n\u201cI observed that Amy took drumsticks at dinner, ran errands for her mother all the afternoon, gave Meg her place tonight, and has waited on every one with patience and good humor. I also observe that she does not fret much nor look in the glass, and has not even mentioned a very pretty ring which she wears, so I conclude that she has learned to think of other people more and of herself less, and has decided to try and mold her character as carefully as she molds her little clay figures. I am glad of this, for though I should be very proud of a graceful statue made by her, I shall be infinitely prouder of a lovable daughter with a talent for making life beautiful to herself and others.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat are you thinking of, Beth?\u201d asked Jo, when Amy had thanked her father and told about her ring.\r\n\r\n\u201cI read in Pilgrim\u2019s Progress today how, after many troubles, Christian and Hopeful came to a pleasant green meadow where lilies bloomed all year round, and there they rested happily, as we do now, before they went on to their journey\u2019s end,\u201d answered Beth, adding, as she slipped out of her father\u2019s arms and went to the instrument, \u201cIt\u2019s singing time now, and I want to be in my old place. I\u2019ll try to sing the song of the shepherd boy which the Pilgrims heard. I made the music for Father, because he likes the verses.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo, sitting at the dear little piano, Beth softly touched the keys, and in the sweet voice they had never thought to hear again, sang to her own accompaniment the quaint hymn, which was a singularly fitting song for her.\r\n\r\nHe that is down need fear no fall,\r\nHe that is low no pride.\r\nHe that is humble ever shall\r\nHave God to be his guide.\r\n\r\nI am content with what I have,\r\nLittle be it, or much.\r\nAnd, Lord! Contentment still I crave,\r\nBecause Thou savest such.\r\n\r\nFulness to them a burden is,\r\nThat go on pilgrimage.\r\nHere little, and hereafter bliss,\r\nIs best from age to age!\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-THREE\r\nAUNT MARCH SETTLES THE QUESTION\r\n\r\nLike bees swarming after their queen, mother and daughters hovered about Mr. March the next day, neglecting everything to look at, wait upon, and listen to the new invalid, who was in a fair way to be killed by kindness. As he sat propped up in a big chair by Beth\u2019s sofa, with the other three close by, and Hannah popping in her head now and then \u2018to peek at the dear man\u2019, nothing seemed needed to complete their happiness. But something was needed, and the elder ones felt it, though none confessed the fact. Mr. and Mrs. March looked at one another with an anxious expression, as their eyes followed Meg. Jo had sudden fits of sobriety, and was seen to shake her fist at Mr. Brooke\u2019s umbrella, which had been left in the hall. Meg was absent-minded, shy, and silent, started when the bell rang, and colored when John\u2019s name was mentioned. Amy said, \u201cEveryone seemed waiting for something, and couldn\u2019t settle down, which was queer, since Father was safe at home,\u201d and Beth innocently wondered why their neighbors didn\u2019t run over as usual.\r\n\r\nLaurie went by in the afternoon, and seeing Meg at the window, seemed suddenly possessed with a melodramatic fit, for he fell down on one knee in the snow, beat his breast, tore his hair, and clasped his hands imploringly, as if begging some boon. And when Meg told him to behave himself and go away, he wrung imaginary tears out of his handkerchief, and staggered round the corner as if in utter despair.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat does the goose mean?\u201d said Meg, laughing and trying to look unconscious.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s showing you how your John will go on by-and-by. Touching, isn\u2019t it?\u201d answered Jo scornfully.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t say my John, it isn\u2019t proper or true,\u201d but Meg\u2019s voice lingered over the words as if they sounded pleasant to her. \u201cPlease don\u2019t plague me, Jo, I\u2019ve told you I don\u2019t care much about him, and there isn\u2019t to be anything said, but we are all to be friendly, and go on as before.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe can\u2019t, for something has been said, and Laurie\u2019s mischief has spoiled you for me. I see it, and so does Mother. You are not like your old self a bit, and seem ever so far away from me. I don\u2019t mean to plague you and will bear it like a man, but I do wish it was all settled. I hate to wait, so if you mean ever to do it, make haste and have it over quickly,\u201d said Jo pettishly.\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t say anything till he speaks, and he won\u2019t, because Father said I was too young,\u201d began Meg, bending over her work with a queer little smile, which suggested that she did not quite agree with her father on that point.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf he did speak, you wouldn\u2019t know what to say, but would cry or blush, or let him have his own way, instead of giving a good, decided no.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m not so silly and weak as you think. I know just what I should say, for I\u2019ve planned it all, so I needn\u2019t be taken unawares. There\u2019s no knowing what may happen, and I wished to be prepared.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo couldn\u2019t help smiling at the important air which Meg had unconsciously assumed and which was as becoming as the pretty color varying in her cheeks.\r\n\r\n\u201cWould you mind telling me what you\u2019d say?\u201d asked Jo more respectfully.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot at all. You are sixteen now, quite old enough to be my confidant, and my experience will be useful to you by-and-by, perhaps, in your own affairs of this sort.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t mean to have any. It\u2019s fun to watch other people philander, but I should feel like a fool doing it myself,\u201d said Jo, looking alarmed at the thought.\r\n\r\n\u201cI think not, if you liked anyone very much, and he liked you.\u201d Meg spoke as if to herself, and glanced out at the lane where she had often seen lovers walking together in the summer twilight.\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought you were going to tell your speech to that man,\u201d said Jo, rudely shortening her sister\u2019s little reverie.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, I should merely say, quite calmly and decidedly, \u2018Thank you, Mr. Brooke, you are very kind, but I agree with Father that I am too young to enter into any engagement at present, so please say no more, but let us be friends as we were.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHum, that\u2019s stiff and cool enough! I don\u2019t believe you\u2019ll ever say it, and I know he won\u2019t be satisfied if you do. If he goes on like the rejected lovers in books, you\u2019ll give in, rather than hurt his feelings.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I won\u2019t. I shall tell him I\u2019ve made up my mind, and shall walk out of the room with dignity.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg rose as she spoke, and was just going to rehearse the dignified exit, when a step in the hall made her fly into her seat and begin to sew as fast as if her life depended on finishing that particular seam in a given time. Jo smothered a laugh at the sudden change, and when someone gave a modest tap, opened the door with a grim aspect which was anything but hospitable.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood afternoon. I came to get my umbrella, that is, to see how your father finds himself today,\u201d said Mr. Brooke, getting a trifle confused as his eyes went from one telltale face to the other.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s very well, he\u2019s in the rack. I\u2019ll get him, and tell it you are here.\u201d And having jumbled her father and the umbrella well together in her reply, Jo slipped out of the room to give Meg a chance to make her speech and air her dignity. But the instant she vanished, Meg began to sidle toward the door, murmuring...\r\n\r\n\u201cMother will like to see you. Pray sit down, I\u2019ll call her.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t go. Are you afraid of me, Margaret?\u201d and Mr. Brooke looked so hurt that Meg thought she must have done something very rude. She blushed up to the little curls on her forehead, for he had never called her Margaret before, and she was surprised to find how natural and sweet it seemed to hear him say it. Anxious to appear friendly and at her ease, she put out her hand with a confiding gesture, and said gratefully...\r\n\r\n\u201cHow can I be afraid when you have been so kind to Father? I only wish I could thank you for it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShall I tell you how?\u201d asked Mr. Brooke, holding the small hand fast in both his own, and looking down at Meg with so much love in the brown eyes that her heart began to flutter, and she both longed to run away and to stop and listen.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh no, please don\u2019t, I\u2019d rather not,\u201d she said, trying to withdraw her hand, and looking frightened in spite of her denial.\r\n\r\n\u201cI won\u2019t trouble you. I only want to know if you care for me a little, Meg. I love you so much, dear,\u201d added Mr. Brooke tenderly.\r\n\r\nThis was the moment for the calm, proper speech, but Meg didn\u2019t make it. She forgot every word of it, hung her head, and answered, \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d so softly that John had to stoop down to catch the foolish little reply.\r\n\r\nHe seemed to think it was worth the trouble, for he smiled to himself as if quite satisfied, pressed the plump hand gratefully, and said in his most persuasive tone, \u201cWill you try and find out? I want to know so much, for I can\u2019t go to work with any heart until I learn whether I am to have my reward in the end or not.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m too young,\u201d faltered Meg, wondering why she was so fluttered, yet rather enjoying it.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll wait, and in the meantime, you could be learning to like me. Would it be a very hard lesson, dear?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot if I chose to learn it, but. . .\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease choose to learn, Meg. I love to teach, and this is easier than German,\u201d broke in John, getting possession of the other hand, so that she had no way of hiding her face as he bent to look into it.\r\n\r\nHis tone was properly beseeching, but stealing a shy look at him, Meg saw that his eyes were merry as well as tender, and that he wore the satisfied smile of one who had no doubt of his success. This nettled her. Annie Moffat\u2019s foolish lessons in coquetry came into her mind, and the love of power, which sleeps in the bosoms of the best of little women, woke up all of a sudden and took possession of her. She felt excited and strange, and not knowing what else to do, followed a capricious impulse, and, withdrawing her hands, said petulantly, \u201cI don\u2019t choose. Please go away and let me be!\u201d\r\n\r\nPoor Mr. Brooke looked as if his lovely castle in the air was tumbling about his ears, for he had never seen Meg in such a mood before, and it rather bewildered him.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you really mean that?\u201d he asked anxiously, following her as she walked away.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I do. I don\u2019t want to be worried about such things. Father says I needn\u2019t, it\u2019s too soon and I\u2019d rather not.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMayn\u2019t I hope you\u2019ll change your mind by-and-by? I\u2019ll wait and say nothing till you have had more time. Don\u2019t play with me, Meg. I didn\u2019t think that of you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t think of me at all. I\u2019d rather you wouldn\u2019t,\u201d said Meg, taking a naughty satisfaction in trying her lover\u2019s patience and her own power.\r\n\r\nHe was grave and pale now, and looked decidedly more like the novel heroes whom she admired, but he neither slapped his forehead nor tramped about the room as they did. He just stood looking at her so wistfully, so tenderly, that she found her heart relenting in spite of herself. What would have happened next I cannot say, if Aunt March had not come hobbling in at this interesting minute.\r\n\r\nThe old lady couldn\u2019t resist her longing to see her nephew, for she had met Laurie as she took her airing, and hearing of Mr. March\u2019s arrival, drove straight out to see him. The family were all busy in the back part of the house, and she had made her way quietly in, hoping to surprise them. She did surprise two of them so much that Meg started as if she had seen a ghost, and Mr. Brooke vanished into the study.\r\n\r\n\u201cBless me, what\u2019s all this?\u201d cried the old lady with a rap of her cane as she glanced from the pale young gentleman to the scarlet young lady.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s Father\u2019s friend. I\u2019m so surprised to see you!\u201d stammered Meg, feeling that she was in for a lecture now.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s evident,\u201d returned Aunt March, sitting down. \u201cBut what is Father\u2019s friend saying to make you look like a peony? There\u2019s mischief going on, and I insist upon knowing what it is,\u201d with another rap.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe were only talking. Mr. Brooke came for his umbrella,\u201d began Meg, wishing that Mr. Brooke and the umbrella were safely out of the house.\r\n\r\n\u201cBrooke? That boy\u2019s tutor? Ah! I understand now. I know all about it. Jo blundered into a wrong message in one of your Father\u2019s letters, and I made her tell me. You haven\u2019t gone and accepted him, child?\u201d cried Aunt March, looking scandalized.\r\n\r\n\u201cHush! He\u2019ll hear. Shan\u2019t I call Mother?\u201d said Meg, much troubled.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot yet. I\u2019ve something to say to you, and I must free my mind at once. Tell me, do you mean to marry this Cook? If you do, not one penny of my money ever goes to you. Remember that, and be a sensible girl,\u201d said the old lady impressively.\r\n\r\nNow Aunt March possessed in perfection the art of rousing the spirit of opposition in the gentlest people, and enjoyed doing it. The best of us have a spice of perversity in us, especially when we are young and in love. If Aunt March had begged Meg to accept John Brooke, she would probably have declared she couldn\u2019t think of it, but as she was preemptorily ordered not to like him, she immediately made up her mind that she would. Inclination as well as perversity made the decision easy, and being already much excited, Meg opposed the old lady with unusual spirit.\r\n\r\n\u201cI shall marry whom I please, Aunt March, and you can leave your money to anyone you like,\u201d she said, nodding her head with a resolute air.\r\n\r\n\u201cHighty-tighty! Is that the way you take my advice, Miss? You\u2019ll be sorry for it by-and-by, when you\u2019ve tried love in a cottage and found it a failure.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt can\u2019t be a worse one than some people find in big houses,\u201d retorted Meg.\r\n\r\nAunt March put on her glasses and took a look at the girl, for she did not know her in this new mood. Meg hardly knew herself, she felt so brave and independent, so glad to defend John and assert her right to love him, if she liked. Aunt March saw that she had begun wrong, and after a little pause, made a fresh start, saying as mildly as she could, \u201cNow, Meg, my dear, be reasonable and take my advice. I mean it kindly, and don\u2019t want you to spoil your whole life by making a mistake at the beginning. You ought to marry well and help your family. It\u2019s your duty to make a rich match and it ought to be impressed upon you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFather and Mother don\u2019t think so. They like John though he is poor.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYour parents, my dear, have no more worldly wisdom than a pair of babies.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad of it,\u201d cried Meg stoutly.\r\n\r\nAunt March took no notice, but went on with her lecture. \u201cThis Rook is poor and hasn\u2019t got any rich relations, has he?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, but he has many warm friends.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou can\u2019t live on friends, try it and see how cool they\u2019ll grow. He hasn\u2019t any business, has he?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot yet. Mr. Laurence is going to help him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat won\u2019t last long. James Laurence is a crotchety old fellow and not to be depended on. So you intend to marry a man without money, position, or business, and go on working harder than you do now, when you might be comfortable all your days by minding me and doing better? I thought you had more sense, Meg.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI couldn\u2019t do better if I waited half my life! John is good and wise, he\u2019s got heaps of talent, he\u2019s willing to work and sure to get on, he\u2019s so energetic and brave. Everyone likes and respects him, and I\u2019m proud to think he cares for me, though I\u2019m so poor and young and silly,\u201d said Meg, looking prettier than ever in her earnestness.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe knows you have got rich relations, child. That\u2019s the secret of his liking, I suspect.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAunt March, how dare you say such a thing? John is above such meanness, and I won\u2019t listen to you a minute if you talk so,\u201d cried Meg indignantly, forgetting everything but the injustice of the old lady\u2019s suspicions. \u201cMy John wouldn\u2019t marry for money, any more than I would. We are willing to work and we mean to wait. I\u2019m not afraid of being poor, for I\u2019ve been happy so far, and I know I shall be with him because he loves me, and I...\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg stopped there, remembering all of a sudden that she hadn\u2019t made up her mind, that she had told \u2018her John\u2019 to go away, and that he might be overhearing her inconsistent remarks.\r\n\r\nAunt March was very angry, for she had set her heart on having her pretty niece make a fine match, and something in the girl\u2019s happy young face made the lonely old woman feel both sad and sour.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I wash my hands of the whole affair! You are a willful child, and you\u2019ve lost more than you know by this piece of folly. No, I won\u2019t stop. I\u2019m disappointed in you, and haven\u2019t spirits to see your father now. Don\u2019t expect anything from me when you are married. Your Mr. Brooke\u2019s friends must take care of you. I\u2019m done with you forever.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd slamming the door in Meg\u2019s face, Aunt March drove off in high dudgeon. She seemed to take all the girl\u2019s courage with her, for when left alone, Meg stood for a moment, undecided whether to laugh or cry. Before she could make up her mind, she was taken possession of by Mr. Brooke, who said all in one breath, \u201cI couldn\u2019t help hearing, Meg. Thank you for defending me, and Aunt March for proving that you do care for me a little bit.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t know how much till she abused you,\u201d began Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd I needn\u2019t go away, but may stay and be happy, may I, dear?\u201d\r\n\r\nHere was another fine chance to make the crushing speech and the stately exit, but Meg never thought of doing either, and disgraced herself forever in Jo\u2019s eyes by meekly whispering, \u201cYes, John,\u201d and hiding her face on Mr. Brooke\u2019s waistcoat.\r\n\r\nFifteen minutes after Aunt March\u2019s departure, Jo came softly downstairs, paused an instant at the parlor door, and hearing no sound within, nodded and smiled with a satisfied expression, saying to herself, \u201cShe has seen him away as we planned, and that affair is settled. I\u2019ll go and hear the fun, and have a good laugh over it.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut poor Jo never got her laugh, for she was transfixed upon the threshold by a spectacle which held her there, staring with her mouth nearly as wide open as her eyes. Going in to exult over a fallen enemy and to praise a strong-minded sister for the banishment of an objectionable lover, it certainly was a shock to behold the aforesaid enemy serenely sitting on the sofa, with the strongminded sister enthroned upon his knee and wearing an expression of the most abject submission. Jo gave a sort of gasp, as if a cold shower bath had suddenly fallen upon her, for such an unexpected turning of the tables actually took her breath away. At the odd sound the lovers turned and saw her. Meg jumped up, looking both proud and shy, but \u2018that man\u2019, as Jo called him, actually laughed and said coolly, as he kissed the astonished newcomer, \u201cSister Jo, congratulate us!\u201d\r\n\r\nThat was adding insult to injury, it was altogether too much, and making some wild demonstration with her hands, Jo vanished without a word. Rushing upstairs, she startled the invalids by exclaiming tragically as she burst into the room, \u201cOh, do somebody go down quick! John Brooke is acting dreadfully, and Meg likes it!\u201d\r\n\r\nMr. and Mrs. March left the room with speed, and casting herself upon the bed, Jo cried and scolded tempestuously as she told the awful news to Beth and Amy. The little girls, however, considered it a most agreeable and interesting event, and Jo got little comfort from them, so she went up to her refuge in the garret, and confided her troubles to the rats.\r\n\r\nNobody ever knew what went on in the parlor that afternoon, but a great deal of talking was done, and quiet Mr. Brooke astonished his friends by the eloquence and spirit with which he pleaded his suit, told his plans, and persuaded them to arrange everything just as he wanted it.\r\n\r\nThe tea bell rang before he had finished describing the paradise which he meant to earn for Meg, and he proudly took her in to supper, both looking so happy that Jo hadn\u2019t the heart to be jealous or dismal. Amy was very much impressed by John\u2019s devotion and Meg\u2019s dignity, Beth beamed at them from a distance, while Mr. and Mrs. March surveyed the young couple with such tender satisfaction that it was perfectly evident Aunt March was right in calling them as \u2018unworldly as a pair of babies\u2019. No one ate much, but everyone looked very happy, and the old room seemed to brighten up amazingly when the first romance of the family began there.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou can\u2019t say nothing pleasant ever happens now, can you, Meg?\u201d said Amy, trying to decide how she would group the lovers in a sketch she was planning to make.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I\u2019m sure I can\u2019t. How much has happened since I said that! It seems a year ago,\u201d answered Meg, who was in a blissful dream lifted far above such common things as bread and butter.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe joys come close upon the sorrows this time, and I rather think the changes have begun,\u201d said Mrs. March. \u201cIn most families there comes, now and then, a year full of events. This has been such a one, but it ends well, after all.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHope the next will end better,\u201d muttered Jo, who found it very hard to see Meg absorbed in a stranger before her face, for Jo loved a few persons very dearly and dreaded to have their affection lost or lessened in any way.\r\n\r\n\u201cI hope the third year from this will end better. I mean it shall, if I live to work out my plans,\u201d said Mr. Brooke, smiling at Meg, as if everything had become possible to him now.\r\n\r\n\u201cDoesn\u2019t it seem very long to wait?\u201d asked Amy, who was in a hurry for the wedding.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve got so much to learn before I shall be ready, it seems a short time to me,\u201d answered Meg, with a sweet gravity in her face never seen there before.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou have only to wait, I am to do the work,\u201d said John beginning his labors by picking up Meg\u2019s napkin, with an expression which caused Jo to shake her head, and then say to herself with an air of relief as the front door banged, \u201cHere comes Laurie. Now we shall have some sensible conversation.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut Jo was mistaken, for Laurie came prancing in, overflowing with good spirits, bearing a great bridal-looking bouquet for \u2018Mrs. John Brooke\u2019, and evidently laboring under the delusion that the whole affair had been brought about by his excellent management.\r\n\r\n\u201cI knew Brooke would have it all his own way, he always does, for when he makes up his mind to accomplish anything, it\u2019s done though the sky falls,\u201d said Laurie, when he had presented his offering and his congratulations.\r\n\r\n\u201cMuch obliged for that recommendation. I take it as a good omen for the future and invite you to my wedding on the spot,\u201d answered Mr. Brooke, who felt at peace with all mankind, even his mischievous pupil.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll come if I\u2019m at the ends of the earth, for the sight of Jo\u2019s face alone on that occasion would be worth a long journey. You don\u2019t look festive, ma\u2019am, what\u2019s the matter?\u201d asked Laurie, following her into a corner of the parlor, whither all had adjourned to greet Mr. Laurence.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t approve of the match, but I\u2019ve made up my mind to bear it, and shall not say a word against it,\u201d said Jo solemnly. \u201cYou can\u2019t know how hard it is for me to give up Meg,\u201d she continued with a little quiver in her voice.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t give her up. You only go halves,\u201d said Laurie consolingly.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt can never be the same again. I\u2019ve lost my dearest friend,\u201d sighed Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ve got me, anyhow. I\u2019m not good for much, I know, but I\u2019ll stand by you, Jo, all the days of my life. Upon my word I will!\u201d and Laurie meant what he said.\r\n\r\n\u201cI know you will, and I\u2019m ever so much obliged. You are always a great comfort to me, Teddy,\u201d returned Jo, gratefully shaking hands.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, now, don\u2019t be dismal, there\u2019s a good fellow. It\u2019s all right you see. Meg is happy, Brooke will fly round and get settled immediately, Grandpa will attend to him, and it will be very jolly to see Meg in her own little house. We\u2019ll have capital times after she is gone, for I shall be through college before long, and then we\u2019ll go abroad on some nice trip or other. Wouldn\u2019t that console you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI rather think it would, but there\u2019s no knowing what may happen in three years,\u201d said Jo thoughtfully.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s true. Don\u2019t you wish you could take a look forward and see where we shall all be then? I do,\u201d returned Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cI think not, for I might see something sad, and everyone looks so happy now, I don\u2019t believe they could be much improved.\u201d And Jo\u2019s eyes went slowly round the room, brightening as they looked, for the prospect was a pleasant one.\r\n\r\nFather and Mother sat together, quietly reliving the first chapter of the romance which for them began some twenty years ago. Amy was drawing the lovers, who sat apart in a beautiful world of their own, the light of which touched their faces with a grace the little artist could not copy. Beth lay on her sofa, talking cheerily with her old friend, who held her little hand as if he felt that it possessed the power to lead him along the peaceful way she walked. Jo lounged in her favorite low seat, with the grave quiet look which best became her, and Laurie, leaning on the back of her chair, his chin on a level with her curly head, smiled with his friendliest aspect, and nodded at her in the long glass which reflected them both.\r\n\r\nSo the curtain falls upon Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. Whether it ever rises again, depends upon the reception given the first act of the domestic drama called Little Women.\r\nPART 2\r\n\r\nIn order that we may start afresh and go to Meg\u2019s wedding...\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR\r\nGOSSIP\r\n\r\nIn order that we may start afresh and go to Meg\u2019s wedding with free minds, it will be well to begin with a little gossip about the Marches. And here let me premise that if any of the elders think there is too much \u2018lovering\u2019 in the story, as I fear they may (I\u2019m not afraid the young folks will make that objection), I can only say with Mrs. March, \u201cWhat can you expect when I have four gay girls in the house, and a dashing young neighbor over the way?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe three years that have passed have brought but few changes to the quiet family. The war is over, and Mr. March safely at home, busy with his books and the small parish which found in him a minister by nature as by grace, a quiet, studious man, rich in the wisdom that is better than learning, the charity which calls all mankind \u2018brother\u2019, the piety that blossoms into character, making it august and lovely.\r\n\r\nThese attributes, in spite of poverty and the strict integrity which shut him out from the more worldly successes, attracted to him many admirable persons, as naturally as sweet herbs draw bees, and as naturally he gave them the honey into which fifty years of hard experience had distilled no bitter drop. Earnest young men found the gray-headed scholar as young at heart as they; thoughtful or troubled women instinctively brought their doubts to him, sure of finding the gentlest sympathy, the wisest counsel. Sinners told their sins to the pure-hearted old man and were both rebuked and saved. Gifted men found a companion in him. Ambitious men caught glimpses of nobler ambitions than their own, and even worldlings confessed that his beliefs were beautiful and true, although \u2018they wouldn\u2019t pay\u2019.\r\n\r\nTo outsiders the five energetic women seemed to rule the house, and so they did in many things, but the quiet scholar, sitting among his books, was still the head of the family, the household conscience, anchor, and comforter, for to him the busy, anxious women always turned in troublous times, finding him, in the truest sense of those sacred words, husband and father.\r\n\r\nThe girls gave their hearts into their mother\u2019s keeping, their souls into their father\u2019s, and to both parents, who lived and labored so faithfully for them, they gave a love that grew with their growth and bound them tenderly together by the sweetest tie which blesses life and outlives death.\r\n\r\nMrs. March is as brisk and cheery, though rather grayer, than when we saw her last, and just now so absorbed in Meg\u2019s affairs that the hospitals and homes still full of wounded \u2018boys\u2019 and soldiers\u2019 widows, decidedly miss the motherly missionary\u2019s visits.\r\n\r\nJohn Brooke did his duty manfully for a year, got wounded, was sent home, and not allowed to return. He received no stars or bars, but he deserved them, for he cheerfully risked all he had, and life and love are very precious when both are in full bloom. Perfectly resigned to his discharge, he devoted himself to getting well, preparing for business, and earning a home for Meg. With the good sense and sturdy independence that characterized him, he refused Mr. Laurence\u2019s more generous offers, and accepted the place of bookkeeper, feeling better satisfied to begin with an honestly earned salary than by running any risks with borrowed money.\r\n\r\nMeg had spent the time in working as well as waiting, growing womanly in character, wise in housewifely arts, and prettier than ever, for love is a great beautifier. She had her girlish ambitions and hopes, and felt some disappointment at the humble way in which the new life must begin. Ned Moffat had just married Sallie Gardiner, and Meg couldn\u2019t help contrasting their fine house and carriage, many gifts, and splendid outfit with her own, and secretly wishing she could have the same. But somehow envy and discontent soon vanished when she thought of all the patient love and labor John had put into the little home awaiting her, and when they sat together in the twilight, talking over their small plans, the future always grew so beautiful and bright that she forgot Sallie\u2019s splendor and felt herself the richest, happiest girl in Christendom.\r\n\r\nJo never went back to Aunt March, for the old lady took such a fancy to Amy that she bribed her with the offer of drawing lessons from one of the best teachers going, and for the sake of this advantage, Amy would have served a far harder mistress. So she gave her mornings to duty, her afternoons to pleasure, and prospered finely. Jo meantime devoted herself to literature and Beth, who remained delicate long after the fever was a thing of the past. Not an invalid exactly, but never again the rosy, healthy creature she had been, yet always hopeful, happy, and serene, and busy with the quiet duties she loved, everyone\u2019s friend, and an angel in the house, long before those who loved her most had learned to know it.\r\n\r\nAs long as The Spread Eagle paid her a dollar a column for her \u2018rubbish\u2019, as she called it, Jo felt herself a woman of means, and spun her little romances diligently. But great plans fermented in her busy brain and ambitious mind, and the old tin kitchen in the garret held a slowly increasing pile of blotted manuscript, which was one day to place the name of March upon the roll of fame.\r\n\r\nLaurie, having dutifully gone to college to please his grandfather, was now getting through it in the easiest possible manner to please himself. A universal favorite, thanks to money, manners, much talent, and the kindest heart that ever got its owner into scrapes by trying to get other people out of them, he stood in great danger of being spoiled, and probably would have been, like many another promising boy, if he had not possessed a talisman against evil in the memory of the kind old man who was bound up in his success, the motherly friend who watched over him as if he were her son, and last, but not least by any means, the knowledge that four innocent girls loved, admired, and believed in him with all their hearts.\r\n\r\nBeing only \u2018a glorious human boy\u2019, of course he frolicked and flirted, grew dandified, aquatic, sentimental, or gymnastic, as college fashions ordained, hazed and was hazed, talked slang, and more than once came perilously near suspension and expulsion. But as high spirits and the love of fun were the causes of these pranks, he always managed to save himself by frank confession, honorable atonement, or the irresistible power of persuasion which he possessed in perfection. In fact, he rather prided himself on his narrow escapes, and liked to thrill the girls with graphic accounts of his triumphs over wrathful tutors, dignified professors, and vanquished enemies. The \u2018men of my class\u2019, were heroes in the eyes of the girls, who never wearied of the exploits of \u2018our fellows\u2019, and were frequently allowed to bask in the smiles of these great creatures, when Laurie brought them home with him.\r\n\r\nAmy especially enjoyed this high honor, and became quite a belle among them, for her ladyship early felt and learned to use the gift of fascination with which she was endowed. Meg was too much absorbed in her private and particular John to care for any other lords of creation, and Beth too shy to do more than peep at them and wonder how Amy dared to order them about so, but Jo felt quite in her own element, and found it very difficult to refrain from imitating the gentlemanly attitudes, phrases, and feats, which seemed more natural to her than the decorums prescribed for young ladies. They all liked Jo immensely, but never fell in love with her, though very few escaped without paying the tribute of a sentimental sigh or two at Amy\u2019s shrine. And speaking of sentiment brings us very naturally to the \u2018Dovecote\u2019.\r\n\r\nThat was the name of the little brown house Mr. Brooke had prepared for Meg\u2019s first home. Laurie had christened it, saying it was highly appropriate to the gentle lovers who \u2018went on together like a pair of turtledoves, with first a bill and then a coo\u2019. It was a tiny house, with a little garden behind and a lawn about as big as a pocket handkerchief in the front. Here Meg meant to have a fountain, shrubbery, and a profusion of lovely flowers, though just at present the fountain was represented by a weather-beaten urn, very like a dilapidated slopbowl, the shrubbery consisted of several young larches, undecided whether to live or die, and the profusion of flowers was merely hinted by regiments of sticks to show where seeds were planted. But inside, it was altogether charming, and the happy bride saw no fault from garret to cellar. To be sure, the hall was so narrow it was fortunate that they had no piano, for one never could have been got in whole, the dining room was so small that six people were a tight fit, and the kitchen stairs seemed built for the express purpose of precipitating both servants and china pell-mell into the coalbin. But once get used to these slight blemishes and nothing could be more complete, for good sense and good taste had presided over the furnishing, and the result was highly satisfactory. There were no marble-topped tables, long mirrors, or lace curtains in the little parlor, but simple furniture, plenty of books, a fine picture or two, a stand of flowers in the bay window, and, scattered all about, the pretty gifts which came from friendly hands and were the fairer for the loving messages they brought.\r\n\r\nI don\u2019t think the Parian Psyche Laurie gave lost any of its beauty because John put up the bracket it stood upon, that any upholsterer could have draped the plain muslin curtains more gracefully than Amy\u2019s artistic hand, or that any store-room was ever better provided with good wishes, merry words, and happy hopes than that in which Jo and her mother put away Meg\u2019s few boxes, barrels, and bundles, and I am morally certain that the spandy new kitchen never could have looked so cozy and neat if Hannah had not arranged every pot and pan a dozen times over, and laid the fire all ready for lighting the minute \u2018Mis. Brooke came home\u2019. I also doubt if any young matron ever began life with so rich a supply of dusters, holders, and piece bags, for Beth made enough to last till the silver wedding came round, and invented three different kinds of dishcloths for the express service of the bridal china.\r\n\r\nPeople who hire all these things done for them never know what they lose, for the homeliest tasks get beautified if loving hands do them, and Meg found so many proofs of this that everything in her small nest, from the kitchen roller to the silver vase on her parlor table, was eloquent of home love and tender forethought.\r\n\r\nWhat happy times they had planning together, what solemn shopping excursions, what funny mistakes they made, and what shouts of laughter arose over Laurie\u2019s ridiculous bargains. In his love of jokes, this young gentleman, though nearly through college, was a much of a boy as ever. His last whim had been to bring with him on his weekly visits some new, useful, and ingenious article for the young housekeeper. Now a bag of remarkable clothespins, next, a wonderful nutmeg grater which fell to pieces at the first trial, a knife cleaner that spoiled all the knives, or a sweeper that picked the nap neatly off the carpet and left the dirt, labor-saving soap that took the skin off one\u2019s hands, infallible cements which stuck firmly to nothing but the fingers of the deluded buyer, and every kind of tinware, from a toy savings bank for odd pennies, to a wonderful boiler which would wash articles in its own steam with every prospect of exploding in the process.\r\n\r\nIn vain Meg begged him to stop. John laughed at him, and Jo called him \u2018Mr. Toodles\u2019. He was possessed with a mania for patronizing Yankee ingenuity, and seeing his friends fitly furnished forth. So each week beheld some fresh absurdity.\r\n\r\nEverything was done at last, even to Amy\u2019s arranging different colored soaps to match the different colored rooms, and Beth\u2019s setting the table for the first meal.\r\n\r\n\u201cAre you satisfied? Does it seem like home, and do you feel as if you should be happy here?\u201d asked Mrs. March, as she and her daughter went through the new kingdom arm in arm, for just then they seemed to cling together more tenderly than ever.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Mother, perfectly satisfied, thanks to you all, and so happy that I can\u2019t talk about it,\u201d with a look that was far better than words.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf she only had a servant or two it would be all right,\u201d said Amy, coming out of the parlor, where she had been trying to decide whether the bronze Mercury looked best on the whatnot or the mantlepiece.\r\n\r\n\u201cMother and I have talked that over, and I have made up my mind to try her way first. There will be so little to do that with Lotty to run my errands and help me here and there, I shall only have enough work to keep me from getting lazy or homesick,\u201d answered Meg tranquilly.\r\n\r\n\u201cSallie Moffat has four,\u201d began Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf Meg had four, the house wouldn\u2019t hold them, and master and missis would have to camp in the garden,\u201d broke in Jo, who, enveloped in a big blue pinafore, was giving the last polish to the door handles.\r\n\r\n\u201cSallie isn\u2019t a poor man\u2019s wife, and many maids are in keeping with her fine establishment. Meg and John begin humbly, but I have a feeling that there will be quite as much happiness in the little house as in the big one. It\u2019s a great mistake for young girls like Meg to leave themselves nothing to do but dress, give orders, and gossip. When I was first married, I used to long for my new clothes to wear out or get torn, so that I might have the pleasure of mending them, for I got heartily sick of doing fancywork and tending my pocket handkerchief.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy didn\u2019t you go into the kitchen and make messes, as Sallie says she does to amuse herself, though they never turn out well and the servants laugh at her,\u201d said Meg.\r\n\r\n\u201cI did after a while, not to \u2018mess\u2019 but to learn of Hannah how things should be done, that my servants need not laugh at me. It was play then, but there came a time when I was truly grateful that I not only possessed the will but the power to cook wholesome food for my little girls, and help myself when I could no longer afford to hire help. You begin at the other end, Meg, dear, but the lessons you learn now will be of use to you by-and-by when John is a richer man, for the mistress of a house, however splendid, should know how work ought to be done, if she wishes to be well and honestly served.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Mother, I\u2019m sure of that,\u201d said Meg, listening respectfully to the little lecture, for the best of women will hold forth upon the all absorbing subject of house keeping. \u201cDo you know I like this room most of all in my baby house,\u201d added Meg, a minute after, as they went upstairs and she looked into her well-stored linen closet.\r\n\r\nBeth was there, laying the snowy piles smoothly on the shelves and exulting over the goodly array. All three laughed as Meg spoke, for that linen closet was a joke. You see, having said that if Meg married \u2018that Brooke\u2019 she shouldn\u2019t have a cent of her money, Aunt March was rather in a quandary when time had appeased her wrath and made her repent her vow. She never broke her word, and was much exercised in her mind how to get round it, and at last devised a plan whereby she could satisfy herself. Mrs. Carrol, Florence\u2019s mamma, was ordered to buy, have made, and marked a generous supply of house and table linen, and send it as her present, all of which was faithfully done, but the secret leaked out, and was greatly enjoyed by the family, for Aunt March tried to look utterly unconscious, and insisted that she could give nothing but the old-fashioned pearls long promised to the first bride.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s a housewifely taste which I am glad to see. I had a young friend who set up housekeeping with six sheets, but she had finger bowls for company and that satisfied her,\u201d said Mrs. March, patting the damask tablecloths, with a truly feminine appreciation of their fineness.\r\n\r\n\u201cI haven\u2019t a single finger bowl, but this is a setout that will last me all my days, Hannah says.\u201d And Meg looked quite contented, as well she might.\r\n\r\nA tall, broad-shouldered young fellow, with a cropped head, a felt basin of a hat, and a flyaway coat, came tramping down the road at a great pace, walked over the low fence without stopping to open the gate, straight up to Mrs. March, with both hands out and a hearty...\r\n\r\n\u201cHere I am, Mother! Yes, it\u2019s all right.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe last words were in answer to the look the elder lady gave him, a kindly questioning look which the handsome eyes met so frankly that the little ceremony closed, as usual, with a motherly kiss.\r\n\r\n\u201cFor Mrs. John Brooke, with the maker\u2019s congratulations and compliments. Bless you, Beth! What a refreshing spectacle you are, Jo. Amy, you are getting altogether too handsome for a single lady.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs Laurie spoke, he delivered a brown paper parcel to Meg, pulled Beth\u2019s hair ribbon, stared at Jo\u2019s big pinafore, and fell into an attitude of mock rapture before Amy, then shook hands all round, and everyone began to talk.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere is John?\u201d asked Meg anxiously.\r\n\r\n\u201cStopped to get the license for tomorrow, ma\u2019am.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhich side won the last match, Teddy?\u201d inquired Jo, who persisted in feeling an interest in manly sports despite her nineteen years.\r\n\r\n\u201cOurs, of course. Wish you\u2019d been there to see.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow is the lovely Miss Randal?\u201d asked Amy with a significant smile.\r\n\r\n\u201cMore cruel than ever. Don\u2019t you see how I\u2019m pining away?\u201d and Laurie gave his broad chest a sounding slap and heaved a melodramatic sigh.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the last joke? Undo the bundle and see, Meg,\u201d said Beth, eying the knobby parcel with curiosity.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a useful thing to have in the house in case of fire or thieves,\u201d observed Laurie, as a watchman\u2019s rattle appeared, amid the laughter of the girls.\r\n\r\n\u201cAny time when John is away and you get frightened, Mrs. Meg, just swing that out of the front window, and it will rouse the neighborhood in a jiffy. Nice thing, isn\u2019t it?\u201d and Laurie gave them a sample of its powers that made them cover up their ears.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s gratitude for you! And speaking of gratitude reminds me to mention that you may thank Hannah for saving your wedding cake from destruction. I saw it going into your house as I came by, and if she hadn\u2019t defended it manfully I\u2019d have had a pick at it, for it looked like a remarkably plummy one.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wonder if you will ever grow up, Laurie,\u201d said Meg in a matronly tone.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m doing my best, ma\u2019am, but can\u2019t get much higher, I\u2019m afraid, as six feet is about all men can do in these degenerate days,\u201d responded the young gentleman, whose head was about level with the little chandelier.\r\n\r\n\u201cI suppose it would be profanation to eat anything in this spick-and-span bower, so as I\u2019m tremendously hungry, I propose an adjournment,\u201d he added presently.\r\n\r\n\u201cMother and I are going to wait for John. There are some last things to settle,\u201d said Meg, bustling away.\r\n\r\n\u201cBeth and I are going over to Kitty Bryant\u2019s to get more flowers for tomorrow,\u201d added Amy, tying a picturesque hat over her picturesque curls, and enjoying the effect as much as anybody.\r\n\r\n\u201cCome, Jo, don\u2019t desert a fellow. I\u2019m in such a state of exhaustion I can\u2019t get home without help. Don\u2019t take off your apron, whatever you do, it\u2019s peculiarly becoming,\u201d said Laurie, as Jo bestowed his especial aversion in her capacious pocket and offered her arm to support his feeble steps.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, Teddy, I want to talk seriously to you about tomorrow,\u201d began Jo, as they strolled away together. \u201cYou must promise to behave well, and not cut up any pranks, and spoil our plans.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a prank.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd don\u2019t say funny things when we ought to be sober.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI never do. You are the one for that.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd I implore you not to look at me during the ceremony. I shall certainly laugh if you do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou won\u2019t see me, you\u2019ll be crying so hard that the thick fog round you will obscure the prospect.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI never cry unless for some great affliction.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSuch as fellows going to college, hey?\u201d cut in Laurie, with suggestive laugh.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t be a peacock. I only moaned a trifle to keep the girls company.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cExactly. I say, Jo, how is Grandpa this week? Pretty amiable?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cVery. Why, have you got into a scrape and want to know how he\u2019ll take it?\u201d asked Jo rather sharply.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, Jo, do you think I\u2019d look your mother in the face and say \u2018All right\u2019, if it wasn\u2019t?\u201d and Laurie stopped short, with an injured air.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I don\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen don\u2019t go and be suspicious. I only want some money,\u201d said Laurie, walking on again, appeased by her hearty tone.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou spend a great deal, Teddy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBless you, I don\u2019t spend it, it spends itself somehow, and is gone before I know it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou are so generous and kind-hearted that you let people borrow, and can\u2019t say \u2018No\u2019 to anyone. We heard about Henshaw and all you did for him. If you always spent money in that way, no one would blame you,\u201d said Jo warmly.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, he made a mountain out of a molehill. You wouldn\u2019t have me let that fine fellow work himself to death just for want of a little help, when he is worth a dozen of us lazy chaps, would you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course not, but I don\u2019t see the use of your having seventeen waistcoats, endless neckties, and a new hat every time you come home. I thought you\u2019d got over the dandy period, but every now and then it breaks out in a new spot. Just now it\u2019s the fashion to be hideous, to make your head look like a scrubbing brush, wear a strait jacket, orange gloves, and clumping square-toed boots. If it was cheap ugliness, I\u2019d say nothing, but it costs as much as the other, and I don\u2019t get any satisfaction out of it.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie threw back his head, and laughed so heartily at this attack, that the felt hat fell off, and Jo walked on it, which insult only afforded him an opportunity for expatiating on the advantages of a rough-and-ready costume, as he folded up the maltreated hat, and stuffed it into his pocket.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t lecture any more, there\u2019s a good soul! I have enough all through the week, and like to enjoy myself when I come home. I\u2019ll get myself up regardless of expense tomorrow and be a satisfaction to my friends.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll leave you in peace if you\u2019ll only let your hair grow. I\u2019m not aristocratic, but I do object to being seen with a person who looks like a young prize fighter,\u201d observed Jo severely.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis unassuming style promotes study, that\u2019s why we adopt it,\u201d returned Laurie, who certainly could not be accused of vanity, having voluntarily sacrificed a handsome curly crop to the demand for quarter-inch-long stubble.\r\n\r\n\u201cBy the way, Jo, I think that little Parker is really getting desperate about Amy. He talks of her constantly, writes poetry, and moons about in a most suspicious manner. He\u2019d better nip his little passion in the bud, hadn\u2019t he?\u201d added Laurie, in a confidential, elder brotherly tone, after a minute\u2019s silence.\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course he had. We don\u2019t want any more marrying in this family for years to come. Mercy on us, what are the children thinking of?\u201d and Jo looked as much scandalized as if Amy and little Parker were not yet in their teens.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a fast age, and I don\u2019t know what we are coming to, ma\u2019am. You are a mere infant, but you\u2019ll go next, Jo, and we\u2019ll be left lamenting,\u201d said Laurie, shaking his head over the degeneracy of the times.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t be alarmed. I\u2019m not one of the agreeable sort. Nobody will want me, and it\u2019s a mercy, for there should always be one old maid in a family.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou won\u2019t give anyone a chance,\u201d said Laurie, with a sidelong glance and a little more color than before in his sunburned face. \u201cYou won\u2019t show the soft side of your character, and if a fellow gets a peep at it by accident and can\u2019t help showing that he likes it, you treat him as Mrs. Gummidge did her sweetheart, throw cold water over him, and get so thorny no one dares touch or look at you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t like that sort of thing. I\u2019m too busy to be worried with nonsense, and I think it\u2019s dreadful to break up families so. Now don\u2019t say any more about it. Meg\u2019s wedding has turned all our heads, and we talk of nothing but lovers and such absurdities. I don\u2019t wish to get cross, so let\u2019s change the subject;\u201d and Jo looked quite ready to fling cold water on the slightest provocation.\r\n\r\nWhatever his feelings might have been, Laurie found a vent for them in a long low whistle and the fearful prediction as they parted at the gate, \u201cMark my words, Jo, you\u2019ll go next.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE\r\nTHE FIRST WEDDING\r\n\r\nThe June roses over the porch were awake bright and early on that morning, rejoicing with all their hearts in the cloudless sunshine, like friendly little neighbors, as they were. Quite flushed with excitement were their ruddy faces, as they swung in the wind, whispering to one another what they had seen, for some peeped in at the dining room windows where the feast was spread, some climbed up to nod and smile at the sisters as they dressed the bride, others waved a welcome to those who came and went on various errands in garden, porch, and hall, and all, from the rosiest full-blown flower to the palest baby bud, offered their tribute of beauty and fragrance to the gentle mistress who had loved and tended them so long.\r\n\r\nMeg looked very like a rose herself, for all that was best and sweetest in heart and soul seemed to bloom into her face that day, making it fair and tender, with a charm more beautiful than beauty. Neither silk, lace, nor orange flowers would she have. \u201cI don\u2019t want a fashionable wedding, but only those about me whom I love, and to them I wish to look and be my familiar self.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo she made her wedding gown herself, sewing into it the tender hopes and innocent romances of a girlish heart. Her sisters braided up her pretty hair, and the only ornaments she wore were the lilies of the valley, which \u2018her John\u2019 liked best of all the flowers that grew.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou do look just like our own dear Meg, only so very sweet and lovely that I should hug you if it wouldn\u2019t crumple your dress,\u201d cried Amy, surveying her with delight when all was done.\r\n\r\n\u201cThen I am satisfied. But please hug and kiss me, everyone, and don\u2019t mind my dress. I want a great many crumples of this sort put into it today,\u201d and Meg opened her arms to her sisters, who clung about her with April faces for a minute, feeling that the new love had not changed the old.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow I\u2019m going to tie John\u2019s cravat for him, and then to stay a few minutes with Father quietly in the study,\u201d and Meg ran down to perform these little ceremonies, and then to follow her mother wherever she went, conscious that in spite of the smiles on the motherly face, there was a secret sorrow hid in the motherly heart at the flight of the first bird from the nest.\r\n\r\nAs the younger girls stand together, giving the last touches to their simple toilet, it may be a good time to tell of a few changes which three years have wrought in their appearance, for all are looking their best just now.\r\n\r\nJo\u2019s angles are much softened, she has learned to carry herself with ease, if not grace. The curly crop has lengthened into a thick coil, more becoming to the small head atop of the tall figure. There is a fresh color in her brown cheeks, a soft shine in her eyes, and only gentle words fall from her sharp tongue today.\r\n\r\nBeth has grown slender, pale, and more quiet than ever. The beautiful, kind eyes are larger, and in them lies an expression that saddens one, although it is not sad itself. It is the shadow of pain which touches the young face with such pathetic patience, but Beth seldom complains and always speaks hopefully of \u2018being better soon\u2019.\r\n\r\nAmy is with truth considered \u2018the flower of the family\u2019, for at sixteen she has the air and bearing of a full-grown woman, not beautiful, but possessed of that indescribable charm called grace. One saw it in the lines of her figure, the make and motion of her hands, the flow of her dress, the droop of her hair, unconscious yet harmonious, and as attractive to many as beauty itself. Amy\u2019s nose still afflicted her, for it never would grow Grecian, so did her mouth, being too wide, and having a decided chin. These offending features gave character to her whole face, but she never could see it, and consoled herself with her wonderfully fair complexion, keen blue eyes, and curls more golden and abundant than ever.\r\n\r\nAll three wore suits of thin silver gray (their best gowns for the summer), with blush roses in hair and bosom, and all three looked just what they were, fresh-faced, happy-hearted girls, pausing a moment in their busy lives to read with wistful eyes the sweetest chapter in the romance of womanhood.\r\n\r\nThere were to be no ceremonious performances, everything was to be as natural and homelike as possible, so when Aunt March arrived, she was scandalized to see the bride come running to welcome and lead her in, to find the bridegroom fastening up a garland that had fallen down, and to catch a glimpse of the paternal minister marching upstairs with a grave countenance and a wine bottle under each arm.\r\n\r\n\u201cUpon my word, here\u2019s a state of things!\u201d cried the old lady, taking the seat of honor prepared for her, and settling the folds of her lavender moire with a great rustle. \u201cYou oughtn\u2019t to be seen till the last minute, child.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m not a show, Aunty, and no one is coming to stare at me, to criticize my dress, or count the cost of my luncheon. I\u2019m too happy to care what anyone says or thinks, and I\u2019m going to have my little wedding just as I like it. John, dear, here\u2019s your hammer.\u201d And away went Meg to help \u2018that man\u2019 in his highly improper employment.\r\n\r\nMr. Brooke didn\u2019t even say, \u201cThank you,\u201d but as he stooped for the unromantic tool, he kissed his little bride behind the folding door, with a look that made Aunt March whisk out her pocket handkerchief with a sudden dew in her sharp old eyes.\r\n\r\nA crash, a cry, and a laugh from Laurie, accompanied by the indecorous exclamation, \u201cJupiter Ammon! Jo\u2019s upset the cake again!\u201d caused a momentary flurry, which was hardly over when a flock of cousins arrived, and \u2018the party came in\u2019, as Beth used to say when a child.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t let that young giant come near me, he worries me worse than mosquitoes,\u201d whispered the old lady to Amy, as the rooms filled and Laurie\u2019s black head towered above the rest.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe has promised to be very good today, and he can be perfectly elegant if he likes,\u201d returned Amy, and gliding away to warn Hercules to beware of the dragon, which warning caused him to haunt the old lady with a devotion that nearly distracted her.\r\n\r\nThere was no bridal procession, but a sudden silence fell upon the room as Mr. March and the young couple took their places under the green arch. Mother and sisters gathered close, as if loath to give Meg up. The fatherly voice broke more than once, which only seemed to make the service more beautiful and solemn. The bridegroom\u2019s hand trembled visibly, and no one heard his replies. But Meg looked straight up in her husband\u2019s eyes, and said, \u201cI will!\u201d with such tender trust in her own face and voice that her mother\u2019s heart rejoiced and Aunt March sniffed audibly.\r\n\r\nJo did not cry, though she was very near it once, and was only saved from a demonstration by the consciousness that Laurie was staring fixedly at her, with a comical mixture of merriment and emotion in his wicked black eyes. Beth kept her face hidden on her mother\u2019s shoulder, but Amy stood like a graceful statue, with a most becoming ray of sunshine touching her white forehead and the flower in her hair.\r\n\r\nIt wasn\u2019t at all the thing, I\u2019m afraid, but the minute she was fairly married, Meg cried, \u201cThe first kiss for Marmee!\u201d and turning, gave it with her heart on her lips. During the next fifteen minutes she looked more like a rose than ever, for everyone availed themselves of their privileges to the fullest extent, from Mr. Laurence to old Hannah, who, adorned with a headdress fearfully and wonderfully made, fell upon her in the hall, crying with a sob and a chuckle, \u201cBless you, deary, a hundred times! The cake ain\u2019t hurt a mite, and everything looks lovely.\u201d\r\n\r\nEverybody cleared up after that, and said something brilliant, or tried to, which did just as well, for laughter is ready when hearts are light. There was no display of gifts, for they were already in the little house, nor was there an elaborate breakfast, but a plentiful lunch of cake and fruit, dressed with flowers. Mr. Laurence and Aunt March shrugged and smiled at one another when water, lemonade, and coffee were found to be to only sorts of nectar which the three Hebes carried round. No one said anything, till Laurie, who insisted on serving the bride, appeared before her, with a loaded salver in his hand and a puzzled expression on his face.\r\n\r\n\u201cHas Jo smashed all the bottles by accident?\u201d he whispered, \u201cor am I merely laboring under a delusion that I saw some lying about loose this morning?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, your grandfather kindly offered us his best, and Aunt March actually sent some, but Father put away a little for Beth, and dispatched the rest to the Soldier\u2019s Home. You know he thinks that wine should be used only in illness, and Mother says that neither she nor her daughters will ever offer it to any young man under her roof.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg spoke seriously and expected to see Laurie frown or laugh, but he did neither, for after a quick look at her, he said, in his impetuous way, \u201cI like that! For I\u2019ve seen enough harm done to wish other women would think as you do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou are not made wise by experience, I hope?\u201d and there was an anxious accent in Meg\u2019s voice.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo. I give you my word for it. Don\u2019t think too well of me, either, this is not one of my temptations. Being brought up where wine is as common as water and almost as harmless, I don\u2019t care for it, but when a pretty girl offers it, one doesn\u2019t like to refuse, you see.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut you will, for the sake of others, if not for your own. Come, Laurie, promise, and give me one more reason to call this the happiest day of my life.\u201d\r\n\r\nA demand so sudden and so serious made the young man hesitate a moment, for ridicule is often harder to bear than self-denial. Meg knew that if he gave the promise he would keep it at all costs, and feeling her power, used it as a woman may for her friend\u2019s good. She did not speak, but she looked up at him with a face made very eloquent by happiness, and a smile which said, \u201cNo one can refuse me anything today.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie certainly could not, and with an answering smile, he gave her his hand, saying heartily, \u201cI promise, Mrs. Brooke!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thank you, very, very much.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd I drink \u2018long life to your resolution\u2019, Teddy,\u201d cried Jo, baptizing him with a splash of lemonade, as she waved her glass and beamed approvingly upon him.\r\n\r\nSo the toast was drunk, the pledge made and loyally kept in spite of many temptations, for with instinctive wisdom, the girls seized a happy moment to do their friend a service, for which he thanked them all his life.\r\n\r\nAfter lunch, people strolled about, by twos and threes, through the house and garden, enjoying the sunshine without and within. Meg and John happened to be standing together in the middle of the grass plot, when Laurie was seized with an inspiration which put the finishing touch to this unfashionable wedding.\r\n\r\n\u201cAll the married people take hands and dance round the new-made husband and wife, as the Germans do, while we bachelors and spinsters prance in couples outside!\u201d cried Laurie, promenading down the path with Amy, with such infectious spirit and skill that everyone else followed their example without a murmur. Mr. and Mrs. March, Aunt and Uncle Carrol began it, others rapidly joined in, even Sallie Moffat, after a moment\u2019s hesitation, threw her train over her arm and whisked Ned into the ring. But the crowning joke was Mr. Laurence and Aunt March, for when the stately old gentleman chasseed solemnly up to the old lady, she just tucked her cane under her arm, and hopped briskly away to join hands with the rest and dance about the bridal pair, while the young folks pervaded the garden like butterflies on a midsummer day.\r\n\r\nWant of breath brought the impromptu ball to a close, and then people began to go.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish you well, my dear, I heartily wish you well, but I think you\u2019ll be sorry for it,\u201d said Aunt March to Meg, adding to the bridegroom, as he led her to the carriage, \u201cYou\u2019ve got a treasure, young man, see that you deserve it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat is the prettiest wedding I\u2019ve been to for an age, Ned, and I don\u2019t see why, for there wasn\u2019t a bit of style about it,\u201d observed Mrs. Moffat to her husband, as they drove away.\r\n\r\n\u201cLaurie, my lad, if you ever want to indulge in this sort of thing, get one of those little girls to help you, and I shall be perfectly satisfied,\u201d said Mr. Laurence, settling himself in his easy chair to rest after the excitement of the morning.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll do my best to gratify you, Sir,\u201d was Laurie\u2019s unusually dutiful reply, as he carefully unpinned the posy Jo had put in his buttonhole.\r\n\r\nThe little house was not far away, and the only bridal journey Meg had was the quiet walk with John from the old home to the new. When she came down, looking like a pretty Quakeress in her dove-colored suit and straw bonnet tied with white, they all gathered about her to say \u2018good-by\u2019, as tenderly as if she had been going to make the grand tour.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t feel that I am separated from you, Marmee dear, or that I love you any the less for loving John so much,\u201d she said, clinging to her mother, with full eyes for a moment. \u201cI shall come every day, Father, and expect to keep my old place in all your hearts, though I am married. Beth is going to be with me a great deal, and the other girls will drop in now and then to laugh at my housekeeping struggles. Thank you all for my happy wedding day. Good-by, good-by!\u201d\r\n\r\nThey stood watching her, with faces full of love and hope and tender pride as she walked away, leaning on her husband\u2019s arm, with her hands full of flowers and the June sunshine brightening her happy face\u2014and so Meg\u2019s married life began.\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-SIX\r\nARTISTIC ATTEMPTS\r\n\r\nIt takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women. Amy was learning this distinction through much tribulation, for mistaking enthusiasm for inspiration, she attempted every branch of art with youthful audacity. For a long time there was a lull in the \u2018mud-pie\u2019 business, and she devoted herself to the finest pen-and-ink drawing, in which she showed such taste and skill that her graceful handiwork proved both pleasant and profitable. But over-strained eyes caused pen and ink to be laid aside for a bold attempt at poker-sketching. While this attack lasted, the family lived in constant fear of a conflagration, for the odor of burning wood pervaded the house at all hours, smoke issued from attic and shed with alarming frequency, red-hot pokers lay about promiscuously, and Hannah never went to bed without a pail of water and the dinner bell at her door in case of fire. Raphael\u2019s face was found boldly executed on the underside of the moulding board, and Bacchus on the head of a beer barrel. A chanting cherub adorned the cover of the sugar bucket, and attempts to portray Romeo and Juliet supplied kindling for some time.\r\n\r\nFrom fire to oil was a natural transition for burned fingers, and Amy fell to painting with undiminished ardor. An artist friend fitted her out with his castoff palettes, brushes, and colors, and she daubed away, producing pastoral and marine views such as were never seen on land or sea. Her monstrosities in the way of cattle would have taken prizes at an agricultural fair, and the perilous pitching of her vessels would have produced seasickness in the most nautical observer, if the utter disregard to all known rules of shipbuilding and rigging had not convulsed him with laughter at the first glance. Swarthy boys and dark-eyed Madonnas, staring at you from one corner of the studio, suggested Murillo; oily brown shadows of faces with a lurid streak in the wrong place, meant Rembrandt; buxom ladies and dropiscal infants, Rubens; and Turner appeared in tempests of blue thunder, orange lightning, brown rain, and purple clouds, with a tomato-colored splash in the middle, which might be the sun or a bouy, a sailor\u2019s shirt or a king\u2019s robe, as the spectator pleased.\r\n\r\nCharcoal portraits came next, and the entire family hung in a row, looking as wild and crocky as if just evoked from a coalbin. Softened into crayon sketches, they did better, for the likenesses were good, and Amy\u2019s hair, Jo\u2019s nose, Meg\u2019s mouth, and Laurie\u2019s eyes were pronounced \u2018wonderfully fine\u2019. A return to clay and plaster followed, and ghostly casts of her acquaintances haunted corners of the house, or tumbled off closet shelves onto people\u2019s heads. Children were enticed in as models, till their incoherent accounts of her mysterious doings caused Miss Amy to be regarded in the light of a young ogress. Her efforts in this line, however, were brought to an abrupt close by an untoward accident, which quenched her ardor. Other models failing her for a time, she undertook to cast her own pretty foot, and the family were one day alarmed by an unearthly bumping and screaming and running to the rescue, found the young enthusiast hopping wildly about the shed with her foot held fast in a pan full of plaster, which had hardened with unexpected rapidity. With much difficulty and some danger she was dug out, for Jo was so overcome with laughter while she excavated that her knife went too far, cut the poor foot, and left a lasting memorial of one artistic attempt, at least.\r\n\r\nAfter this Amy subsided, till a mania for sketching from nature set her to haunting river, field, and wood, for picturesque studies, and sighing for ruins to copy. She caught endless colds sitting on damp grass to book \u2018a delicious bit\u2019, composed of a stone, a stump, one mushroom, and a broken mullein stalk, or \u2018a heavenly mass of clouds\u2019, that looked like a choice display of featherbeds when done. She sacrificed her complexion floating on the river in the midsummer sun to study light and shade, and got a wrinkle over her nose trying after \u2018points of sight\u2019, or whatever the squint-and-string performance is called.\r\n\r\nIf \u2018genius is eternal patience\u2019, as Michelangelo affirms, Amy had some claim to the divine attribute, for she persevered in spite of all obstacles, failures, and discouragements, firmly believing that in time she should do something worthy to be called \u2018high art\u2019.\r\n\r\nShe was learning, doing, and enjoying other things, meanwhile, for she had resolved to be an attractive and accomplished woman, even if she never became a great artist. Here she succeeded better, for she was one of those happily created beings who please without effort, make friends everywhere, and take life so gracefully and easily that less fortunate souls are tempted to believe that such are born under a lucky star. Everybody liked her, for among her good gifts was tact. She had an instinctive sense of what was pleasing and proper, always said the right thing to the right person, did just what suited the time and place, and was so self-possessed that her sisters used to say, \u201cIf Amy went to court without any rehearsal beforehand, she\u2019d know exactly what to do.\u201d\r\n\r\nOne of her weaknesses was a desire to move in \u2018our best society\u2019, without being quite sure what the best really was. Money, position, fashionable accomplishments, and elegant manners were most desirable things in her eyes, and she liked to associate with those who possessed them, often mistaking the false for the true, and admiring what was not admirable. Never forgetting that by birth she was a gentlewoman, she cultivated her aristocratic tastes and feelings, so that when the opportunity came she might be ready to take the place from which poverty now excluded her.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy lady,\u201d as her friends called her, sincerely desired to be a genuine lady, and was so at heart, but had yet to learn that money cannot buy refinement of nature, that rank does not always confer nobility, and that true breeding makes itself felt in spite of external drawbacks.\r\n\r\n\u201cI want to ask a favor of you, Mamma,\u201d Amy said, coming in with an important air one day.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, little girl, what is it?\u201d replied her mother, in whose eyes the stately young lady still remained \u2018the baby\u2019.\r\n\r\n\u201cOur drawing class breaks up next week, and before the girls separate for the summer, I want to ask them out here for a day. They are wild to see the river, sketch the broken bridge, and copy some of the things they admire in my book. They have been very kind to me in many ways, and I am grateful, for they are all rich and I know I am poor, yet they never made any difference.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy should they?\u201d and Mrs. March put the question with what the girls called her \u2018Maria Theresa air\u2019.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou know as well as I that it does make a difference with nearly everyone, so don\u2019t ruffle up like a dear, motherly hen, when your chickens get pecked by smarter birds. The ugly duckling turned out a swan, you know.\u201d and Amy smiled without bitterness, for she possessed a happy temper and hopeful spirit.\r\n\r\nMrs. March laughed, and smoothed down her maternal pride as she asked, \u201cWell, my swan, what is your plan?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI should like to ask the girls out to lunch next week, to take them for a drive to the places they want to see, a row on the river, perhaps, and make a little artistic fete for them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat looks feasible. What do you want for lunch? Cake, sandwiches, fruit, and coffee will be all that is necessary, I suppose?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, dear, no! We must have cold tongue and chicken, French chocolate and ice cream, besides. The girls are used to such things, and I want my lunch to be proper and elegant, though I do work for my living.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow many young ladies are there?\u201d asked her mother, beginning to look sober.\r\n\r\n\u201cTwelve or fourteen in the class, but I dare say they won\u2019t all come.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBless me, child, you will have to charter an omnibus to carry them about.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Mother, how can you think of such a thing? Not more than six or eight will probably come, so I shall hire a beach wagon and borrow Mr. Laurence\u2019s cherry-bounce.\u201d (Hannah\u2019s pronunciation of char-a-banc.)\r\n\r\n\u201cAll of this will be expensive, Amy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot very. I\u2019ve calculated the cost, and I\u2019ll pay for it myself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you think, dear, that as these girls are used to such things, and the best we can do will be nothing new, that some simpler plan would be pleasanter to them, as a change if nothing more, and much better for us than buying or borrowing what we don\u2019t need, and attempting a style not in keeping with our circumstances?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf I can\u2019t have it as I like, I don\u2019t care to have it at all. I know that I can carry it out perfectly well, if you and the girls will help a little, and I don\u2019t see why I can\u2019t if I\u2019m willing to pay for it,\u201d said Amy, with the decision which opposition was apt to change into obstinacy.\r\n\r\nMrs. March knew that experience was an excellent teacher, and when it was possible she left her children to learn alone the lessons which she would gladly have made easier, if they had not objected to taking advice as much as they did salts and senna.\r\n\r\n\u201cVery well, Amy, if your heart is set upon it, and you see your way through without too great an outlay of money, time, and temper, I\u2019ll say no more. Talk it over with the girls, and whichever way you decide, I\u2019ll do my best to help you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThanks, Mother, you are always so kind.\u201d and away went Amy to lay her plan before her sisters.\r\n\r\nMeg agreed at once, and promised her aid, gladly offering anything she possessed, from her little house itself to her very best saltspoons. But Jo frowned upon the whole project and would have nothing to do with it at first.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy in the world should you spend your money, worry your family, and turn the house upside down for a parcel of girls who don\u2019t care a sixpence for you? I thought you had too much pride and sense to truckle to any mortal woman just because she wears French boots and rides in a coupe,\u201d said Jo, who, being called from the tragic climax of her novel, was not in the best mood for social enterprises.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t truckle, and I hate being patronized as much as you do!\u201d returned Amy indignantly, for the two still jangled when such questions arose. \u201cThe girls do care for me, and I for them, and there\u2019s a great deal of kindness and sense and talent among them, in spite of what you call fashionable nonsense. You don\u2019t care to make people like you, to go into good society, and cultivate your manners and tastes. I do, and I mean to make the most of every chance that comes. You can go through the world with your elbows out and your nose in the air, and call it independence, if you like. That\u2019s not my way.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen Amy had whetted her tongue and freed her mind she usually got the best of it, for she seldom failed to have common sense on her side, while Jo carried her love of liberty and hate of conventionalities to such an unlimited extent that she naturally found herself worsted in an argument. Amy\u2019s definition of Jo\u2019s idea of independence was such a good hit that both burst out laughing, and the discussion took a more amiable turn. Much against her will, Jo at length consented to sacrifice a day to Mrs. Grundy, and help her sister through what she regarded as \u2018a nonsensical business\u2019.\r\n\r\nThe invitations were sent, nearly all accepted, and the following Monday was set apart for the grand event. Hannah was out of humor because her week\u2019s work was deranged, and prophesied that \u201cef the washin\u2019 and ironin\u2019 warn\u2019t done reg\u2019lar, nothin\u2019 would go well anywheres\u201d. This hitch in the mainspring of the domestic machinery had a bad effect upon the whole concern, but Amy\u2019s motto was \u2018Nil desperandum\u2019, and having made up her mind what to do, she proceeded to do it in spite of all obstacles. To begin with, Hannah\u2019s cooking didn\u2019t turn out well. The chicken was tough, the tongue too salty, and the chocolate wouldn\u2019t froth properly. Then the cake and ice cost more than Amy expected, so did the wagon, and various other expenses, which seemed trifling at the outset, counted up rather alarmingly afterward. Beth got a cold and took to her bed. Meg had an unusual number of callers to keep her at home, and Jo was in such a divided state of mind that her breakages, accidents, and mistakes were uncommonly numerous, serious, and trying.\r\n\r\nIf it was not fair on Monday, the young ladies were to come on Tuesday, an arrangement which aggravated Jo and Hannah to the last degree. On Monday morning the weather was in that undecided state which is more exasperating than a steady pour. It drizzled a little, shone a little, blew a little, and didn\u2019t make up its mind till it was too late for anyone else to make up theirs. Amy was up at dawn, hustling people out of their beds and through their breakfasts, that the house might be got in order. The parlor struck her as looking uncommonly shabby, but without stopping to sigh for what she had not, she skillfully made the best of what she had, arranging chairs over the worn places in the carpet, covering stains on the walls with homemade statuary, which gave an artistic air to the room, as did the lovely vases of flowers Jo scattered about.\r\n\r\nThe lunch looked charming, and as she surveyed it, she sincerely hoped it would taste well, and that the borrowed glass, china, and silver would get safely home again. The carriages were promised, Meg and Mother were all ready to do the honors, Beth was able to help Hannah behind the scenes, Jo had engaged to be as lively and amiable as an absent mind, and aching head, and a very decided disapproval of everybody and everything would allow, and as she wearily dressed, Amy cheered herself with anticipations of the happy moment when, lunch safely over, she should drive away with her friends for an afternoon of artistic delights, for the \u2018cherry bounce\u2019 and the broken bridge were her strong points.\r\n\r\nThen came the hours of suspense, during which she vibrated from parlor to porch, while public opinion varied like the weathercock. A smart shower at eleven had evidently quenched the enthusiasm of the young ladies who were to arrive at twelve, for nobody came, and at two the exhausted family sat down in a blaze of sunshine to consume the perishable portions of the feast, that nothing might be lost.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo doubt about the weather today, they will certainly come, so we must fly round and be ready for them,\u201d said Amy, as the sun woke her next morning. She spoke briskly, but in her secret soul she wished she had said nothing about Tuesday, for her interest like her cake was getting a little stale.\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t get any lobsters, so you will have to do without salad today,\u201d said Mr. March, coming in half an hour later, with an expression of placid despair.\r\n\r\n\u201cUse the chicken then, the toughness won\u2019t matter in a salad,\u201d advised his wife.\r\n\r\n\u201cHannah left it on the kitchen table a minute, and the kittens got at it. I\u2019m very sorry, Amy,\u201d added Beth, who was still a patroness of cats.\r\n\r\n\u201cThen I must have a lobster, for tongue alone won\u2019t do,\u201d said Amy decidedly.\r\n\r\n\u201cShall I rush into town and demand one?\u201d asked Jo, with the magnanimity of a martyr.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019d come bringing it home under your arm without any paper, just to try me. I\u2019ll go myself,\u201d answered Amy, whose temper was beginning to fail.\r\n\r\nShrouded in a thick veil and armed with a genteel traveling basket, she departed, feeling that a cool drive would soothe her ruffled spirit and fit her for the labors of the day. After some delay, the object of her desire was procured, likewise a bottle of dressing to prevent further loss of time at home, and off she drove again, well pleased with her own forethought.\r\n\r\nAs the omnibus contained only one other passenger, a sleepy old lady, Amy pocketed her veil and beguiled the tedium of the way by trying to find out where all her money had gone to. So busy was she with her card full of refractory figures that she did not observe a newcomer, who entered without stopping the vehicle, till a masculine voice said, \u201cGood morning, Miss March,\u201d and, looking up, she beheld one of Laurie\u2019s most elegant college friends. Fervently hoping that he would get out before she did, Amy utterly ignored the basket at her feet, and congratulating herself that she had on her new traveling dress, returned the young man\u2019s greeting with her usual suavity and spirit.\r\n\r\nThey got on excellently, for Amy\u2019s chief care was soon set at rest by learning that the gentleman would leave first, and she was chatting away in a peculiarly lofty strain, when the old lady got out. In stumbling to the door, she upset the basket, and\u2014oh horror!\u2014the lobster, in all its vulgar size and brilliancy, was revealed to the highborn eyes of a Tudor!\r\n\r\n\u201cBy Jove, she\u2019s forgotten her dinner!\u201d cried the unconscious youth, poking the scarlet monster into its place with his cane, and preparing to hand out the basket after the old lady.\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease don\u2019t\u2014it\u2019s\u2014it\u2019s mine,\u201d murmured Amy, with a face nearly as red as her fish.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, really, I beg pardon. It\u2019s an uncommonly fine one, isn\u2019t it?\u201d said Tudor, with great presence of mind, and an air of sober interest that did credit to his breeding.\r\n\r\nAmy recovered herself in a breath, set her basket boldly on the seat, and said, laughing, \u201cDon\u2019t you wish you were to have some of the salad he\u2019s going to make, and to see the charming young ladies who are to eat it?\u201d\r\n\r\nNow that was tact, for two of the ruling foibles of the masculine mind were touched. The lobster was instantly surrounded by a halo of pleasing reminiscences, and curiosity about \u2018the charming young ladies\u2019 diverted his mind from the comical mishap.\r\n\r\n\u201cI suppose he\u2019ll laugh and joke over it with Laurie, but I shan\u2019t see them, that\u2019s a comfort,\u201d thought Amy, as Tudor bowed and departed.\r\n\r\nShe did not mention this meeting at home (though she discovered that, thanks to the upset, her new dress was much damaged by the rivulets of dressing that meandered down the skirt), but went through with the preparations which now seemed more irksome than before, and at twelve o\u2019clock all was ready again. Feeling that the neighbors were interested in her movements, she wished to efface the memory of yesterday\u2019s failure by a grand success today, so she ordered the \u2018cherry bounce\u2019, and drove away in state to meet and escort her guests to the banquet.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s the rumble, they\u2019re coming! I\u2019ll go onto the porch and meet them. It looks hospitable, and I want the poor child to have a good time after all her trouble,\u201d said Mrs. March, suiting the action to the word. But after one glance, she retired, with an indescribable expression, for looking quite lost in the big carriage, sat Amy and one young lady.\r\n\r\n\u201cRun, Beth, and help Hannah clear half the things off the table. It will be too absurd to put a luncheon for twelve before a single girl,\u201d cried Jo, hurrying away to the lower regions, too excited to stop even for a laugh.\r\n\r\nIn came Amy, quite calm and delightfully cordial to the one guest who had kept her promise. The rest of the family, being of a dramatic turn, played their parts equally well, and Miss Eliott found them a most hilarious set, for it was impossible to control entirely the merriment which possessed them. The remodeled lunch being gaily partaken of, the studio and garden visited, and art discussed with enthusiasm, Amy ordered a buggy (alas for the elegant cherry-bounce), and drove her friend quietly about the neighborhood till sunset, when \u2018the party went out\u2019.\r\n\r\nAs she came walking in, looking very tired but as composed as ever, she observed that every vestige of the unfortunate fete had disappeared, except a suspicious pucker about the corners of Jo\u2019s mouth.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ve had a loverly afternoon for your drive, dear,\u201d said her mother, as respectfully as if the whole twelve had come.\r\n\r\n\u201cMiss Eliott is a very sweet girl, and seemed to enjoy herself, I thought,\u201d observed Beth, with unusual warmth.\r\n\r\n\u201cCould you spare me some of your cake? I really need some, I have so much company, and I can\u2019t make such delicious stuff as yours,\u201d asked Meg soberly.\r\n\r\n\u201cTake it all. I\u2019m the only one here who likes sweet things, and it will mold before I can dispose of it,\u201d answered Amy, thinking with a sigh of the generous store she had laid in for such an end as this.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a pity Laurie isn\u2019t here to help us,\u201d began Jo, as they sat down to ice cream and salad for the second time in two days.\r\n\r\nA warning look from her mother checked any further remarks, and the whole family ate in heroic silence, till Mr. March mildly observed, \u201csalad was one of the favorite dishes of the ancients, and Evelyn...\u201d Here a general explosion of laughter cut short the \u2018history of salads\u2019, to the great surprise of the learned gentleman.\r\n\r\n\u201cBundle everything into a basket and send it to the Hummels. Germans like messes. I\u2019m sick of the sight of this, and there\u2019s no reason you should all die of a surfeit because I\u2019ve been a fool,\u201d cried Amy, wiping her eyes.\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought I should have died when I saw you two girls rattling about in the what-you-call-it, like two little kernels in a very big nutshell, and Mother waiting in state to receive the throng,\u201d sighed Jo, quite spent with laughter.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m very sorry you were disappointed, dear, but we all did our best to satisfy you,\u201d said Mrs. March, in a tone full of motherly regret.\r\n\r\n\u201cI am satisfied. I\u2019ve done what I undertook, and it\u2019s not my fault that it failed. I comfort myself with that,\u201d said Amy with a little quiver in her voice. \u201cI thank you all very much for helping me, and I\u2019ll thank you still more if you won\u2019t allude to it for a month, at least.\u201d\r\n\r\nNo one did for several months, but the word \u2018fete\u2019 always produced a general smile, and Laurie\u2019s birthday gift to Amy was a tiny coral lobster in the shape of a charm for her watch guard.\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN\r\nLITERARY LESSONS\r\n\r\nFortune suddenly smiled upon Jo, and dropped a good luck penny in her path. Not a golden penny, exactly, but I doubt if half a million would have given more real happiness then did the little sum that came to her in this wise.\r\n\r\nEvery few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and \u2018fall into a vortex\u2019, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace. Her \u2018scribbling suit\u2019 consisted of a black woolen pinafore on which she could wipe her pen at will, and a cap of the same material, adorned with a cheerful red bow, into which she bundled her hair when the decks were cleared for action. This cap was a beacon to the inquiring eyes of her family, who during these periods kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-occasionally to ask, with interest, \u201cDoes genius burn, Jo?\u201d They did not always venture even to ask this question, but took an observation of the cap, and judged accordingly. If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on, in exciting moments it was pushed rakishly askew, and when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off, and cast upon the floor. At such times the intruder silently withdrew, and not until the red bow was seen gaily erect upon the gifted brow, did anyone dare address Jo.\r\n\r\nShe did not think herself a genius by any means, but when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh. Sleep forsook her eyes, meals stood untasted, day and night were all too short to enjoy the happiness which blessed her only at such times, and made these hours worth living, even if they bore no other fruit. The divine afflatus usually lasted a week or two, and then she emerged from her \u2018vortex\u2019, hungry, sleepy, cross, or despondent.\r\n\r\nShe was just recovering from one of these attacks when she was prevailed upon to escort Miss Crocker to a lecture, and in return for her virtue was rewarded with a new idea. It was a People\u2019s Course, the lecture on the Pyramids, and Jo rather wondered at the choice of such a subject for such an audience, but took it for granted that some great social evil would be remedied or some great want supplied by unfolding the glories of the Pharaohs to an audience whose thoughts were busy with the price of coal and flour, and whose lives were spent in trying to solve harder riddles than that of the Sphinx.\r\n\r\nThey were early, and while Miss Crocker set the heel of her stocking, Jo amused herself by examining the faces of the people who occupied the seat with them. On her left were two matrons, with massive foreheads and bonnets to match, discussing Women\u2019s Rights and making tatting. Beyond sat a pair of humble lovers, artlessly holding each other by the hand, a somber spinster eating peppermints out of a paper bag, and an old gentleman taking his preparatory nap behind a yellow bandanna. On her right, her only neighbor was a studious looking lad absorbed in a newspaper.\r\n\r\nIt was a pictorial sheet, and Jo examined the work of art nearest her, idly wondering what fortuitous concatenation of circumstances needed the melodramatic illustration of an Indian in full war costume, tumbling over a precipice with a wolf at his throat, while two infuriated young gentlemen, with unnaturally small feet and big eyes, were stabbing each other close by, and a disheveled female was flying away in the background with her mouth wide open. Pausing to turn a page, the lad saw her looking and, with boyish good nature offered half his paper, saying bluntly, \u201cwant to read it? That\u2019s a first-rate story.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo accepted it with a smile, for she had never outgrown her liking for lads, and soon found herself involved in the usual labyrinth of love, mystery, and murder, for the story belonged to that class of light literature in which the passions have a holiday, and when the author\u2019s invention fails, a grand catastrophe clears the stage of one half the dramatis personae, leaving the other half to exult over their downfall.\r\n\r\n\u201cPrime, isn\u2019t it?\u201d asked the boy, as her eye went down the last paragraph of her portion.\r\n\r\n\u201cI think you and I could do as well as that if we tried,\u201d returned Jo, amused at his admiration of the trash.\r\n\r\n\u201cI should think I was a pretty lucky chap if I could. She makes a good living out of such stories, they say.\u201d and he pointed to the name of Mrs. S.L.A.N.G. Northbury, under the title of the tale.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you know her?\u201d asked Jo, with sudden interest.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, but I read all her pieces, and I know a fellow who works in the office where this paper is printed.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you say she makes a good living out of stories like this?\u201d and Jo looked more respectfully at the agitated group and thickly sprinkled exclamation points that adorned the page.\r\n\r\n\u201cGuess she does! She knows just what folks like, and gets paid well for writing it.\u201d\r\n\r\nHere the lecture began, but Jo heard very little of it, for while Professor Sands was prosing away about Belzoni, Cheops, scarabei, and hieroglyphics, she was covertly taking down the address of the paper, and boldly resolving to try for the hundred-dollar prize offered in its columns for a sensational story. By the time the lecture ended and the audience awoke, she had built up a splendid fortune for herself (not the first founded on paper), and was already deep in the concoction of her story, being unable to decide whether the duel should come before the elopement or after the murder.\r\n\r\nShe said nothing of her plan at home, but fell to work next day, much to the disquiet of her mother, who always looked a little anxious when \u2018genius took to burning\u2019. Jo had never tried this style before, contenting herself with very mild romances for The Spread Eagle. Her experience and miscellaneous reading were of service now, for they gave her some idea of dramatic effect, and supplied plot, language, and costumes. Her story was as full of desperation and despair as her limited acquaintance with those uncomfortable emotions enabled her to make it, and having located it in Lisbon, she wound up with an earthquake, as a striking and appropriate denouement. The manuscript was privately dispatched, accompanied by a note, modestly saying that if the tale didn\u2019t get the prize, which the writer hardly dared expect, she would be very glad to receive any sum it might be considered worth.\r\n\r\nSix weeks is a long time to wait, and a still longer time for a girl to keep a secret, but Jo did both, and was just beginning to give up all hope of ever seeing her manuscript again, when a letter arrived which almost took her breath away, for on opening it, a check for a hundred dollars fell into her lap. For a minute she stared at it as if it had been a snake, then she read her letter and began to cry. If the amiable gentleman who wrote that kindly note could have known what intense happiness he was giving a fellow creature, I think he would devote his leisure hours, if he has any, to that amusement, for Jo valued the letter more than the money, because it was encouraging, and after years of effort it was so pleasant to find that she had learned to do something, though it was only to write a sensation story.\r\n\r\nA prouder young woman was seldom seen than she, when, having composed herself, she electrified the family by appearing before them with the letter in one hand, the check in the other, announcing that she had won the prize. Of course there was a great jubilee, and when the story came everyone read and praised it, though after her father had told her that the language was good, the romance fresh and hearty, and the tragedy quite thrilling, he shook his head, and said in his unworldly way...\r\n\r\n\u201cYou can do better than this, Jo. Aim at the highest, and never mind the money.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI think the money is the best part of it. What will you do with such a fortune?\u201d asked Amy, regarding the magic slip of paper with a reverential eye.\r\n\r\n\u201cSend Beth and Mother to the seaside for a month or two,\u201d answered Jo promptly.\r\n\r\nTo the seaside they went, after much discussion, and though Beth didn\u2019t come home as plump and rosy as could be desired, she was much better, while Mrs. March declared she felt ten years younger. So Jo was satisfied with the investment of her prize money, and fell to work with a cheery spirit, bent on earning more of those delightful checks. She did earn several that year, and began to feel herself a power in the house, for by the magic of a pen, her \u2018rubbish\u2019 turned into comforts for them all. The Duke\u2019s Daughter paid the butcher\u2019s bill, A Phantom Hand put down a new carpet, and the Curse of the Coventrys proved the blessing of the Marches in the way of groceries and gowns.\r\n\r\nWealth is certainly a most desirable thing, but poverty has its sunny side, and one of the sweet uses of adversity is the genuine satisfaction which comes from hearty work of head or hand, and to the inspiration of necessity, we owe half the wise, beautiful, and useful blessings of the world. Jo enjoyed a taste of this satisfaction, and ceased to envy richer girls, taking great comfort in the knowledge that she could supply her own wants, and need ask no one for a penny.\r\n\r\nLittle notice was taken of her stories, but they found a market, and encouraged by this fact, she resolved to make a bold stroke for fame and fortune. Having copied her novel for the fourth time, read it to all her confidential friends, and submitted it with fear and trembling to three publishers, she at last disposed of it, on condition that she would cut it down one third, and omit all the parts which she particularly admired.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow I must either bundle it back in to my tin kitchen to mold, pay for printing it myself, or chop it up to suit purchasers and get what I can for it. Fame is a very good thing to have in the house, but cash is more convenient, so I wish to take the sense of the meeting on this important subject,\u201d said Jo, calling a family council.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t spoil your book, my girl, for there is more in it than you know, and the idea is well worked out. Let it wait and ripen,\u201d was her father\u2019s advice, and he practiced what he preached, having waited patiently thirty years for fruit of his own to ripen, and being in no haste to gather it even now when it was sweet and mellow.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt seems to me that Jo will profit more by taking the trial than by waiting,\u201d said Mrs. March. \u201cCriticism is the best test of such work, for it will show her both unsuspected merits and faults, and help her to do better next time. We are too partial, but the praise and blame of outsiders will prove useful, even if she gets but little money.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d said Jo, knitting her brows, \u201cthat\u2019s just it. I\u2019ve been fussing over the thing so long, I really don\u2019t know whether it\u2019s good, bad, or indifferent. It will be a great help to have cool, impartial persons take a look at it, and tell me what they think of it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wouldn\u2019t leave a word out of it. You\u2019ll spoil it if you do, for the interest of the story is more in the minds than in the actions of the people, and it will be all a muddle if you don\u2019t explain as you go on,\u201d said Meg, who firmly believed that this book was the most remarkable novel ever written.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut Mr. Allen says, \u2018Leave out the explanations, make it brief and dramatic, and let the characters tell the story\u2019,\u201d interrupted Jo, turning to the publisher\u2019s note.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo as he tells you. He knows what will sell, and we don\u2019t. Make a good, popular book, and get as much money as you can. By-and-by, when you\u2019ve got a name, you can afford to digress, and have philosophical and metaphysical people in your novels,\u201d said Amy, who took a strictly practical view of the subject.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d said Jo, laughing, \u201cif my people are \u2018philosophical and metaphysical\u2019, it isn\u2019t my fault, for I know nothing about such things, except what I hear father say, sometimes. If I\u2019ve got some of his wise ideas jumbled up with my romance, so much the better for me. Now, Beth, what do you say?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI should so like to see it printed soon,\u201d was all Beth said, and smiled in saying it. But there was an unconscious emphasis on the last word, and a wistful look in the eyes that never lost their childlike candor, which chilled Jo\u2019s heart for a minute with a forboding fear, and decided her to make her little venture \u2018soon\u2019.\r\n\r\nSo, with Spartan firmness, the young authoress laid her first-born on her table, and chopped it up as ruthlessly as any ogre. In the hope of pleasing everyone, she took everyone\u2019s advice, and like the old man and his donkey in the fable suited nobody.\r\n\r\nHer father liked the metaphysical streak which had unconsciously got into it, so that was allowed to remain though she had her doubts about it. Her mother thought that there was a trifle too much description. Out, therefore it came, and with it many necessary links in the story. Meg admired the tragedy, so Jo piled up the agony to suit her, while Amy objected to the fun, and, with the best intentions in life, Jo quenched the spritly scenes which relieved the somber character of the story. Then, to complicate the ruin, she cut it down one third, and confidingly sent the poor little romance, like a picked robin, out into the big, busy world to try its fate.\r\n\r\nWell, it was printed, and she got three hundred dollars for it, likewise plenty of praise and blame, both so much greater than she expected that she was thrown into a state of bewilderment from which it took her some time to recover.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou said, Mother, that criticism would help me. But how can it, when it\u2019s so contradictory that I don\u2019t know whether I\u2019ve written a promising book or broken all the ten commandments?\u201d cried poor Jo, turning over a heap of notices, the perusal of which filled her with pride and joy one minute, wrath and dismay the next. \u201cThis man says, \u2018An exquisite book, full of truth, beauty, and earnestness.\u2019 \u2018All is sweet, pure, and healthy.\u2019\u201d continued the perplexed authoress. \u201cThe next, \u2018The theory of the book is bad, full of morbid fancies, spiritualistic ideas, and unnatural characters.\u2019 Now, as I had no theory of any kind, don\u2019t believe in Spiritualism, and copied my characters from life, I don\u2019t see how this critic can be right. Another says, \u2018It\u2019s one of the best American novels which has appeared for years.\u2019 (I know better than that), and the next asserts that \u2018Though it is original, and written with great force and feeling, it is a dangerous book.\u2019 \u2019Tisn\u2019t! Some make fun of it, some overpraise, and nearly all insist that I had a deep theory to expound, when I only wrote it for the pleasure and the money. I wish I\u2019d printed the whole or not at all, for I do hate to be so misjudged.\u201d\r\n\r\nHer family and friends administered comfort and commendation liberally. Yet it was a hard time for sensitive, high-spirited Jo, who meant so well and had apparently done so ill. But it did her good, for those whose opinion had real value gave her the criticism which is an author\u2019s best education, and when the first soreness was over, she could laugh at her poor little book, yet believe in it still, and feel herself the wiser and stronger for the buffeting she had received.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot being a genius, like Keats, it won\u2019t kill me,\u201d she said stoutly, \u201cand I\u2019ve got the joke on my side, after all, for the parts that were taken straight out of real life are denounced as impossible and absurd, and the scenes that I made up out of my own silly head are pronounced \u2018charmingly natural, tender, and true\u2019. So I\u2019ll comfort myself with that, and when I\u2019m ready, I\u2019ll up again and take another.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT\r\nDOMESTIC EXPERIENCES\r\n\r\nLike most other young matrons, Meg began her married life with the determination to be a model housekeeper. John should find home a paradise, he should always see a smiling face, should fare sumptuously every day, and never know the loss of a button. She brought so much love, energy, and cheerfulness to the work that she could not but succeed, in spite of some obstacles. Her paradise was not a tranquil one, for the little woman fussed, was over-anxious to please, and bustled about like a true Martha, cumbered with many cares. She was too tired, sometimes, even to smile, John grew dyspeptic after a course of dainty dishes and ungratefully demanded plain fare. As for buttons, she soon learned to wonder where they went, to shake her head over the carelessness of men, and to threaten to make him sew them on himself, and see if his work would stand impatient and clumsy fingers any better than hers.\r\n\r\nThey were very happy, even after they discovered that they couldn\u2019t live on love alone. John did not find Meg\u2019s beauty diminished, though she beamed at him from behind the familiar coffee pot. Nor did Meg miss any of the romance from the daily parting, when her husband followed up his kiss with the tender inquiry, \u201cShall I send some veal or mutton for dinner, darling?\u201d The little house ceased to be a glorified bower, but it became a home, and the young couple soon felt that it was a change for the better. At first they played keep-house, and frolicked over it like children. Then John took steadily to business, feeling the cares of the head of a family upon his shoulders, and Meg laid by her cambric wrappers, put on a big apron, and fell to work, as before said, with more energy than discretion.\r\n\r\nWhile the cooking mania lasted she went through Mrs. Cornelius\u2019s Receipt Book as if it were a mathematical exercise, working out the problems with patience and care. Sometimes her family were invited in to help eat up a too bounteous feast of successes, or Lotty would be privately dispatched with a batch of failures, which were to be concealed from all eyes in the convenient stomachs of the little Hummels. An evening with John over the account books usually produced a temporary lull in the culinary enthusiasm, and a frugal fit would ensue, during which the poor man was put through a course of bread pudding, hash, and warmed-over coffee, which tried his soul, although he bore it with praiseworthy fortitude. Before the golden mean was found, however, Meg added to her domestic possessions what young couples seldom get on long without, a family jar.\r\n\r\nFired with a housewifely wish to see her storeroom stocked with homemade preserves, she undertook to put up her own currant jelly. John was requested to order home a dozen or so of little pots and an extra quantity of sugar, for their own currants were ripe and were to be attended to at once. As John firmly believed that \u2018my wife\u2019 was equal to anything, and took a natural pride in her skill, he resolved that she should be gratified, and their only crop of fruit laid by in a most pleasing form for winter use. Home came four dozen delightful little pots, half a barrel of sugar, and a small boy to pick the currants for her. With her pretty hair tucked into a little cap, arms bared to the elbow, and a checked apron which had a coquettish look in spite of the bib, the young housewife fell to work, feeling no doubts about her success, for hadn\u2019t she seen Hannah do it hundreds of times? The array of pots rather amazed her at first, but John was so fond of jelly, and the nice little jars would look so well on the top shelf, that Meg resolved to fill them all, and spent a long day picking, boiling, straining, and fussing over her jelly. She did her best, she asked advice of Mrs. Cornelius, she racked her brain to remember what Hannah did that she left undone, she reboiled, resugared, and restrained, but that dreadful stuff wouldn\u2019t \u2018jell\u2019.\r\n\r\nShe longed to run home, bib and all, and ask Mother to lend her a hand, but John and she had agreed that they would never annoy anyone with their private worries, experiments, or quarrels. They had laughed over that last word as if the idea it suggested was a most preposterous one, but they had held to their resolve, and whenever they could get on without help they did so, and no one interfered, for Mrs. March had advised the plan. So Meg wrestled alone with the refractory sweetmeats all that hot summer day, and at five o\u2019clock sat down in her topsy-turvey kitchen, wrung her bedaubed hands, lifted up her voice and wept.\r\n\r\nNow, in the first flush of the new life, she had often said, \u201cMy husband shall always feel free to bring a friend home whenever he likes. I shall always be prepared. There shall be no flurry, no scolding, no discomfort, but a neat house, a cheerful wife, and a good dinner. John, dear, never stop to ask my leave, invite whom you please, and be sure of a welcome from me.\u201d\r\n\r\nHow charming that was, to be sure! John quite glowed with pride to hear her say it, and felt what a blessed thing it was to have a superior wife. But, although they had had company from time to time, it never happened to be unexpected, and Meg had never had an opportunity to distinguish herself till now. It always happens so in this vale of tears, there is an inevitability about such things which we can only wonder at, deplore, and bear as we best can.\r\n\r\nIf John had not forgotten all about the jelly, it really would have been unpardonable in him to choose that day, of all the days in the year, to bring a friend home to dinner unexpectedly. Congratulating himself that a handsome repast had been ordered that morning, feeling sure that it would be ready to the minute, and indulging in pleasant anticipations of the charming effect it would produce, when his pretty wife came running out to meet him, he escorted his friend to his mansion, with the irrepressible satisfaction of a young host and husband.\r\n\r\nIt is a world of disappointments, as John discovered when he reached the Dovecote. The front door usually stood hospitably open. Now it was not only shut, but locked, and yesterday\u2019s mud still adorned the steps. The parlor windows were closed and curtained, no picture of the pretty wife sewing on the piazza, in white, with a distracting little bow in her hair, or a bright-eyed hostess, smiling a shy welcome as she greeted her guest. Nothing of the sort, for not a soul appeared but a sanginary-looking boy asleep under the current bushes.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m afraid something has happened. Step into the garden, Scott, while I look up Mrs. Brooke,\u201d said John, alarmed at the silence and solitude.\r\n\r\nRound the house he hurried, led by a pungent smell of burned sugar, and Mr. Scott strolled after him, with a queer look on his face. He paused discreetly at a distance when Brooke disappeared, but he could both see and hear, and being a bachelor, enjoyed the prospect mightily.\r\n\r\nIn the kitchen reigned confusion and despair. One edition of jelly was trickled from pot to pot, another lay upon the floor, and a third was burning gaily on the stove. Lotty, with Teutonic phlegm, was calmly eating bread and currant wine, for the jelly was still in a hopelessly liquid state, while Mrs. Brooke, with her apron over her head, sat sobbing dismally.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy dearest girl, what is the matter?\u201d cried John, rushing in, with awful visions of scalded hands, sudden news of affliction, and secret consternation at the thought of the guest in the garden.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, John, I am so tired and hot and cross and worried! I\u2019ve been at it till I\u2019m all worn out. Do come and help me or I shall die!\u201d and the exhausted housewife cast herself upon his breast, giving him a sweet welcome in every sense of the word, for her pinafore had been baptized at the same time as the floor.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat worries you dear? Has anything dreadful happened?\u201d asked the anxious John, tenderly kissing the crown of the little cap, which was all askew.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d sobbed Meg despairingly.\r\n\r\n\u201cTell me quick, then. Don\u2019t cry. I can bear anything better than that. Out with it, love.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe... The jelly won\u2019t jell and I don\u2019t know what to do!\u201d\r\n\r\nJohn Brooke laughed then as he never dared to laugh afterward, and the derisive Scott smiled involuntarily as he heard the hearty peal, which put the finishing stroke to poor Meg\u2019s woe.\r\n\r\n\u201cIs that all? Fling it out of the window, and don\u2019t bother any more about it. I\u2019ll buy you quarts if you want it, but for heaven\u2019s sake don\u2019t have hysterics, for I\u2019ve brought Jack Scott home to dinner, and...\u201d\r\n\r\nJohn got no further, for Meg cast him off, and clasped her hands with a tragic gesture as she fell into a chair, exclaiming in a tone of mingled indignation, reproach, and dismay...\r\n\r\n\u201cA man to dinner, and everything in a mess! John Brooke, how could you do such a thing?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHush, he\u2019s in the garden! I forgot the confounded jelly, but it can\u2019t be helped now,\u201d said John, surveying the prospect with an anxious eye.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou ought to have sent word, or told me this morning, and you ought to have remembered how busy I was,\u201d continued Meg petulantly, for even turtledoves will peck when ruffled.\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t know it this morning, and there was no time to send word, for I met him on the way out. I never thought of asking leave, when you have always told me to do as I liked. I never tried it before, and hang me if I ever do again!\u201d added John, with an aggrieved air.\r\n\r\n\u201cI should hope not! Take him away at once. I can\u2019t see him, and there isn\u2019t any dinner.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I like that! Where\u2019s the beef and vegetables I sent home, and the pudding you promised?\u201d cried John, rushing to the larder.\r\n\r\n\u201cI hadn\u2019t time to cook anything. I meant to dine at Mother\u2019s. I\u2019m sorry, but I was so busy,\u201d and Meg\u2019s tears began again.\r\n\r\nJohn was a mild man, but he was human, and after a long day\u2019s work to come home tired, hungry, and hopeful, to find a chaotic house, an empty table, and a cross wife was not exactly conducive to repose of mind or manner. He restrained himself however, and the little squall would have blown over, but for one unlucky word.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a scrape, I acknowledge, but if you will lend a hand, we\u2019ll pull through and have a good time yet. Don\u2019t cry, dear, but just exert yourself a bit, and fix us up something to eat. We\u2019re both as hungry as hunters, so we shan\u2019t mind what it is. Give us the cold meat, and bread and cheese. We won\u2019t ask for jelly.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe meant it to be a good-natured joke, but that one word sealed his fate. Meg thought it was too cruel to hint about her sad failure, and the last atom of patience vanished as he spoke.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou must get yourself out of the scrape as you can. I\u2019m too used up to \u2018exert\u2019 myself for anyone. It\u2019s like a man to propose a bone and vulgar bread and cheese for company. I won\u2019t have anything of the sort in my house. Take that Scott up to Mother\u2019s, and tell him I\u2019m away, sick, dead, anything. I won\u2019t see him, and you two can laugh at me and my jelly as much as you like. You won\u2019t have anything else here.\u201d and having delivered her defiance all on one breath, Meg cast away her pinafore and precipitately left the field to bemoan herself in her own room.\r\n\r\nWhat those two creatures did in her absence, she never knew, but Mr. Scott was not taken \u2018up to Mother\u2019s\u2019, and when Meg descended, after they had strolled away together, she found traces of a promiscuous lunch which filled her with horror. Lotty reported that they had eaten \u201ca much, and greatly laughed, and the master bid her throw away all the sweet stuff, and hide the pots.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg longed to go and tell Mother, but a sense of shame at her own short-comings, of loyalty to John, \u201cwho might be cruel, but nobody should know it,\u201d restrained her, and after a summary cleaning up, she dressed herself prettily, and sat down to wait for John to come and be forgiven.\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, John didn\u2019t come, not seeing the matter in that light. He had carried it off as a good joke with Scott, excused his little wife as well as he could, and played the host so hospitably that his friend enjoyed the impromptu dinner, and promised to come again, but John was angry, though he did not show it, he felt that Meg had deserted him in his hour of need. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t fair to tell a man to bring folks home any time, with perfect freedom, and when he took you at your word, to flame up and blame him, and leave him in the lurch, to be laughed at or pitied. No, by George, it wasn\u2019t! And Meg must know it.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe had fumed inwardly during the feast, but when the flurry was over and he strolled home after seeing Scott off, a milder mood came over him. \u201cPoor little thing! It was hard upon her when she tried so heartily to please me. She was wrong, of course, but then she was young. I must be patient and teach her.\u201d He hoped she had not gone home\u2014he hated gossip and interference. For a minute he was ruffled again at the mere thought of it, and then the fear that Meg would cry herself sick softened his heart, and sent him on at a quicker pace, resolving to be calm and kind, but firm, quite firm, and show her where she had failed in her duty to her spouse.\r\n\r\nMeg likewise resolved to be \u2018calm and kind, but firm\u2019, and show him his duty. She longed to run to meet him, and beg pardon, and be kissed and comforted, as she was sure of being, but, of course, she did nothing of the sort, and when she saw John coming, began to hum quite naturally, as she rocked and sewed, like a lady of leisure in her best parlor.\r\n\r\nJohn was a little disappointed not to find a tender Niobe, but feeling that his dignity demanded the first apology, he made none, only came leisurely in and laid himself upon the sofa with the singularly relevant remark, \u201cWe are going to have a new moon, my dear.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve no objection,\u201d was Meg\u2019s equally soothing remark. A few other topics of general interest were introduced by Mr. Brooke and wet-blanketed by Mrs. Brooke, and conversation languished. John went to one window, unfolded his paper, and wrapped himself in it, figuratively speaking. Meg went to the other window, and sewed as if new rosettes for slippers were among the necessaries of life. Neither spoke. Both looked quite \u2018calm and firm\u2019, and both felt desperately uncomfortable.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, dear,\u201d thought Meg, \u201cmarried life is very trying, and does need infinite patience as well as love, as Mother says.\u201d The word \u2018Mother\u2019 suggested other maternal counsels given long ago, and received with unbelieving protests.\r\n\r\n\u201cJohn is a good man, but he has his faults, and you must learn to see and bear with them, remembering your own. He is very decided, but never will be obstinate, if you reason kindly, not oppose impatiently. He is very accurate, and particular about the truth\u2014a good trait, though you call him \u2018fussy\u2019. Never deceive him by look or word, Meg, and he will give you the confidence you deserve, the support you need. He has a temper, not like ours\u2014one flash and then all over\u2014but the white, still anger that is seldom stirred, but once kindled is hard to quench. Be careful, be very careful, not to wake his anger against yourself, for peace and happiness depend on keeping his respect. Watch yourself, be the first to ask pardon if you both err, and guard against the little piques, misunderstandings, and hasty words that often pave the way for bitter sorrow and regret.\u201d\r\n\r\nThese words came back to Meg, as she sat sewing in the sunset, especially the last. This was the first serious disagreement, her own hasty speeches sounded both silly and unkind, as she recalled them, her own anger looked childish now, and thoughts of poor John coming home to such a scene quite melted her heart. She glanced at him with tears in her eyes, but he did not see them. She put down her work and got up, thinking, \u201cI will be the first to say, \u2018Forgive me\u2019\u201d, but he did not seem to hear her. She went very slowly across the room, for pride was hard to swallow, and stood by him, but he did not turn his head. For a minute she felt as if she really couldn\u2019t do it, then came the thought, \u201cThis is the beginning. I\u2019ll do my part, and have nothing to reproach myself with,\u201d and stooping down, she softly kissed her husband on the forehead. Of course that settled it. The penitent kiss was better than a world of words, and John had her on his knee in a minute, saying tenderly...\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was too bad to laugh at the poor little jelly pots. Forgive me, dear. I never will again!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut he did, oh bless you, yes, hundreds of times, and so did Meg, both declaring that it was the sweetest jelly they ever made, for family peace was preserved in that little family jar.\r\n\r\nAfter this, Meg had Mr. Scott to dinner by special invitation, and served him up a pleasant feast without a cooked wife for the first course, on which occasion she was so gay and gracious, and made everything go off so charmingly, that Mr. Scott told John he was a lucky fellow, and shook his head over the hardships of bachelorhood all the way home.\r\n\r\nIn the autumn, new trials and experiences came to Meg. Sallie Moffat renewed her friendship, was always running out for a dish of gossip at the little house, or inviting \u2018that poor dear\u2019 to come in and spend the day at the big house. It was pleasant, for in dull weather Meg often felt lonely. All were busy at home, John absent till night, and nothing to do but sew, or read, or potter about. So it naturally fell out that Meg got into the way of gadding and gossiping with her friend. Seeing Sallie\u2019s pretty things made her long for such, and pity herself because she had not got them. Sallie was very kind, and often offered her the coveted trifles, but Meg declined them, knowing that John wouldn\u2019t like it, and then this foolish little woman went and did what John disliked even worse.\r\n\r\nShe knew her husband\u2019s income, and she loved to feel that he trusted her, not only with his happiness, but what some men seem to value more\u2014his money. She knew where it was, was free to take what she liked, and all he asked was that she should keep account of every penny, pay bills once a month, and remember that she was a poor man\u2019s wife. Till now she had done well, been prudent and exact, kept her little account books neatly, and showed them to him monthly without fear. But that autumn the serpent got into Meg\u2019s paradise, and tempted her like many a modern Eve, not with apples, but with dress. Meg didn\u2019t like to be pitied and made to feel poor. It irritated her, but she was ashamed to confess it, and now and then she tried to console herself by buying something pretty, so that Sallie needn\u2019t think she had to economize. She always felt wicked after it, for the pretty things were seldom necessaries, but then they cost so little, it wasn\u2019t worth worrying about, so the trifles increased unconsciously, and in the shopping excursions she was no longer a passive looker-on.\r\n\r\nBut the trifles cost more than one would imagine, and when she cast up her accounts at the end of the month the sum total rather scared her. John was busy that month and left the bills to her, the next month he was absent, but the third he had a grand quarterly settling up, and Meg never forgot it. A few days before she had done a dreadful thing, and it weighed upon her conscience. Sallie had been buying silks, and Meg longed for a new one, just a handsome light one for parties, her black silk was so common, and thin things for evening wear were only proper for girls. Aunt March usually gave the sisters a present of twenty-five dollars apiece at New Year\u2019s. That was only a month to wait, and here was a lovely violet silk going at a bargain, and she had the money, if she only dared to take it. John always said what was his was hers, but would he think it right to spend not only the prospective five-and-twenty, but another five-and-twenty out of the household fund? That was the question. Sallie had urged her to do it, had offered to lend the money, and with the best intentions in life had tempted Meg beyond her strength. In an evil moment the shopman held up the lovely, shimmering folds, and said, \u201cA bargain, I assure, you, ma\u2019am.\u201d She answered, \u201cI\u2019ll take it,\u201d and it was cut off and paid for, and Sallie had exulted, and she had laughed as if it were a thing of no consequence, and driven away, feeling as if she had stolen something, and the police were after her.\r\n\r\nWhen she got home, she tried to assuage the pangs of remorse by spreading forth the lovely silk, but it looked less silvery now, didn\u2019t become her, after all, and the words \u2018fifty dollars\u2019 seemed stamped like a pattern down each breadth. She put it away, but it haunted her, not delightfully as a new dress should, but dreadfully like the ghost of a folly that was not easily laid. When John got out his books that night, Meg\u2019s heart sank, and for the first time in her married life, she was afraid of her husband. The kind, brown eyes looked as if they could be stern, and though he was unusually merry, she fancied he had found her out, but didn\u2019t mean to let her know it. The house bills were all paid, the books all in order. John had praised her, and was undoing the old pocketbook which they called the \u2018bank\u2019, when Meg, knowing that it was quite empty, stopped his hand, saying nervously...\r\n\r\n\u201cYou haven\u2019t seen my private expense book yet.\u201d\r\n\r\nJohn never asked to see it, but she always insisted on his doing so, and used to enjoy his masculine amazement at the queer things women wanted, and made him guess what piping was, demand fiercely the meaning of a hug-me-tight, or wonder how a little thing composed of three rosebuds, a bit of velvet, and a pair of strings, could possibly be a bonnet, and cost six dollars. That night he looked as if he would like the fun of quizzing her figures and pretending to be horrified at her extravagance, as he often did, being particularly proud of his prudent wife.\r\n\r\nThe little book was brought slowly out and laid down before him. Meg got behind his chair under pretense of smoothing the wrinkles out of his tired forehead, and standing there, she said, with her panic increasing with every word...\r\n\r\n\u201cJohn, dear, I\u2019m ashamed to show you my book, for I\u2019ve really been dreadfully extravagant lately. I go about so much I must have things, you know, and Sallie advised my getting it, so I did, and my New Year\u2019s money will partly pay for it, but I was sorry after I had done it, for I knew you\u2019d think it wrong in me.\u201d\r\n\r\nJohn laughed, and drew her round beside him, saying goodhumoredly, \u201cDon\u2019t go and hide. I won\u2019t beat you if you have got a pair of killing boots. I\u2019m rather proud of my wife\u2019s feet, and don\u2019t mind if she does pay eight or nine dollars for her boots, if they are good ones.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat had been one of her last \u2018trifles\u2019, and John\u2019s eye had fallen on it as he spoke. \u201cOh, what will he say when he comes to that awful fifty dollars!\u201d thought Meg, with a shiver.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s worse than boots, it\u2019s a silk dress,\u201d she said, with the calmness of desperation, for she wanted the worst over.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, dear, what is the \u2018dem\u2019d total\u2019, as Mr. Mantalini says?\u201d\r\n\r\nThat didn\u2019t sound like John, and she knew he was looking up at her with the straightforward look that she had always been ready to meet and answer with one as frank till now. She turned the page and her head at the same time, pointing to the sum which would have been bad enough without the fifty, but which was appalling to her with that added. For a minute the room was very still, then John said slowly\u2014but she could feel it cost him an effort to express no displeasure\u2014. . .\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I don\u2019t know that fifty is much for a dress, with all the furbelows and notions you have to have to finish it off these days.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt isn\u2019t made or trimmed,\u201d sighed Meg, faintly, for a sudden recollection of the cost still to be incurred quite overwhelmed her.\r\n\r\n\u201cTwenty-five yards of silk seems a good deal to cover one small woman, but I\u2019ve no doubt my wife will look as fine as Ned Moffat\u2019s when she gets it on,\u201d said John dryly.\r\n\r\n\u201cI know you are angry, John, but I can\u2019t help it. I don\u2019t mean to waste your money, and I didn\u2019t think those little things would count up so. I can\u2019t resist them when I see Sallie buying all she wants, and pitying me because I don\u2019t. I try to be contented, but it is hard, and I\u2019m tired of being poor.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe last words were spoken so low she thought he did not hear them, but he did, and they wounded him deeply, for he had denied himself many pleasures for Meg\u2019s sake. She could have bitten her tongue out the minute she had said it, for John pushed the books away and got up, saying with a little quiver in his voice, \u201cI was afraid of this. I do my best, Meg.\u201d If he had scolded her, or even shaken her, it would not have broken her heart like those few words. She ran to him and held him close, crying, with repentant tears, \u201cOh, John, my dear, kind, hard-working boy. I didn\u2019t mean it! It was so wicked, so untrue and ungrateful, how could I say it! Oh, how could I say it!\u201d\r\n\r\nHe was very kind, forgave her readily, and did not utter one reproach, but Meg knew that she had done and said a thing which would not be forgotten soon, although he might never allude to it again. She had promised to love him for better or worse, and then she, his wife, had reproached him with his poverty, after spending his earnings recklessly. It was dreadful, and the worst of it was John went on so quietly afterward, just as if nothing had happened, except that he stayed in town later, and worked at night when she had gone to cry herself to sleep. A week of remorse nearly made Meg sick, and the discovery that John had countermanded the order for his new greatcoat reduced her to a state of despair which was pathetic to behold. He had simply said, in answer to her surprised inquiries as to the change, \u201cI can\u2019t afford it, my dear.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg said no more, but a few minutes after he found her in the hall with her face buried in the old greatcoat, crying as if her heart would break.\r\n\r\nThey had a long talk that night, and Meg learned to love her husband better for his poverty, because it seemed to have made a man of him, given him the strength and courage to fight his own way, and taught him a tender patience with which to bear and comfort the natural longings and failures of those he loved.\r\n\r\nNext day she put her pride in her pocket, went to Sallie, told the truth, and asked her to buy the silk as a favor. The good-natured Mrs. Moffat willingly did so, and had the delicacy not to make her a present of it immediately afterward. Then Meg ordered home the greatcoat, and when John arrived, she put it on, and asked him how he liked her new silk gown. One can imagine what answer he made, how he received his present, and what a blissful state of things ensued. John came home early, Meg gadded no more, and that greatcoat was put on in the morning by a very happy husband, and taken off at night by a most devoted little wife. So the year rolled round, and at midsummer there came to Meg a new experience, the deepest and tenderest of a woman\u2019s life.\r\n\r\nLaurie came sneaking into the kitchen of the Dovecote one Saturday, with an excited face, and was received with the clash of cymbals, for Hannah clapped her hands with a saucepan in one and the cover in the other.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow\u2019s the little mamma? Where is everybody? Why didn\u2019t you tell me before I came home?\u201d began Laurie in a loud whisper.\r\n\r\n\u201cHappy as a queen, the dear! Every soul of \u2019em is upstairs a worshipin\u2019. We didn\u2019t want no hurrycanes round. Now you go into the parlor, and I\u2019ll send \u2019em down to you,\u201d with which somewhat involved reply Hannah vanished, chuckling ecstatically.\r\n\r\nPresently Jo appeared, proudly bearing a flannel bundle laid forth upon a large pillow. Jo\u2019s face was very sober, but her eyes twinkled, and there was an odd sound in her voice of repressed emotion of some sort.\r\n\r\n\u201cShut your eyes and hold out your arms,\u201d she said invitingly.\r\n\r\nLaurie backed precipitately into a corner, and put his hands behind him with an imploring gesture. \u201cNo, thank you. I\u2019d rather not. I shall drop it or smash it, as sure as fate.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen you shan\u2019t see your nevvy,\u201d said Jo decidedly, turning as if to go.\r\n\r\n\u201cI will, I will! Only you must be responsible for damages.\u201d and obeying orders, Laurie heroically shut his eyes while something was put into his arms. A peal of laughter from Jo, Amy, Mrs. March, Hannah, and John caused him to open them the next minute, to find himself invested with two babies instead of one.\r\n\r\nNo wonder they laughed, for the expression of his face was droll enough to convulse a Quaker, as he stood and stared wildly from the unconscious innocents to the hilarious spectators with such dismay that Jo sat down on the floor and screamed.\r\n\r\n\u201cTwins, by Jupiter!\u201d was all he said for a minute, then turning to the women with an appealing look that was comically piteous, he added, \u201cTake \u2019em quick, somebody! I\u2019m going to laugh, and I shall drop \u2019em.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo rescued his babies, and marched up and down, with one on each arm, as if already initiated into the mysteries of babytending, while Laurie laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s the best joke of the season, isn\u2019t it? I wouldn\u2019t have told you, for I set my heart on surprising you, and I flatter myself I\u2019ve done it,\u201d said Jo, when she got her breath.\r\n\r\n\u201cI never was more staggered in my life. Isn\u2019t it fun? Are they boys? What are you going to name them? Let\u2019s have another look. Hold me up, Jo, for upon my life it\u2019s one too many for me,\u201d returned Laurie, regarding the infants with the air of a big, benevolent Newfoundland looking at a pair of infantile kittens.\r\n\r\n\u201cBoy and girl. Aren\u2019t they beauties?\u201d said the proud papa, beaming upon the little red squirmers as if they were unfledged angels.\r\n\r\n\u201cMost remarkable children I ever saw. Which is which?\u201d and Laurie bent like a well-sweep to examine the prodigies.\r\n\r\n\u201cAmy put a blue ribbon on the boy and a pink on the girl, French fashion, so you can always tell. Besides, one has blue eyes and one brown. Kiss them, Uncle Teddy,\u201d said wicked Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m afraid they mightn\u2019t like it,\u201d began Laurie, with unusual timidity in such matters.\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course they will, they are used to it now. Do it this minute, sir!\u201d commanded Jo, fearing he might propose a proxy.\r\n\r\nLaurie screwed up his face and obeyed with a gingerly peck at each little cheek that produced another laugh, and made the babies squeal.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere, I knew they didn\u2019t like it! That\u2019s the boy, see him kick, he hits out with his fists like a good one. Now then, young Brooke, pitch into a man of your own size, will you?\u201d cried Laurie, delighted with a poke in the face from a tiny fist, flapping aimlessly about.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s to be named John Laurence, and the girl Margaret, after mother and grandmother. We shall call her Daisey, so as not to have two Megs, and I suppose the mannie will be Jack, unless we find a better name,\u201d said Amy, with aunt-like interest.\r\n\r\n\u201cName him Demijohn, and call him Demi for short,\u201d said Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cDaisy and Demi, just the thing! I knew Teddy would do it,\u201d cried Jo clapping her hands.\r\n\r\nTeddy certainly had done it that time, for the babies were \u2018Daisy\u2019 and \u2018Demi\u2019 to the end of the chapter.\r\nCHAPTER TWENTY-NINE\r\nCALLS\r\n\r\n\u201cCome, Jo, it\u2019s time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFor what?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t mean to say you have forgotten that you promised to make half a dozen calls with me today?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve done a good many rash and foolish things in my life, but I don\u2019t think I ever was mad enough to say I\u2019d make six calls in one day, when a single one upsets me for a week.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, you did, it was a bargain between us. I was to finish the crayon of Beth for you, and you were to go properly with me, and return our neighbors\u2019 visits.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf it was fair, that was in the bond, and I stand to the letter of my bond, Shylock. There is a pile of clouds in the east, it\u2019s not fair, and I don\u2019t go.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, that\u2019s shirking. It\u2019s a lovely day, no prospect of rain, and you pride yourself on keeping promises, so be honorable, come and do your duty, and then be at peace for another six months.\u201d\r\n\r\nAt that minute Jo was particularly absorbed in dressmaking, for she was mantua-maker general to the family, and took especial credit to herself because she could use a needle as well as a pen. It was very provoking to be arrested in the act of a first trying-on, and ordered out to make calls in her best array on a warm July day. She hated calls of the formal sort, and never made any till Amy compelled her with a bargain, bribe, or promise. In the present instance there was no escape, and having clashed her scissors rebelliously, while protesting that she smelled thunder, she gave in, put away her work, and taking up her hat and gloves with an air of resignation, told Amy the victim was ready.\r\n\r\n\u201cJo March, you are perverse enough to provoke a saint! You don\u2019t intend to make calls in that state, I hope,\u201d cried Amy, surveying her with amazement.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy not? I\u2019m neat and cool and comfortable, quite proper for a dusty walk on a warm day. If people care more for my clothes than they do for me, I don\u2019t wish to see them. You can dress for both, and be as elegant as you please. It pays for you to be fine. It doesn\u2019t for me, and furbelows only worry me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, dear!\u201d sighed Amy, \u201cnow she\u2019s in a contrary fit, and will drive me distracted before I can get her properly ready. I\u2019m sure it\u2019s no pleasure to me to go today, but it\u2019s a debt we owe society, and there\u2019s no one to pay it but you and me. I\u2019ll do anything for you, Jo, if you\u2019ll only dress yourself nicely, and come and help me do the civil. You can talk so well, look so aristocratic in your best things, and behave so beautifully, if you try, that I\u2019m proud of you. I\u2019m afraid to go alone, do come and take care of me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019re an artful little puss to flatter and wheedle your cross old sister in that way. The idea of my being aristocratic and well-bred, and your being afraid to go anywhere alone! I don\u2019t know which is the most absurd. Well, I\u2019ll go if I must, and do my best. You shall be commander of the expedition, and I\u2019ll obey blindly, will that satisfy you?\u201d said Jo, with a sudden change from perversity to lamblike submission.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019re a perfect cherub! Now put on all your best things, and I\u2019ll tell you how to behave at each place, so that you will make a good impression. I want people to like you, and they would if you\u2019d only try to be a little more agreeable. Do your hair the pretty way, and put the pink rose in your bonnet. It\u2019s becoming, and you look too sober in your plain suit. Take your light gloves and the embroidered handkerchief. We\u2019ll stop at Meg\u2019s, and borrow her white sunshade, and then you can have my dove-colored one.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhile Amy dressed, she issued her orders, and Jo obeyed them, not without entering her protest, however, for she sighed as she rustled into her new organdie, frowned darkly at herself as she tied her bonnet strings in an irreproachable bow, wrestled viciously with pins as she put on her collar, wrinkled up her features generally as she shook out the handkerchief, whose embroidery was as irritating to her nose as the present mission was to her feelings, and when she had squeezed her hands into tight gloves with three buttons and a tassel, as the last touch of elegance, she turned to Amy with an imbecile expression of countenance, saying meekly...\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m perfectly miserable, but if you consider me presentable, I die happy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019re highly satisfactory. Turn slowly round, and let me get a careful view.\u201d Jo revolved, and Amy gave a touch here and there, then fell back, with her head on one side, observing graciously, \u201cYes, you\u2019ll do. Your head is all I could ask, for that white bonnet with the rose is quite ravishing. Hold back your shoulders, and carry your hands easily, no matter if your gloves do pinch. There\u2019s one thing you can do well, Jo, that is, wear a shawl. I can\u2019t, but it\u2019s very nice to see you, and I\u2019m so glad Aunt March gave you that lovely one. It\u2019s simple, but handsome, and those folds over the arm are really artistic. Is the point of my mantle in the middle, and have I looped my dress evenly? I like to show my boots, for my feet are pretty, though my nose isn\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou are a thing of beauty and a joy forever,\u201d said Jo, looking through her hand with the air of a connoisseur at the blue feather against the golden hair. \u201cAm I to drag my best dress through the dust, or loop it up, please, ma\u2019am?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHold it up when you walk, but drop it in the house. The sweeping style suits you best, and you must learn to trail your skirts gracefully. You haven\u2019t half buttoned one cuff, do it at once. You\u2019ll never look finished if you are not careful about the little details, for they make up the pleasing whole.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo sighed, and proceeded to burst the buttons off her glove, in doing up her cuff, but at last both were ready, and sailed away, looking as \u2018pretty as picters\u2019, Hannah said, as she hung out of the upper window to watch them.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, Jo dear, the Chesters consider themselves very elegant people, so I want you to put on your best deportment. Don\u2019t make any of your abrupt remarks, or do anything odd, will you? Just be calm, cool, and quiet, that\u2019s safe and ladylike, and you can easily do it for fifteen minutes,\u201d said Amy, as they approached the first place, having borrowed the white parasol and been inspected by Meg, with a baby on each arm.\r\n\r\n\u201cLet me see. \u2018Calm, cool, and quiet\u2019, yes, I think I can promise that. I\u2019ve played the part of a prim young lady on the stage, and I\u2019ll try it off. My powers are great, as you shall see, so be easy in your mind, my child.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy looked relieved, but naughty Jo took her at her word, for during the first call she sat with every limb gracefully composed, every fold correctly draped, calm as a summer sea, cool as a snowbank, and as silent as the sphinx. In vain Mrs. Chester alluded to her \u2018charming novel\u2019, and the Misses Chester introduced parties, picnics, the opera, and the fashions. Each and all were answered by a smile, a bow, and a demure \u201cYes\u201d or \u201cNo\u201d with the chill on. In vain Amy telegraphed the word \u2018talk\u2019, tried to draw her out, and administered covert pokes with her foot. Jo sat as if blandly unconscious of it all, with deportment like Maud\u2019s face, \u2018icily regular, splendidly null\u2019.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat a haughty, uninteresting creature that oldest Miss March is!\u201d was the unfortunately audible remark of one of the ladies, as the door closed upon their guests. Jo laughed noiselessly all through the hall, but Amy looked disgusted at the failure of her instructions, and very naturally laid the blame upon Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow could you mistake me so? I merely meant you to be properly dignified and composed, and you made yourself a perfect stock and stone. Try to be sociable at the Lambs\u2019. Gossip as other girls do, and be interested in dress and flirtations and whatever nonsense comes up. They move in the best society, are valuable persons for us to know, and I wouldn\u2019t fail to make a good impression there for anything.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll be agreeable. I\u2019ll gossip and giggle, and have horrors and raptures over any trifle you like. I rather enjoy this, and now I\u2019ll imitate what is called \u2018a charming girl\u2019. I can do it, for I have May Chester as a model, and I\u2019ll improve upon her. See if the Lambs don\u2019t say, \u2018What a lively, nice creature that Jo March is!\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy felt anxious, as well she might, for when Jo turned freakish there was no knowing where she would stop. Amy\u2019s face was a study when she saw her sister skim into the next drawing room, kiss all the young ladies with effusion, beam graciously upon the young gentlemen, and join in the chat with a spirit which amazed the beholder. Amy was taken possession of by Mrs. Lamb, with whom she was a favorite, and forced to hear a long account of Lucretia\u2019s last attack, while three delightful young gentlemen hovered near, waiting for a pause when they might rush in and rescue her. So situated, she was powerless to check Jo, who seemed possessed by a spirit of mischief, and talked away as volubly as the lady. A knot of heads gathered about her, and Amy strained her ears to hear what was going on, for broken sentences filled her with curiosity, and frequent peals of laughter made her wild to share the fun. One may imagine her suffering on overhearing fragments of this sort of conversation.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe rides splendidly. Who taught her?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo one. She used to practice mounting, holding the reins, and sitting straight on an old saddle in a tree. Now she rides anything, for she doesn\u2019t know what fear is, and the stableman lets her have horses cheap because she trains them to carry ladies so well. She has such a passion for it, I often tell her if everything else fails, she can be a horsebreaker, and get her living so.\u201d\r\n\r\nAt this awful speech Amy contained herself with difficulty, for the impression was being given that she was rather a fast young lady, which was her especial aversion. But what could she do? For the old lady was in the middle of her story, and long before it was done, Jo was off again, making more droll revelations and committing still more fearful blunders.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Amy was in despair that day, for all the good beasts were gone, and of three left, one was lame, one blind, and the other so balky that you had to put dirt in his mouth before he would start. Nice animal for a pleasure party, wasn\u2019t it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhich did she choose?\u201d asked one of the laughing gentlemen, who enjoyed the subject.\r\n\r\n\u201cNone of them. She heard of a young horse at the farm house over the river, and though a lady had never ridden him, she resolved to try, because he was handsome and spirited. Her struggles were really pathetic. There was no one to bring the horse to the saddle, so she took the saddle to the horse. My dear creature, she actually rowed it over the river, put it on her head, and marched up to the barn to the utter amazement of the old man!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDid she ride the horse?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course she did, and had a capital time. I expected to see her brought home in fragments, but she managed him perfectly, and was the life of the party.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I call that plucky!\u201d and young Mr. Lamb turned an approving glance upon Amy, wondering what his mother could be saying to make the girl look so red and uncomfortable.\r\n\r\nShe was still redder and more uncomfortable a moment after, when a sudden turn in the conversation introduced the subject of dress. One of the young ladies asked Jo where she got the pretty drab hat she wore to the picnic and stupid Jo, instead of mentioning the place where it was bought two years ago, must needs answer with unnecessary frankness, \u201cOh, Amy painted it. You can\u2019t buy those soft shades, so we paint ours any color we like. It\u2019s a great comfort to have an artistic sister.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIsn\u2019t that an original idea?\u201d cried Miss Lamb, who found Jo great fun.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s nothing compared to some of her brilliant performances. There\u2019s nothing the child can\u2019t do. Why, she wanted a pair of blue boots for Sallie\u2019s party, so she just painted her soiled white ones the loveliest shade of sky blue you ever saw, and they looked exactly like satin,\u201d added Jo, with an air of pride in her sister\u2019s accomplishments that exasperated Amy till she felt that it would be a relief to throw her cardcase at her.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe read a story of yours the other day, and enjoyed it very much,\u201d observed the elder Miss Lamb, wishing to compliment the literary lady, who did not look the character just then, it must be confessed.\r\n\r\nAny mention of her \u2018works\u2019 always had a bad effect upon Jo, who either grew rigid and looked offended, or changed the subject with a brusque remark, as now. \u201cSorry you could find nothing better to read. I write that rubbish because it sells, and ordinary people like it. Are you going to New York this winter?\u201d\r\n\r\nAs Miss Lamb had \u2018enjoyed\u2019 the story, this speech was not exactly grateful or complimentary. The minute it was made Jo saw her mistake, but fearing to make the matter worse, suddenly remembered that it was for her to make the first move toward departure, and did so with an abruptness that left three people with half-finished sentences in their mouths.\r\n\r\n\u201cAmy, we must go. Good-by, dear, do come and see us. We are pining for a visit. I don\u2019t dare to ask you, Mr. Lamb, but if you should come, I don\u2019t think I shall have the heart to send you away.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo said this with such a droll imitation of May Chester\u2019s gushing style that Amy got out of the room as rapidly as possible, feeling a strong desire to laugh and cry at the same time.\r\n\r\n\u201cDidn\u2019t I do well?\u201d asked Jo, with a satisfied air as they walked away.\r\n\r\n\u201cNothing could have been worse,\u201d was Amy\u2019s crushing reply. \u201cWhat possessed you to tell those stories about my saddle, and the hats and boots, and all the rest of it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, it\u2019s funny, and amuses people. They know we are poor, so it\u2019s no use pretending that we have grooms, buy three or four hats a season, and have things as easy and fine as they do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou needn\u2019t go and tell them all our little shifts, and expose our poverty in that perfectly unnecessary way. You haven\u2019t a bit of proper pride, and never will learn when to hold your tongue and when to speak,\u201d said Amy despairingly.\r\n\r\nPoor Jo looked abashed, and silently chafed the end of her nose with the stiff handkerchief, as if performing a penance for her misdemeanors.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow shall I behave here?\u201d she asked, as they approached the third mansion.\r\n\r\n\u201cJust as you please. I wash my hands of you,\u201d was Amy\u2019s short answer.\r\n\r\n\u201cThen I\u2019ll enjoy myself. The boys are at home, and we\u2019ll have a comfortable time. Goodness knows I need a little change, for elegance has a bad effect upon my constitution,\u201d returned Jo gruffly, being disturbed by her failure to suit.\r\n\r\nAn enthusiastic welcome from three big boys and several pretty children speedily soothed her ruffled feelings, and leaving Amy to entertain the hostess and Mr. Tudor, who happened to be calling likewise, Jo devoted herself to the young folks and found the change refreshing. She listened to college stories with deep interest, caressed pointers and poodles without a murmur, agreed heartily that \u201cTom Brown was a brick,\u201d regardless of the improper form of praise, and when one lad proposed a visit to his turtle tank, she went with an alacrity which caused Mamma to smile upon her, as that motherly lady settled the cap which was left in a ruinous condition by filial hugs, bearlike but affectionate, and dearer to her than the most faultless coiffure from the hands of an inspired Frenchwoman.\r\n\r\nLeaving her sister to her own devices, Amy proceeded to enjoy herself to her heart\u2019s content. Mr. Tudor\u2019s uncle had married an English lady who was third cousin to a living lord, and Amy regarded the whole family with great respect, for in spite of her American birth and breeding, she possessed that reverence for titles which haunts the best of us\u2014that unacknowledged loyalty to the early faith in kings which set the most democratic nation under the sun in ferment at the coming of a royal yellow-haired laddie, some years ago, and which still has something to do with the love the young country bears the old, like that of a big son for an imperious little mother, who held him while she could, and let him go with a farewell scolding when he rebelled. But even the satisfaction of talking with a distant connection of the British nobility did not render Amy forgetful of time, and when the proper number of minutes had passed, she reluctantly tore herself from this aristocratic society, and looked about for Jo, fervently hoping that her incorrigible sister would not be found in any position which should bring disgrace upon the name of March.\r\n\r\nIt might have been worse, but Amy considered it bad. For Jo sat on the grass, with an encampment of boys about her, and a dirty-footed dog reposing on the skirt of her state and festival dress, as she related one of Laurie\u2019s pranks to her admiring audience. One small child was poking turtles with Amy\u2019s cherished parasol, a second was eating gingerbread over Jo\u2019s best bonnet, and a third playing ball with her gloves, but all were enjoying themselves, and when Jo collected her damaged property to go, her escort accompanied her, begging her to come again, \u201cIt was such fun to hear about Laurie\u2019s larks.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCapital boys, aren\u2019t they? I feel quite young and brisk again after that.\u201d said Jo, strolling along with her hands behind her, partly from habit, partly to conceal the bespattered parasol.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy do you always avoid Mr. Tudor?\u201d asked Amy, wisely refraining from any comment upon Jo\u2019s dilapidated appearance.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t like him, he puts on airs, snubs his sisters, worries his father, and doesn\u2019t speak respectfully of his mother. Laurie says he is fast, and I don\u2019t consider him a desirable acquaintance, so I let him alone.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou might treat him civilly, at least. You gave him a cool nod, and just now you bowed and smiled in the politest way to Tommy Chamberlain, whose father keeps a grocery store. If you had just reversed the nod and the bow, it would have been right,\u201d said Amy reprovingly.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, it wouldn\u2019t,\u201d returned Jo, \u201cI neither like, respect, nor admire Tudor, though his grandfather\u2019s uncle\u2019s nephew\u2019s niece was a third cousin to a lord. Tommy is poor and bashful and good and very clever. I think well of him, and like to show that I do, for he is a gentleman in spite of the brown paper parcels.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s no use trying to argue with you,\u201d began Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot the least, my dear,\u201d interrupted Jo, \u201cso let us look amiable, and drop a card here, as the Kings are evidently out, for which I\u2019m deeply grateful.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe family cardcase having done its duty the girls walked on, and Jo uttered another thanksgiving on reaching the fifth house, and being told that the young ladies were engaged.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow let us go home, and never mind Aunt March today. We can run down there any time, and it\u2019s really a pity to trail through the dust in our best bibs and tuckers, when we are tired and cross.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSpeak for yourself, if you please. Aunt March likes to have us pay her the compliment of coming in style, and making a formal call. It\u2019s a little thing to do, but it gives her pleasure, and I don\u2019t believe it will hurt your things half so much as letting dirty dogs and clumping boys spoil them. Stoop down, and let me take the crumbs off of your bonnet.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat a good girl you are, Amy!\u201d said Jo, with a repentant glance from her own damaged costume to that of her sister, which was fresh and spotless still. \u201cI wish it was as easy for me to do little things to please people as it is for you. I think of them, but it takes too much time to do them, so I wait for a chance to confer a great favor, and let the small ones slip, but they tell best in the end, I fancy.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy smiled and was mollified at once, saying with a maternal air, \u201cWomen should learn to be agreeable, particularly poor ones, for they have no other way of repaying the kindnesses they receive. If you\u2019d remember that, and practice it, you\u2019d be better liked than I am, because there is more of you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m a crotchety old thing, and always shall be, but I\u2019m willing to own that you are right, only it\u2019s easier for me to risk my life for a person than to be pleasant to him when I don\u2019t feel like it. It\u2019s a great misfortune to have such strong likes and dislikes, isn\u2019t it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a greater not to be able to hide them. I don\u2019t mind saying that I don\u2019t approve of Tudor any more than you do, but I\u2019m not called upon to tell him so. Neither are you, and there is no use in making yourself disagreeable because he is.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I think girls ought to show when they disapprove of young men, and how can they do it except by their manners? Preaching does not do any good, as I know to my sorrow, since I\u2019ve had Teddie to manage. But there are many little ways in which I can influence him without a word, and I say we ought to do it to others if we can.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTeddy is a remarkable boy, and can\u2019t be taken as a sample of other boys,\u201d said Amy, in a tone of solemn conviction, which would have convulsed the \u2018remarkable boy\u2019 if he had heard it. \u201cIf we were belles, or women of wealth and position, we might do something, perhaps, but for us to frown at one set of young gentlemen because we don\u2019t approve of them, and smile upon another set because we do, wouldn\u2019t have a particle of effect, and we should only be considered odd and puritanical.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo we are to countenance things and people which we detest, merely because we are not belles and millionaires, are we? That\u2019s a nice sort of morality.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t argue about it, I only know that it\u2019s the way of the world, and people who set themselves against it only get laughed at for their pains. I don\u2019t like reformers, and I hope you never try to be one.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI do like them, and I shall be one if I can, for in spite of the laughing the world would never get on without them. We can\u2019t agree about that, for you belong to the old set, and I to the new. You will get on the best, but I shall have the liveliest time of it. I should rather enjoy the brickbats and hooting, I think.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, compose yourself now, and don\u2019t worry Aunt with your new ideas.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll try not to, but I\u2019m always possessed to burst out with some particularly blunt speech or revolutionary sentiment before her. It\u2019s my doom, and I can\u2019t help it.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey found Aunt Carrol with the old lady, both absorbed in some very interesting subject, but they dropped it as the girls came in, with a conscious look which betrayed that they had been talking about their nieces. Jo was not in a good humor, and the perverse fit returned, but Amy, who had virtuously done her duty, kept her temper and pleased everybody, was in a most angelic frame of mind. This amiable spirit was felt at once, and both aunts \u2018my deared\u2019 her affectionately, looking what they afterward said emphatically, \u201cThat child improves every day.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAre you going to help about the fair, dear?\u201d asked Mrs. Carrol, as Amy sat down beside her with the confiding air elderly people like so well in the young.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Aunt. Mrs. Chester asked me if I would, and I offered to tend a table, as I have nothing but my time to give.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m not,\u201d put in Jo decidedly. \u201cI hate to be patronized, and the Chesters think it\u2019s a great favor to allow us to help with their highly connected fair. I wonder you consented, Amy, they only want you to work.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI am willing to work. It\u2019s for the freedmen as well as the Chesters, and I think it very kind of them to let me share the labor and the fun. Patronage does not trouble me when it is well meant.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cQuite right and proper. I like your grateful spirit, my dear. It\u2019s a pleasure to help people who appreciate our efforts. Some do not, and that is trying,\u201d observed Aunt March, looking over her spectacles at Jo, who sat apart, rocking herself, with a somewhat morose expression.\r\n\r\nIf Jo had only known what a great happiness was wavering in the balance for one of them, she would have turned dove-like in a minute, but unfortunately, we don\u2019t have windows in our breasts, and cannot see what goes on in the minds of our friends. Better for us that we cannot as a general thing, but now and then it would be such a comfort, such a saving of time and temper. By her next speech, Jo deprived herself of several years of pleasure, and received a timely lesson in the art of holding her tongue.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t like favors, they oppress and make me feel like a slave. I\u2019d rather do everything for myself, and be perfectly independent.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAhem!\u201d coughed Aunt Carrol softly, with a look at Aunt March.\r\n\r\n\u201cI told you so,\u201d said Aunt March, with a decided nod to Aunt Carrol.\r\n\r\nMercifully unconscious of what she had done, Jo sat with her nose in the air, and a revolutionary aspect which was anything but inviting.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you speak French, dear?\u201d asked Mrs. Carrol, laying a hand on Amy\u2019s.\r\n\r\n\u201cPretty well, thanks to Aunt March, who lets Esther talk to me as often as I like,\u201d replied Amy, with a grateful look, which caused the old lady to smile affably.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow are you about languages?\u201d asked Mrs. Carrol of Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t know a word. I\u2019m very stupid about studying anything, can\u2019t bear French, it\u2019s such a slippery, silly sort of language,\u201d was the brusque reply.\r\n\r\nAnother look passed between the ladies, and Aunt March said to Amy, \u201cYou are quite strong and well now, dear, I believe? Eyes don\u2019t trouble you any more, do they?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot at all, thank you, ma\u2019am. I\u2019m very well, and mean to do great things next winter, so that I may be ready for Rome, whenever that joyful time arrives.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood girl! You deserve to go, and I\u2019m sure you will some day,\u201d said Aunt March, with an approving pat on the head, as Amy picked up her ball for her.\r\n\r\nCrosspatch, draw the latch,\r\nSit by the fire and spin,\r\n\r\nsqualled Polly, bending down from his perch on the back of her chair to peep into Jo\u2019s face, with such a comical air of impertinent inquiry that it was impossible to help laughing.\r\n\r\n\u201cMost observing bird,\u201d said the old lady.\r\n\r\n\u201cCome and take a walk, my dear?\u201d cried Polly, hopping toward the china closet, with a look suggestive of a lump of sugar.\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you, I will. Come Amy.\u201d and Jo brought the visit to an end, feeling more strongly than ever that calls did have a bad effect upon her constitution. She shook hands in a gentlemanly manner, but Amy kissed both the aunts, and the girls departed, leaving behind them the impression of shadow and sunshine, which impression caused Aunt March to say, as they vanished...\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019d better do it, Mary. I\u2019ll supply the money.\u201d and Aunt Carrol to reply decidedly, \u201cI certainly will, if her father and mother consent.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY\r\nCONSEQUENCES\r\n\r\nMrs. Chester\u2019s fair was so very elegant and select that it was considered a great honor by the young ladies of the neighborhood to be invited to take a table, and everyone was much interested in the matter. Amy was asked, but Jo was not, which was fortunate for all parties, as her elbows were decidedly akimbo at this period of her life, and it took a good many hard knocks to teach her how to get on easily. The \u2018haughty, uninteresting creature\u2019 was let severely alone, but Amy\u2019s talent and taste were duly complimented by the offer of the art table, and she exerted herself to prepare and secure appropriate and valuable contributions to it.\r\n\r\nEverything went on smoothly till the day before the fair opened, then there occurred one of the little skirmishes which it is almost impossible to avoid, when some five-and-twenty women, old and young, with all their private piques and prejudices, try to work together.\r\n\r\nMay Chester was rather jealous of Amy because the latter was a greater favorite than herself, and just at this time several trifling circumstances occurred to increase the feeling. Amy\u2019s dainty pen-and-ink work entirely eclipsed May\u2019s painted vases\u2014that was one thorn. Then the all conquering Tudor had danced four times with Amy at a late party and only once with May\u2014that was thorn number two. But the chief grievance that rankled in her soul, and gave an excuse for her unfriendly conduct, was a rumor which some obliging gossip had whispered to her, that the March girls had made fun of her at the Lambs\u2019. All the blame of this should have fallen upon Jo, for her naughty imitation had been too lifelike to escape detection, and the frolicsome Lambs had permitted the joke to escape. No hint of this had reached the culprits, however, and Amy\u2019s dismay can be imagined, when, the very evening before the fair, as she was putting the last touches to her pretty table, Mrs. Chester, who, of course, resented the supposed ridicule of her daughter, said, in a bland tone, but with a cold look...\r\n\r\n\u201cI find, dear, that there is some feeling among the young ladies about my giving this table to anyone but my girls. As this is the most prominent, and some say the most attractive table of all, and they are the chief getters-up of the fair, it is thought best for them to take this place. I\u2019m sorry, but I know you are too sincerely interested in the cause to mind a little personal disappointment, and you shall have another table if you like.\u201d\r\n\r\nMrs. Chester fancied beforehand that it would be easy to deliver this little speech, but when the time came, she found it rather difficult to utter it naturally, with Amy\u2019s unsuspicious eyes looking straight at her full of surprise and trouble.\r\n\r\nAmy felt that there was something behind this, but could not guess what, and said quietly, feeling hurt, and showing that she did, \u201cPerhaps you had rather I took no table at all?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, my dear, don\u2019t have any ill feeling, I beg. It\u2019s merely a matter of expediency, you see, my girls will naturally take the lead, and this table is considered their proper place. I think it very appropriate to you, and feel very grateful for your efforts to make it so pretty, but we must give up our private wishes, of course, and I will see that you have a good place elsewhere. Wouldn\u2019t you like the flower table? The little girls undertook it, but they are discouraged. You could make a charming thing of it, and the flower table is always attractive you know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cEspecially to gentlemen,\u201d added May, with a look which enlightened Amy as to one cause of her sudden fall from favor. She colored angrily, but took no other notice of that girlish sarcasm, and answered with unexpected amiability...\r\n\r\n\u201cIt shall be as you please, Mrs. Chester. I\u2019ll give up my place here at once, and attend to the flowers, if you like.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou can put your own things on your own table, if you prefer,\u201d began May, feeling a little conscience-stricken, as she looked at the pretty racks, the painted shells, and quaint illuminations Amy had so carefully made and so gracefully arranged. She meant it kindly, but Amy mistook her meaning, and said quickly...\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, certainly, if they are in your way,\u201d and sweeping her contributions into her apron, pell-mell, she walked off, feeling that herself and her works of art had been insulted past forgiveness.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow she\u2019s mad. Oh, dear, I wish I hadn\u2019t asked you to speak, Mama,\u201d said May, looking disconsolately at the empty spaces on her table.\r\n\r\n\u201cGirls\u2019 quarrels are soon over,\u201d returned her mother, feeling a trifle ashamed of her own part in this one, as well she might.\r\n\r\nThe little girls hailed Amy and her treasures with delight, which cordial reception somewhat soothed her perturbed spirit, and she fell to work, determined to succeed florally, if she could not artistically. But everything seemed against her. It was late, and she was tired. Everyone was too busy with their own affairs to help her, and the little girls were only hindrances, for the dears fussed and chattered like so many magpies, making a great deal of confusion in their artless efforts to preserve the most perfect order. The evergreen arch wouldn\u2019t stay firm after she got it up, but wiggled and threatened to tumble down on her head when the hanging baskets were filled. Her best tile got a splash of water, which left a sepia tear on the Cupid\u2019s cheek. She bruised her hands with hammering, and got cold working in a draft, which last affliction filled her with apprehensions for the morrow. Any girl reader who has suffered like afflictions will sympathize with poor Amy and wish her well through her task.\r\n\r\nThere was great indignation at home when she told her story that evening. Her mother said it was a shame, but told her she had done right. Beth declared she wouldn\u2019t go to the fair at all, and Jo demanded why she didn\u2019t take all her pretty things and leave those mean people to get on without her.\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause they are mean is no reason why I should be. I hate such things, and though I think I\u2019ve a right to be hurt, I don\u2019t intend to show it. They will feel that more than angry speeches or huffy actions, won\u2019t they, Marmee?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s the right spirit, my dear. A kiss for a blow is always best, though it\u2019s not very easy to give it sometimes,\u201d said her mother, with the air of one who had learned the difference between preaching and practicing.\r\n\r\nIn spite of various very natural temptations to resent and retaliate, Amy adhered to her resolution all the next day, bent on conquering her enemy by kindness. She began well, thanks to a silent reminder that came to her unexpectedly, but most opportunely. As she arranged her table that morning, while the little girls were in the anteroom filling the baskets, she took up her pet production, a little book, the antique cover of which her father had found among his treasures, and in which on leaves of vellum she had beautifully illuminated different texts. As she turned the pages rich in dainty devices with very pardonable pride, her eye fell upon one verse that made her stop and think. Framed in a brilliant scrollwork of scarlet, blue and gold, with little spirits of good will helping one another up and down among the thorns and flowers, were the words, \u201cThou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI ought, but I don\u2019t,\u201d thought Amy, as her eye went from the bright page to May\u2019s discontented face behind the big vases, that could not hide the vacancies her pretty work had once filled. Amy stood a minute, turning the leaves in her hand, reading on each some sweet rebuke for all heartburnings and uncharitableness of spirit. Many wise and true sermons are preached us every day by unconscious ministers in street, school, office, or home. Even a fair table may become a pulpit, if it can offer the good and helpful words which are never out of season. Amy\u2019s conscience preached her a little sermon from that text, then and there, and she did what many of us do not always do, took the sermon to heart, and straightway put it in practice.\r\n\r\nA group of girls were standing about May\u2019s table, admiring the pretty things, and talking over the change of saleswomen. They dropped their voices, but Amy knew they were speaking of her, hearing one side of the story and judging accordingly. It was not pleasant, but a better spirit had come over her, and presently a chance offered for proving it. She heard May say sorrowfully...\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s too bad, for there is no time to make other things, and I don\u2019t want to fill up with odds and ends. The table was just complete then. Now it\u2019s spoiled.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI dare say she\u2019d put them back if you asked her,\u201d suggested someone.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow could I after all the fuss?\u201d began May, but she did not finish, for Amy\u2019s voice came across the hall, saying pleasantly...\r\n\r\n\u201cYou may have them, and welcome, without asking, if you want them. I was just thinking I\u2019d offer to put them back, for they belong to your table rather than mine. Here they are, please take them, and forgive me if I was hasty in carrying them away last night.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs she spoke, Amy returned her contribution, with a nod and a smile, and hurried away again, feeling that it was easier to do a friendly thing than it was to stay and be thanked for it.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, I call that lovely of her, don\u2019t you?\u201d cried one girl.\r\n\r\nMay\u2019s answer was inaudible, but another young lady, whose temper was evidently a little soured by making lemonade, added, with a disagreeable laugh, \u201cVery lovely, for she knew she wouldn\u2019t sell them at her own table.\u201d\r\n\r\nNow, that was hard. When we make little sacrifices we like to have them appreciated, at least, and for a minute Amy was sorry she had done it, feeling that virtue was not always its own reward. But it is, as she presently discovered, for her spirits began to rise, and her table to blossom under her skillful hands, the girls were very kind, and that one little act seemed to have cleared the atmosphere amazingly.\r\n\r\nIt was a very long day and a hard one for Amy, as she sat behind her table, often quite alone, for the little girls deserted very soon. Few cared to buy flowers in summer, and her bouquets began to droop long before night.\r\n\r\nThe art table was the most attractive in the room. There was a crowd about it all day long, and the tenders were constantly flying to and fro with important faces and rattling money boxes. Amy often looked wistfully across, longing to be there, where she felt at home and happy, instead of in a corner with nothing to do. It might seem no hardship to some of us, but to a pretty, blithe young girl, it was not only tedious, but very trying, and the thought of Laurie and his friends made it a real martyrdom.\r\n\r\nShe did not go home till night, and then she looked so pale and quiet that they knew the day had been a hard one, though she made no complaint, and did not even tell what she had done. Her mother gave her an extra cordial cup of tea. Beth helped her dress, and made a charming little wreath for her hair, while Jo astonished her family by getting herself up with unusual care, and hinting darkly that the tables were about to be turned.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t do anything rude, pray Jo; I won\u2019t have any fuss made, so let it all pass and behave yourself,\u201d begged Amy, as she departed early, hoping to find a reinforcement of flowers to refresh her poor little table.\r\n\r\n\u201cI merely intend to make myself entrancingly agreeable to every one I know, and to keep them in your corner as long as possible. Teddy and his boys will lend a hand, and we\u2019ll have a good time yet.\u201d returned Jo, leaning over the gate to watch for Laurie. Presently the familiar tramp was heard in the dusk, and she ran out to meet him.\r\n\r\n\u201cIs that my boy?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAs sure as this is my girl!\u201d and Laurie tucked her hand under his arm with the air of a man whose every wish was gratified.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Teddy, such doings!\u201d and Jo told Amy\u2019s wrongs with sisterly zeal.\r\n\r\n\u201cA flock of our fellows are going to drive over by-and-by, and I\u2019ll be hanged if I don\u2019t make them buy every flower she\u2019s got, and camp down before her table afterward,\u201d said Laurie, espousing her cause with warmth.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe flowers are not at all nice, Amy says, and the fresh ones may not arrive in time. I don\u2019t wish to be unjust or suspicious, but I shouldn\u2019t wonder if they never came at all. When people do one mean thing they are very likely to do another,\u201d observed Jo in a disgusted tone.\r\n\r\n\u201cDidn\u2019t Hayes give you the best out of our gardens? I told him to.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t know that, he forgot, I suppose, and, as your grandpa was poorly, I didn\u2019t like to worry him by asking, though I did want some.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, Jo, how could you think there was any need of asking? They are just as much yours as mine. Don\u2019t we always go halves in everything?\u201d began Laurie, in the tone that always made Jo turn thorny.\r\n\r\n\u201cGracious, I hope not! Half of some of your things wouldn\u2019t suit me at all. But we mustn\u2019t stand philandering here. I\u2019ve got to help Amy, so you go and make yourself splendid, and if you\u2019ll be so very kind as to let Hayes take a few nice flowers up to the Hall, I\u2019ll bless you forever.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCouldn\u2019t you do it now?\u201d asked Laurie, so suggestively that Jo shut the gate in his face with inhospitable haste, and called through the bars, \u201cGo away, Teddy, I\u2019m busy.\u201d\r\n\r\nThanks to the conspirators, the tables were turned that night, for Hayes sent up a wilderness of flowers, with a lovely basket arranged in his best manner for a centerpiece. Then the March family turned out en masse, and Jo exerted herself to some purpose, for people not only came, but stayed, laughing at her nonsense, admiring Amy\u2019s taste, and apparently enjoying themselves very much. Laurie and his friends gallantly threw themselves into the breach, bought up the bouquets, encamped before the table, and made that corner the liveliest spot in the room. Amy was in her element now, and out of gratitude, if nothing more, was as spritely and gracious as possible, coming to the conclusion, about that time, that virtue was its own reward, after all.\r\n\r\nJo behaved herself with exemplary propriety, and when Amy was happily surrounded by her guard of honor, Jo circulated about the Hall, picking up various bits of gossip, which enlightened her upon the subject of the Chester change of base. She reproached herself for her share of the ill feeling and resolved to exonerate Amy as soon as possible. She also discovered what Amy had done about the things in the morning, and considered her a model of magnanimity. As she passed the art table, she glanced over it for her sister\u2019s things, but saw no sign of them. \u201cTucked away out of sight, I dare say,\u201d thought Jo, who could forgive her own wrongs, but hotly resented any insult offered her family.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood evening, Miss Jo. How does Amy get on?\u201d asked May with a conciliatory air, for she wanted to show that she also could be generous.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe has sold everything she had that was worth selling, and now she is enjoying herself. The flower table is always attractive, you know, \u2018especially to gentlemen\u2019.\u201d Jo couldn\u2019t resist giving that little slap, but May took it so meekly she regretted it a minute after, and fell to praising the great vases, which still remained unsold.\r\n\r\n\u201cIs Amy\u2019s illumination anywhere about? I took a fancy to buy that for Father,\u201d said Jo, very anxious to learn the fate of her sister\u2019s work.\r\n\r\n\u201cEverything of Amy\u2019s sold long ago. I took care that the right people saw them, and they made a nice little sum of money for us,\u201d returned May, who had overcome sundry small temptations, as well as Amy had, that day.\r\n\r\nMuch gratified, Jo rushed back to tell the good news, and Amy looked both touched and surprised by the report of May\u2019s word and manner.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, gentlemen, I want you to go and do your duty by the other tables as generously as you have by mine, especially the art table,\u201d she said, ordering out \u2018Teddy\u2019s own\u2019, as the girls called the college friends.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Charge, Chester, charge!\u2019 is the motto for that table, but do your duty like men, and you\u2019ll get your money\u2019s worth of art in every sense of the word,\u201d said the irrepressible Jo, as the devoted phalanx prepared to take the field.\r\n\r\n\u201cTo hear is to obey, but March is fairer far than May,\u201d said little Parker, making a frantic effort to be both witty and tender, and getting promptly quenched by Laurie, who said...\r\n\r\n\u201cVery well, my son, for a small boy!\u201d and walked him off, with a paternal pat on the head.\r\n\r\n\u201cBuy the vases,\u201d whispered Amy to Laurie, as a final heaping of coals of fire on her enemy\u2019s head.\r\n\r\nTo May\u2019s great delight, Mr. Laurence not only bought the vases, but pervaded the hall with one under each arm. The other gentlemen speculated with equal rashness in all sorts of frail trifles, and wandered helplessly about afterward, burdened with wax flowers, painted fans, filigree portfolios, and other useful and appropriate purchases.\r\n\r\nAunt Carrol was there, heard the story, looked pleased, and said something to Mrs. March in a corner, which made the latter lady beam with satisfaction, and watch Amy with a face full of mingled pride and anxiety, though she did not betray the cause of her pleasure till several days later.\r\n\r\nThe fair was pronounced a success, and when May bade Amy goodnight, she did not gush as usual, but gave her an affectionate kiss, and a look which said \u2018forgive and forget\u2019. That satisfied Amy, and when she got home she found the vases paraded on the parlor chimney piece with a great bouquet in each. \u201cThe reward of merit for a magnanimous March,\u201d as Laurie announced with a flourish.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ve a deal more principle and generosity and nobleness of character than I ever gave you credit for, Amy. You\u2019ve behaved sweetly, and I respect you with all my heart,\u201d said Jo warmly, as they brushed their hair together late that night.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, we all do, and love her for being so ready to forgive. It must have been dreadfully hard, after working so long and setting your heart on selling your own pretty things. I don\u2019t believe I could have done it as kindly as you did,\u201d added Beth from her pillow.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, girls, you needn\u2019t praise me so. I only did as I\u2019d be done by. You laugh at me when I say I want to be a lady, but I mean a true gentlewoman in mind and manners, and I try to do it as far as I know how. I can\u2019t explain exactly, but I want to be above the little meannesses and follies and faults that spoil so many women. I\u2019m far from it now, but I do my best, and hope in time to be what Mother is.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy spoke earnestly, and Jo said, with a cordial hug, \u201cI understand now what you mean, and I\u2019ll never laugh at you again. You are getting on faster than you think, and I\u2019ll take lessons of you in true politeness, for you\u2019ve learned the secret, I believe. Try away, deary, you\u2019ll get your reward some day, and no one will be more delighted than I shall.\u201d\r\n\r\nA week later Amy did get her reward, and poor Jo found it hard to be delighted. A letter came from Aunt Carrol, and Mrs. March\u2019s face was illuminated to such a degree when she read it that Jo and Beth, who were with her, demanded what the glad tidings were.\r\n\r\n\u201cAunt Carrol is going abroad next month, and wants...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMe to go with her!\u201d burst in Jo, flying out of her chair in an uncontrollable rapture.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, dear, not you. It\u2019s Amy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Mother! She\u2019s too young, it\u2019s my turn first. I\u2019ve wanted it so long. It would do me so much good, and be so altogether splendid. I must go!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m afraid it\u2019s impossible, Jo. Aunt says Amy, decidedly, and it is not for us to dictate when she offers such a favor.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s always so. Amy has all the fun and I have all the work. It isn\u2019t fair, oh, it isn\u2019t fair!\u201d cried Jo passionately.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m afraid it\u2019s partly your own fault, dear. When Aunt spoke to me the other day, she regretted your blunt manners and too independent spirit, and here she writes, as if quoting something you had said\u2014\u2018I planned at first to ask Jo, but as \u2018favors burden her\u2019, and she \u2018hates French\u2019, I think I won\u2019t venture to invite her. Amy is more docile, will make a good companion for Flo, and receive gratefully any help the trip may give her.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, my tongue, my abominable tongue! Why can\u2019t I learn to keep it quiet?\u201d groaned Jo, remembering words which had been her undoing. When she had heard the explanation of the quoted phrases, Mrs. March said sorrowfully...\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish you could have gone, but there is no hope of it this time, so try to bear it cheerfully, and don\u2019t sadden Amy\u2019s pleasure by reproaches or regrets.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll try,\u201d said Jo, winking hard as she knelt down to pick up the basket she had joyfully upset. \u201cI\u2019ll take a leaf out of her book, and try not only to seem glad, but to be so, and not grudge her one minute of happiness. But it won\u2019t be easy, for it is a dreadful disappointment,\u201d and poor Jo bedewed the little fat pincushion she held with several very bitter tears.\r\n\r\n\u201cJo, dear, I\u2019m very selfish, but I couldn\u2019t spare you, and I\u2019m glad you are not going quite yet,\u201d whispered Beth, embracing her, basket and all, with such a clinging touch and loving face that Jo felt comforted in spite of the sharp regret that made her want to box her own ears, and humbly beg Aunt Carrol to burden her with this favor, and see how gratefully she would bear it.\r\n\r\nBy the time Amy came in, Jo was able to take her part in the family jubilation, not quite as heartily as usual, perhaps, but without repinings at Amy\u2019s good fortune. The young lady herself received the news as tidings of great joy, went about in a solemn sort of rapture, and began to sort her colors and pack her pencils that evening, leaving such trifles as clothes, money, and passports to those less absorbed in visions of art than herself.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt isn\u2019t a mere pleasure trip to me, girls,\u201d she said impressively, as she scraped her best palette. \u201cIt will decide my career, for if I have any genius, I shall find it out in Rome, and will do something to prove it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSuppose you haven\u2019t?\u201d said Jo, sewing away, with red eyes, at the new collars which were to be handed over to Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cThen I shall come home and teach drawing for my living,\u201d replied the aspirant for fame, with philosophic composure. But she made a wry face at the prospect, and scratched away at her palette as if bent on vigorous measures before she gave up her hopes.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, you won\u2019t. You hate hard work, and you\u2019ll marry some rich man, and come home to sit in the lap of luxury all your days,\u201d said Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cYour predictions sometimes come to pass, but I don\u2019t believe that one will. I\u2019m sure I wish it would, for if I can\u2019t be an artist myself, I should like to be able to help those who are,\u201d said Amy, smiling, as if the part of Lady Bountiful would suit her better than that of a poor drawing teacher.\r\n\r\n\u201cHum!\u201d said Jo, with a sigh. \u201cIf you wish it you\u2019ll have it, for your wishes are always granted\u2014mine never.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWould you like to go?\u201d asked Amy, thoughtfully patting her nose with her knife.\r\n\r\n\u201cRather!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, in a year or two I\u2019ll send for you, and we\u2019ll dig in the Forum for relics, and carry out all the plans we\u2019ve made so many times.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you. I\u2019ll remind you of your promise when that joyful day comes, if it ever does,\u201d returned Jo, accepting the vague but magnificent offer as gratefully as she could.\r\n\r\nThere was not much time for preparation, and the house was in a ferment till Amy was off. Jo bore up very well till the last flutter of blue ribbon vanished, when she retired to her refuge, the garret, and cried till she couldn\u2019t cry any more. Amy likewise bore up stoutly till the steamer sailed. Then just as the gangway was about to be withdrawn, it suddenly came over her that a whole ocean was soon to roll between her and those who loved her best, and she clung to Laurie, the last lingerer, saying with a sob...\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, take care of them for me, and if anything should happen...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI will, dear, I will, and if anything happens, I\u2019ll come and comfort you,\u201d whispered Laurie, little dreaming that he would be called upon to keep his word.\r\n\r\nSo Amy sailed away to find the Old World, which is always new and beautiful to young eyes, while her father and friend watched her from the shore, fervently hoping that none but gentle fortunes would befall the happy-hearted girl, who waved her hand to them till they could see nothing but the summer sunshine dazzling on the sea.\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-ONE\r\nOUR FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT\r\n\r\nLondon\r\n\r\nDearest People, Here I really sit at a front window of the Bath Hotel, Piccadilly. It\u2019s not a fashionable place, but Uncle stopped here years ago, and won\u2019t go anywhere else. However, we don\u2019t mean to stay long, so it\u2019s no great matter. Oh, I can\u2019t begin to tell you how I enjoy it all! I never can, so I\u2019ll only give you bits out of my notebook, for I\u2019ve done nothing but sketch and scribble since I started.\r\n\r\nI sent a line from Halifax, when I felt pretty miserable, but after that I got on delightfully, seldom ill, on deck all day, with plenty of pleasant people to amuse me. Everyone was very kind to me, especially the officers. Don\u2019t laugh, Jo, gentlemen really are very necessary aboard ship, to hold on to, or to wait upon one, and as they have nothing to do, it\u2019s a mercy to make them useful, otherwise they would smoke themselves to death, I\u2019m afraid.\r\n\r\nAunt and Flo were poorly all the way, and liked to be let alone, so when I had done what I could for them, I went and enjoyed myself. Such walks on deck, such sunsets, such splendid air and waves! It was almost as exciting as riding a fast horse, when we went rushing on so grandly. I wish Beth could have come, it would have done her so much good. As for Jo, she would have gone up and sat on the maintop jib, or whatever the high thing is called, made friends with the engineers, and tooted on the captain\u2019s speaking trumpet, she\u2019d have been in such a state of rapture.\r\n\r\nIt was all heavenly, but I was glad to see the Irish coast, and found it very lovely, so green and sunny, with brown cabins here and there, ruins on some of the hills, and gentlemen\u2019s countryseats in the valleys, with deer feeding in the parks. It was early in the morning, but I didn\u2019t regret getting up to see it, for the bay was full of little boats, the shore so picturesque, and a rosy sky overhead. I never shall forget it.\r\n\r\nAt Queenstown one of my new acquaintances left us, Mr. Lennox, and when I said something about the Lakes of Killarney, he sighed, and sung, with a look at me...\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, have you e\u2019er heard of Kate Kearney?\r\nShe lives on the banks of Killarney;\r\nFrom the glance of her eye,\r\nShun danger and fly,\r\nFor fatal\u2019s the glance of Kate Kearney.\u201d\r\n\r\nWasn\u2019t that nonsensical?\r\n\r\nWe only stopped at Liverpool a few hours. It\u2019s a dirty, noisy place, and I was glad to leave it. Uncle rushed out and bought a pair of dogskin gloves, some ugly, thick shoes, and an umbrella, and got shaved \u00e0 la mutton chop, the first thing. Then he flattered himself that he looked like a true Briton, but the first time he had the mud cleaned off his shoes, the little bootblack knew that an American stood in them, and said, with a grin, \u201cThere yer har, sir. I\u2019ve given \u2019em the latest Yankee shine.\u201d It amused Uncle immensely. Oh, I must tell you what that absurd Lennox did! He got his friend Ward, who came on with us, to order a bouquet for me, and the first thing I saw in my room was a lovely one, with \u201cRobert Lennox\u2019s compliments,\u201d on the card. Wasn\u2019t that fun, girls? I like traveling.\r\n\r\nI never shall get to London if I don\u2019t hurry. The trip was like riding through a long picture gallery, full of lovely landscapes. The farmhouses were my delight, with thatched roofs, ivy up to the eaves, latticed windows, and stout women with rosy children at the doors. The very cattle looked more tranquil than ours, as they stood knee-deep in clover, and the hens had a contented cluck, as if they never got nervous like Yankee biddies. Such perfect color I never saw, the grass so green, sky so blue, grain so yellow, woods so dark, I was in a rapture all the way. So was Flo, and we kept bouncing from one side to the other, trying to see everything while we were whisking along at the rate of sixty miles an hour. Aunt was tired and went to sleep, but Uncle read his guidebook, and wouldn\u2019t be astonished at anything. This is the way we went on. Amy, flying up\u2014\u201cOh, that must be Kenilworth, that gray place among the trees!\u201d Flo, darting to my window\u2014\u201cHow sweet! We must go there sometime, won\u2019t we Papa?\u201d Uncle, calmly admiring his boots\u2014\u201cNo, my dear, not unless you want beer, that\u2019s a brewery.\u201d\r\n\r\nA pause\u2014then Flo cried out, \u201cBless me, there\u2019s a gallows and a man going up.\u201d \u201cWhere, where?\u201d shrieks Amy, staring out at two tall posts with a crossbeam and some dangling chains. \u201cA colliery,\u201d remarks Uncle, with a twinkle of the eye. \u201cHere\u2019s a lovely flock of lambs all lying down,\u201d says Amy. \u201cSee, Papa, aren\u2019t they pretty?\u201d added Flo sentimentally. \u201cGeese, young ladies,\u201d returns Uncle, in a tone that keeps us quiet till Flo settles down to enjoy the Flirtations of Captain Cavendish, and I have the scenery all to myself.\r\n\r\nOf course it rained when we got to London, and there was nothing to be seen but fog and umbrellas. We rested, unpacked, and shopped a little between the showers. Aunt Mary got me some new things, for I came off in such a hurry I wasn\u2019t half ready. A white hat and blue feather, a muslin dress to match, and the loveliest mantle you ever saw. Shopping in Regent Street is perfectly splendid. Things seem so cheap, nice ribbons only sixpence a yard. I laid in a stock, but shall get my gloves in Paris. Doesn\u2019t that sound sort of elegant and rich?\r\n\r\nFlo and I, for the fun of it, ordered a hansom cab, while Aunt and Uncle were out, and went for a drive, though we learned afterward that it wasn\u2019t the thing for young ladies to ride in them alone. It was so droll! For when we were shut in by the wooden apron, the man drove so fast that Flo was frightened, and told me to stop him, but he was up outside behind somewhere, and I couldn\u2019t get at him. He didn\u2019t hear me call, nor see me flap my parasol in front, and there we were, quite helpless, rattling away, and whirling around corners at a breakneck pace. At last, in my despair, I saw a little door in the roof, and on poking it open, a red eye appeared, and a beery voice said...\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, then, mum?\u201d\r\n\r\nI gave my order as soberly as I could, and slamming down the door, with an \u201cAye, aye, mum,\u201d the man made his horse walk, as if going to a funeral. I poked again and said, \u201cA little faster,\u201d then off he went, helter-skelter as before, and we resigned ourselves to our fate.\r\n\r\nToday was fair, and we went to Hyde Park, close by, for we are more aristocratic than we look. The Duke of Devonshire lives near. I often see his footmen lounging at the back gate, and the Duke of Wellington\u2019s house is not far off. Such sights as I saw, my dear! It was as good as Punch, for there were fat dowagers rolling about in their red and yellow coaches, with gorgeous Jeameses in silk stockings and velvet coats, up behind, and powdered coachmen in front. Smart maids, with the rosiest children I ever saw, handsome girls, looking half asleep, dandies in queer English hats and lavender kids lounging about, and tall soldiers, in short red jackets and muffin caps stuck on one side, looking so funny I longed to sketch them.\r\n\r\nRotten Row means \u2018Route de Roi\u2019, or the king\u2019s way, but now it\u2019s more like a riding school than anything else. The horses are splendid, and the men, especially the grooms, ride well, but the women are stiff, and bounce, which isn\u2019t according to our rules. I longed to show them a tearing American gallop, for they trotted solemnly up and down, in their scant habits and high hats, looking like the women in a toy Noah\u2019s Ark. Everyone rides\u2014old men, stout ladies, little children\u2014and the young folks do a deal of flirting here, I saw a pair exchange rose buds, for it\u2019s the thing to wear one in the button-hole, and I thought it rather a nice little idea.\r\n\r\nIn the P.M. to Westminster Abbey, but don\u2019t expect me to describe it, that\u2019s impossible, so I\u2019ll only say it was sublime! This evening we are going to see Fechter, which will be an appropriate end to the happiest day of my life.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s very late, but I can\u2019t let my letter go in the morning without telling you what happened last evening. Who do you think came in, as we were at tea? Laurie\u2019s English friends, Fred and Frank Vaughn! I was so surprised, for I shouldn\u2019t have known them but for the cards. Both are tall fellows with whiskers, Fred handsome in the English style, and Frank much better, for he only limps slightly, and uses no crutches. They had heard from Laurie where we were to be, and came to ask us to their house, but Uncle won\u2019t go, so we shall return the call, and see them as we can. They went to the theater with us, and we did have such a good time, for Frank devoted himself to Flo, and Fred and I talked over past, present, and future fun as if we had known each other all our days. Tell Beth Frank asked for her, and was sorry to hear of her ill health. Fred laughed when I spoke of Jo, and sent his \u2018respectful compliments to the big hat\u2019. Neither of them had forgotten Camp Laurence, or the fun we had there. What ages ago it seems, doesn\u2019t it?\r\n\r\nAunt is tapping on the wall for the third time, so I must stop. I really feel like a dissipated London fine lady, writing here so late, with my room full of pretty things, and my head a jumble of parks, theaters, new gowns, and gallant creatures who say \u201cAh!\u201d and twirl their blond mustaches with the true English lordliness. I long to see you all, and in spite of my nonsense am, as ever, your loving...\r\n\r\nAMY\r\n\r\nPARIS\r\n\r\nDear girls,\r\n\r\nIn my last I told you about our London visit, how kind the Vaughns were, and what pleasant parties they made for us. I enjoyed the trips to Hampton Court and the Kensington Museum more than anything else, for at Hampton I saw Raphael\u2019s cartoons, and at the Museum, rooms full of pictures by Turner, Lawrence, Reynolds, Hogarth, and the other great creatures. The day in Richmond Park was charming, for we had a regular English picnic, and I had more splendid oaks and groups of deer than I could copy, also heard a nightingale, and saw larks go up. We \u2018did\u2019 London to our heart\u2019s content, thanks to Fred and Frank, and were sorry to go away, for though English people are slow to take you in, when they once make up their minds to do it they cannot be outdone in hospitality, I think. The Vaughns hope to meet us in Rome next winter, and I shall be dreadfully disappointed if they don\u2019t, for Grace and I are great friends, and the boys very nice fellows, especially Fred.\r\n\r\nWell, we were hardly settled here, when he turned up again, saying he had come for a holiday, and was going to Switzerland. Aunt looked sober at first, but he was so cool about it she couldn\u2019t say a word. And now we get on nicely, and are very glad he came, for he speaks French like a native, and I don\u2019t know what we should do without him. Uncle doesn\u2019t know ten words, and insists on talking English very loud, as if it would make people understand him. Aunt\u2019s pronunciation is old-fashioned, and Flo and I, though we flattered ourselves that we knew a good deal, find we don\u2019t, and are very grateful to have Fred do the \u2018parley vooing\u2019, as Uncle calls it.\r\n\r\nSuch delightful times as we are having! Sight-seeing from morning till night, stopping for nice lunches in the gay cafes, and meeting with all sorts of droll adventures. Rainy days I spend in the Louvre, revelling in pictures. Jo would turn up her naughty nose at some of the finest, because she has no soul for art, but I have, and I\u2019m cultivating eye and taste as fast as I can. She would like the relics of great people better, for I\u2019ve seen her Napoleon\u2019s cocked hat and gray coat, his baby\u2019s cradle and his old toothbrush, also Marie Antoinette\u2019s little shoe, the ring of Saint Denis, Charlemagne\u2019s sword, and many other interesting things. I\u2019ll talk for hours about them when I come, but haven\u2019t time to write.\r\n\r\nThe Palais Royale is a heavenly place, so full of bijouterie and lovely things that I\u2019m nearly distracted because I can\u2019t buy them. Fred wanted to get me some, but of course I didn\u2019t allow it. Then the Bois and Champs Elysees are tres magnifique. I\u2019ve seen the imperial family several times, the emperor an ugly, hard-looking man, the empress pale and pretty, but dressed in bad taste, I thought\u2014purple dress, green hat, and yellow gloves. Little Nap is a handsome boy, who sits chatting to his tutor, and kisses his hand to the people as he passes in his four-horse barouche, with postilions in red satin jackets and a mounted guard before and behind.\r\n\r\nWe often walk in the Tuileries Gardens, for they are lovely, though the antique Luxembourg Gardens suit me better. Pere la Chaise is very curious, for many of the tombs are like small rooms, and looking in, one sees a table, with images or pictures of the dead, and chairs for the mourners to sit in when they come to lament. That is so Frenchy.\r\n\r\nOur rooms are on the Rue de Rivoli, and sitting on the balcony, we look up and down the long, brilliant street. It is so pleasant that we spend our evenings talking there when too tired with our day\u2019s work to go out. Fred is very entertaining, and is altogether the most agreeable young man I ever knew\u2014except Laurie, whose manners are more charming. I wish Fred was dark, for I don\u2019t fancy light men, however, the Vaughns are very rich and come of an excellent family, so I won\u2019t find fault with their yellow hair, as my own is yellower.\r\n\r\nNext week we are off to Germany and Switzerland, and as we shall travel fast, I shall only be able to give you hasty letters. I keep my diary, and try to \u2018remember correctly and describe clearly all that I see and admire\u2019, as Father advised. It is good practice for me, and with my sketchbook will give you a better idea of my tour than these scribbles.\r\n\r\nAdieu, I embrace you tenderly. \u201cVotre Amie.\u201d\r\n\r\nHEIDELBERG\r\n\r\nMy dear Mamma,\r\n\r\nHaving a quiet hour before we leave for Berne, I\u2019ll try to tell you what has happened, for some of it is very important, as you will see.\r\n\r\nThe sail up the Rhine was perfect, and I just sat and enjoyed it with all my might. Get Father\u2019s old guidebooks and read about it. I haven\u2019t words beautiful enough to describe it. At Coblentz we had a lovely time, for some students from Bonn, with whom Fred got acquainted on the boat, gave us a serenade. It was a moonlight night, and about one o\u2019clock Flo and I were waked by the most delicious music under our windows. We flew up, and hid behind the curtains, but sly peeps showed us Fred and the students singing away down below. It was the most romantic thing I ever saw\u2014the river, the bridge of boats, the great fortress opposite, moonlight everywhere, and music fit to melt a heart of stone.\r\n\r\nWhen they were done we threw down some flowers, and saw them scramble for them, kiss their hands to the invisible ladies, and go laughing away, to smoke and drink beer, I suppose. Next morning Fred showed me one of the crumpled flowers in his vest pocket, and looked very sentimental. I laughed at him, and said I didn\u2019t throw it, but Flo, which seemed to disgust him, for he tossed it out of the window, and turned sensible again. I\u2019m afraid I\u2019m going to have trouble with that boy, it begins to look like it.\r\n\r\nThe baths at Nassau were very gay, so was Baden-Baden, where Fred lost some money, and I scolded him. He needs someone to look after him when Frank is not with him. Kate said once she hoped he\u2019d marry soon, and I quite agree with her that it would be well for him. Frankfurt was delightful. I saw Goethe\u2019s house, Schiller\u2019s statue, and Dannecker\u2019s famous \u2018Ariadne.\u2019 It was very lovely, but I should have enjoyed it more if I had known the story better. I didn\u2019t like to ask, as everyone knew it or pretended they did. I wish Jo would tell me all about it. I ought to have read more, for I find I don\u2019t know anything, and it mortifies me.\r\n\r\nNow comes the serious part, for it happened here, and Fred has just gone. He has been so kind and jolly that we all got quite fond of him. I never thought of anything but a traveling friendship till the serenade night. Since then I\u2019ve begun to feel that the moonlight walks, balcony talks, and daily adventures were something more to him than fun. I haven\u2019t flirted, Mother, truly, but remembered what you said to me, and have done my very best. I can\u2019t help it if people like me. I don\u2019t try to make them, and it worries me if I don\u2019t care for them, though Jo says I haven\u2019t got any heart. Now I know Mother will shake her head, and the girls say, \u201cOh, the mercenary little wretch!\u201d, but I\u2019ve made up my mind, and if Fred asks me, I shall accept him, though I\u2019m not madly in love. I like him, and we get on comfortably together. He is handsome, young, clever enough, and very rich\u2014ever so much richer than the Laurences. I don\u2019t think his family would object, and I should be very happy, for they are all kind, well-bred, generous people, and they like me. Fred, as the eldest twin, will have the estate, I suppose, and such a splendid one it is! A city house in a fashionable street, not so showy as our big houses, but twice as comfortable and full of solid luxury, such as English people believe in. I like it, for it\u2019s genuine. I\u2019ve seen the plate, the family jewels, the old servants, and pictures of the country place, with its park, great house, lovely grounds, and fine horses. Oh, it would be all I should ask! And I\u2019d rather have it than any title such as girls snap up so readily, and find nothing behind. I may be mercenary, but I hate poverty, and don\u2019t mean to bear it a minute longer than I can help. One of us must marry well. Meg didn\u2019t, Jo won\u2019t, Beth can\u2019t yet, so I shall, and make everything okay all round. I wouldn\u2019t marry a man I hated or despised. You may be sure of that, and though Fred is not my model hero, he does very well, and in time I should get fond enough of him if he was very fond of me, and let me do just as I liked. So I\u2019ve been turning the matter over in my mind the last week, for it was impossible to help seeing that Fred liked me. He said nothing, but little things showed it. He never goes with Flo, always gets on my side of the carriage, table, or promenade, looks sentimental when we are alone, and frowns at anyone else who ventures to speak to me. Yesterday at dinner, when an Austrian officer stared at us and then said something to his friend, a rakish-looking baron, about \u2018ein wonderschones Blondchen\u2019, Fred looked as fierce as a lion, and cut his meat so savagely it nearly flew off his plate. He isn\u2019t one of the cool, stiff Englishmen, but is rather peppery, for he has Scotch blood in him, as one might guess from his bonnie blue eyes.\r\n\r\nWell, last evening we went up to the castle about sunset, at least all of us but Fred, who was to meet us there after going to the Post Restante for letters. We had a charming time poking about the ruins, the vaults where the monster tun is, and the beautiful gardens made by the elector long ago for his English wife. I liked the great terrace best, for the view was divine, so while the rest went to see the rooms inside, I sat there trying to sketch the gray stone lion\u2019s head on the wall, with scarlet woodbine sprays hanging round it. I felt as if I\u2019d got into a romance, sitting there, watching the Neckar rolling through the valley, listening to the music of the Austrian band below, and waiting for my lover, like a real storybook girl. I had a feeling that something was going to happen and I was ready for it. I didn\u2019t feel blushy or quakey, but quite cool and only a little excited.\r\n\r\nBy-and-by I heard Fred\u2019s voice, and then he came hurrying through the great arch to find me. He looked so troubled that I forgot all about myself, and asked what the matter was. He said he\u2019d just got a letter begging him to come home, for Frank was very ill. So he was going at once on the night train and only had time to say good-by. I was very sorry for him, and disappointed for myself, but only for a minute because he said, as he shook hands, and said it in a way that I could not mistake, \u201cI shall soon come back, you won\u2019t forget me, Amy?\u201d\r\n\r\nI didn\u2019t promise, but I looked at him, and he seemed satisfied, and there was no time for anything but messages and good-byes, for he was off in an hour, and we all miss him very much. I know he wanted to speak, but I think, from something he once hinted, that he had promised his father not to do anything of the sort yet a while, for he is a rash boy, and the old gentleman dreads a foreign daughter-in-law. We shall soon meet in Rome, and then, if I don\u2019t change my mind, I\u2019ll say \u201cYes, thank you,\u201d when he says \u201cWill you, please?\u201d\r\n\r\nOf course this is all very private, but I wished you to know what was going on. Don\u2019t be anxious about me, remember I am your \u2018prudent Amy\u2019, and be sure I will do nothing rashly. Send me as much advice as you like. I\u2019ll use it if I can. I wish I could see you for a good talk, Marmee. Love and trust me.\r\n\r\nEver your AMY\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-TWO\r\nTENDER TROUBLES\r\n\r\n\u201cJo, I\u2019m anxious about Beth.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Mother, she has seemed unusually well since the babies came.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s not her health that troubles me now, it\u2019s her spirits. I\u2019m sure there is something on her mind, and I want you to discover what it is.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat makes you think so, Mother?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShe sits alone a good deal, and doesn\u2019t talk to her father as much as she used. I found her crying over the babies the other day. When she sings, the songs are always sad ones, and now and then I see a look in her face that I don\u2019t understand. This isn\u2019t like Beth, and it worries me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHave you asked her about it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI have tried once or twice, but she either evaded my questions or looked so distressed that I stopped. I never force my children\u2019s confidence, and I seldom have to wait for long.\u201d\r\n\r\nMrs. March glanced at Jo as she spoke, but the face opposite seemed quite unconscious of any secret disquietude but Beth\u2019s, and after sewing thoughtfully for a minute, Jo said, \u201cI think she is growing up, and so begins to dream dreams, and have hopes and fears and fidgets, without knowing why or being able to explain them. Why, Mother, Beth\u2019s eighteen, but we don\u2019t realize it, and treat her like a child, forgetting she\u2019s a woman.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo she is. Dear heart, how fast you do grow up,\u201d returned her mother with a sigh and a smile.\r\n\r\n\u201cCan\u2019t be helped, Marmee, so you must resign yourself to all sorts of worries, and let your birds hop out of the nest, one by one. I promise never to hop very far, if that is any comfort to you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a great comfort, Jo. I always feel strong when you are at home, now Meg is gone. Beth is too feeble and Amy too young to depend upon, but when the tug comes, you are always ready.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, you know I don\u2019t mind hard jobs much, and there must always be one scrub in a family. Amy is splendid in fine works and I\u2019m not, but I feel in my element when all the carpets are to be taken up, or half the family fall sick at once. Amy is distinguishing herself abroad, but if anything is amiss at home, I\u2019m your man.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI leave Beth to your hands, then, for she will open her tender little heart to her Jo sooner than to anyone else. Be very kind, and don\u2019t let her think anyone watches or talks about her. If she only would get quite strong and cheerful again, I shouldn\u2019t have a wish in the world.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHappy woman! I\u2019ve got heaps.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy dear, what are they?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll settle Bethy\u2019s troubles, and then I\u2019ll tell you mine. They are not very wearing, so they\u2019ll keep.\u201d and Jo stitched away, with a wise nod which set her mother\u2019s heart at rest about her for the present at least.\r\n\r\nWhile apparently absorbed in her own affairs, Jo watched Beth, and after many conflicting conjectures, finally settled upon one which seemed to explain the change in her. A slight incident gave Jo the clue to the mystery, she thought, and lively fancy, loving heart did the rest. She was affecting to write busily one Saturday afternoon, when she and Beth were alone together. Yet as she scribbled, she kept her eye on her sister, who seemed unusually quiet. Sitting at the window, Beth\u2019s work often dropped into her lap, and she leaned her head upon her hand, in a dejected attitude, while her eyes rested on the dull, autumnal landscape. Suddenly some one passed below, whistling like an operatic blackbird, and a voice called out, \u201cAll serene! Coming in tonight.\u201d\r\n\r\nBeth started, leaned forward, smiled and nodded, watched the passer-by till his quick tramp died away, then said softly as if to herself, \u201cHow strong and well and happy that dear boy looks.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHum!\u201d said Jo, still intent upon her sister\u2019s face, for the bright color faded as quickly as it came, the smile vanished, and presently a tear lay shining on the window ledge. Beth whisked it off, and in her half-averted face read a tender sorrow that made her own eyes fill. Fearing to betray herself, she slipped away, murmuring something about needing more paper.\r\n\r\n\u201cMercy on me, Beth loves Laurie!\u201d she said, sitting down in her own room, pale with the shock of the discovery which she believed she had just made. \u201cI never dreamed of such a thing. What will Mother say? I wonder if her...\u201d there Jo stopped and turned scarlet with a sudden thought. \u201cIf he shouldn\u2019t love back again, how dreadful it would be. He must. I\u2019ll make him!\u201d and she shook her head threateningly at the picture of the mischievous-looking boy laughing at her from the wall. \u201cOh dear, we are growing up with a vengeance. Here\u2019s Meg married and a mamma, Amy flourishing away at Paris, and Beth in love. I\u2019m the only one that has sense enough to keep out of mischief.\u201d Jo thought intently for a minute with her eyes fixed on the picture, then she smoothed out her wrinkled forehead and said, with a decided nod at the face opposite, \u201cNo thank you, sir, you\u2019re very charming, but you\u2019ve no more stability than a weathercock. So you needn\u2019t write touching notes and smile in that insinuating way, for it won\u2019t do a bit of good, and I won\u2019t have it.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen she sighed, and fell into a reverie from which she did not wake till the early twilight sent her down to take new observations, which only confirmed her suspicion. Though Laurie flirted with Amy and joked with Jo, his manner to Beth had always been peculiarly kind and gentle, but so was everybody\u2019s. Therefore, no one thought of imagining that he cared more for her than for the others. Indeed, a general impression had prevailed in the family of late that \u2018our boy\u2019 was getting fonder than ever of Jo, who, however, wouldn\u2019t hear a word upon the subject and scolded violently if anyone dared to suggest it. If they had known the various tender passages which had been nipped in the bud, they would have had the immense satisfaction of saying, \u201cI told you so.\u201d But Jo hated \u2018philandering\u2019, and wouldn\u2019t allow it, always having a joke or a smile ready at the least sign of impending danger.\r\n\r\nWhen Laurie first went to college, he fell in love about once a month, but these small flames were as brief as ardent, did no damage, and much amused Jo, who took great interest in the alternations of hope, despair, and resignation, which were confided to her in their weekly conferences. But there came a time when Laurie ceased to worship at many shrines, hinted darkly at one all-absorbing passion, and indulged occasionally in Byronic fits of gloom. Then he avoided the tender subject altogether, wrote philosophical notes to Jo, turned studious, and gave out that he was going to \u2018dig\u2019, intending to graduate in a blaze of glory. This suited the young lady better than twilight confidences, tender pressures of the hand, and eloquent glances of the eye, for with Jo, brain developed earlier than heart, and she preferred imaginary heroes to real ones, because when tired of them, the former could be shut up in the tin kitchen till called for, and the latter were less manageable.\r\n\r\nThings were in this state when the grand discovery was made, and Jo watched Laurie that night as she had never done before. If she had not got the new idea into her head, she would have seen nothing unusual in the fact that Beth was very quiet, and Laurie very kind to her. But having given the rein to her lively fancy, it galloped away with her at a great pace, and common sense, being rather weakened by a long course of romance writing, did not come to the rescue. As usual Beth lay on the sofa and Laurie sat in a low chair close by, amusing her with all sorts of gossip, for she depended on her weekly \u2018spin\u2019, and he never disappointed her. But that evening Jo fancied that Beth\u2019s eyes rested on the lively, dark face beside her with peculiar pleasure, and that she listened with intense interest to an account of some exciting cricket match, though the phrases, \u2018caught off a tice\u2019, \u2018stumped off his ground\u2019, and \u2018the leg hit for three\u2019, were as intelligible to her as Sanskrit. She also fancied, having set her heart upon seeing it, that she saw a certain increase of gentleness in Laurie\u2019s manner, that he dropped his voice now and then, laughed less than usual, was a little absent-minded, and settled the afghan over Beth\u2019s feet with an assiduity that was really almost tender.\r\n\r\n\u201cWho knows? Stranger things have happened,\u201d thought Jo, as she fussed about the room. \u201cShe will make quite an angel of him, and he will make life delightfully easy and pleasant for the dear, if they only love each other. I don\u2019t see how he can help it, and I do believe he would if the rest of us were out of the way.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs everyone was out of the way but herself, Jo began to feel that she ought to dispose of herself with all speed. But where should she go? And burning to lay herself upon the shrine of sisterly devotion, she sat down to settle that point.\r\n\r\nNow, the old sofa was a regular patriarch of a sofa\u2014long, broad, well-cushioned, and low, a trifle shabby, as well it might be, for the girls had slept and sprawled on it as babies, fished over the back, rode on the arms, and had menageries under it as children, and rested tired heads, dreamed dreams, and listened to tender talk on it as young women. They all loved it, for it was a family refuge, and one corner had always been Jo\u2019s favorite lounging place. Among the many pillows that adorned the venerable couch was one, hard, round, covered with prickly horsehair, and furnished with a knobby button at each end. This repulsive pillow was her especial property, being used as a weapon of defense, a barricade, or a stern preventive of too much slumber.\r\n\r\nLaurie knew this pillow well, and had cause to regard it with deep aversion, having been unmercifully pummeled with it in former days when romping was allowed, and now frequently debarred by it from the seat he most coveted next to Jo in the sofa corner. If \u2018the sausage\u2019 as they called it, stood on end, it was a sign that he might approach and repose, but if it lay flat across the sofa, woe to man, woman, or child who dared disturb it! That evening Jo forgot to barricade her corner, and had not been in her seat five minutes, before a massive form appeared beside her, and with both arms spread over the sofa back, both long legs stretched out before him, Laurie exclaimed, with a sigh of satisfaction...\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, this is filling at the price.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo slang,\u201d snapped Jo, slamming down the pillow. But it was too late, there was no room for it, and coasting onto the floor, it disappeared in a most mysterious manner.\r\n\r\n\u201cCome, Jo, don\u2019t be thorny. After studying himself to a skeleton all the week, a fellow deserves petting and ought to get it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBeth will pet you. I\u2019m busy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, she\u2019s not to be bothered with me, but you like that sort of thing, unless you\u2019ve suddenly lost your taste for it. Have you? Do you hate your boy, and want to fire pillows at him?\u201d\r\n\r\nAnything more wheedlesome than that touching appeal was seldom heard, but Jo quenched \u2018her boy\u2019 by turning on him with a stern query, \u201cHow many bouquets have you sent Miss Randal this week?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot one, upon my word. She\u2019s engaged. Now then.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad of it, that\u2019s one of your foolish extravagances, sending flowers and things to girls for whom you don\u2019t care two pins,\u201d continued Jo reprovingly.\r\n\r\n\u201cSensible girls for whom I do care whole papers of pins won\u2019t let me send them \u2018flowers and things\u2019, so what can I do? My feelings need a \u2018vent\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMother doesn\u2019t approve of flirting even in fun, and you do flirt desperately, Teddy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019d give anything if I could answer, \u2018So do you\u2019. As I can\u2019t, I\u2019ll merely say that I don\u2019t see any harm in that pleasant little game, if all parties understand that it\u2019s only play.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it does look pleasant, but I can\u2019t learn how it\u2019s done. I\u2019ve tried, because one feels awkward in company not to do as everybody else is doing, but I don\u2019t seem to get on\u201d, said Jo, forgetting to play mentor.\r\n\r\n\u201cTake lessons of Amy, she has a regular talent for it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, she does it very prettily, and never seems to go too far. I suppose it\u2019s natural to some people to please without trying, and others to always say and do the wrong thing in the wrong place.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad you can\u2019t flirt. It\u2019s really refreshing to see a sensible, straightforward girl, who can be jolly and kind without making a fool of herself. Between ourselves, Jo, some of the girls I know really do go on at such a rate I\u2019m ashamed of them. They don\u2019t mean any harm, I\u2019m sure, but if they knew how we fellows talked about them afterward, they\u2019d mend their ways, I fancy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey do the same, and as their tongues are the sharpest, you fellows get the worst of it, for you are as silly as they, every bit. If you behaved properly, they would, but knowing you like their nonsense, they keep it up, and then you blame them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMuch you know about it, ma\u2019am,\u201d said Laurie in a superior tone. \u201cWe don\u2019t like romps and flirts, though we may act as if we did sometimes. The pretty, modest girls are never talked about, except respectfully, among gentleman. Bless your innocent soul! If you could be in my place for a month you\u2019d see things that would astonish you a trifle. Upon my word, when I see one of those harum-scarum girls, I always want to say with our friend Cock Robin...\r\n\r\n\u201cOut upon you, fie upon you,\r\nBold-faced jig!\u201d\r\n\r\nIt was impossible to help laughing at the funny conflict between Laurie\u2019s chivalrous reluctance to speak ill of womankind, and his very natural dislike of the unfeminine folly of which fashionable society showed him many samples. Jo knew that \u2018young Laurence\u2019 was regarded as a most eligible parti by worldly mamas, was much smiled upon by their daughters, and flattered enough by ladies of all ages to make a coxcomb of him, so she watched him rather jealously, fearing he would be spoiled, and rejoiced more than she confessed to find that he still believed in modest girls. Returning suddenly to her admonitory tone, she said, dropping her voice, \u201cIf you must have a \u2018vent\u2019, Teddy, go and devote yourself to one of the \u2018pretty, modest girls\u2019 whom you do respect, and not waste your time with the silly ones.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou really advise it?\u201d and Laurie looked at her with an odd mixture of anxiety and merriment in his face.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I do, but you\u2019d better wait till you are through college, on the whole, and be fitting yourself for the place meantime. You\u2019re not half good enough for\u2014well, whoever the modest girl may be.\u201d and Jo looked a little queer likewise, for a name had almost escaped her.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat I\u2019m not!\u201d acquiesced Laurie, with an expression of humility quite new to him, as he dropped his eyes and absently wound Jo\u2019s apron tassel round his finger.\r\n\r\n\u201cMercy on us, this will never do,\u201d thought Jo, adding aloud, \u201cGo and sing to me. I\u2019m dying for some music, and always like yours.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019d rather stay here, thank you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, you can\u2019t, there isn\u2019t room. Go and make yourself useful, since you are too big to be ornamental. I thought you hated to be tied to a woman\u2019s apron string?\u201d retorted Jo, quoting certain rebellious words of his own.\r\n\r\n\u201cAh, that depends on who wears the apron!\u201d and Laurie gave an audacious tweak at the tassel.\r\n\r\n\u201cAre you going?\u201d demanded Jo, diving for the pillow.\r\n\r\nHe fled at once, and the minute it was well, \u201cUp with the bonnets of bonnie Dundee,\u201d she slipped away to return no more till the young gentleman departed in high dudgeon.\r\n\r\nJo lay long awake that night, and was just dropping off when the sound of a stifled sob made her fly to Beth\u2019s bedside, with the anxious inquiry, \u201cWhat is it, dear?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought you were asleep,\u201d sobbed Beth.\r\n\r\n\u201cIs it the old pain, my precious?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, it\u2019s a new one, but I can bear it,\u201d and Beth tried to check her tears.\r\n\r\n\u201cTell me all about it, and let me cure it as I often did the other.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou can\u2019t, there is no cure.\u201d There Beth\u2019s voice gave way, and clinging to her sister, she cried so despairingly that Jo was frightened.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere is it? Shall I call Mother?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, no, don\u2019t call her, don\u2019t tell her. I shall be better soon. Lie down here and \u2018poor\u2019 my head. I\u2019ll be quiet and go to sleep, indeed I will.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo obeyed, but as her hand went softly to and fro across Beth\u2019s hot forehead and wet eyelids, her heart was very full and she longed to speak. But young as she was, Jo had learned that hearts, like flowers, cannot be rudely handled, but must open naturally, so though she believed she knew the cause of Beth\u2019s new pain, she only said, in her tenderest tone, \u201cDoes anything trouble you, deary?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Jo,\u201d after a long pause.\r\n\r\n\u201cWouldn\u2019t it comfort you to tell me what it is?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot now, not yet.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen I won\u2019t ask, but remember, Bethy, that Mother and Jo are always glad to hear and help you, if they can.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI know it. I\u2019ll tell you by-and-by.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIs the pain better now?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes, much better, you are so comfortable, Jo.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGo to sleep, dear. I\u2019ll stay with you.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo cheek to cheek they fell asleep, and on the morrow Beth seemed quite herself again, for at eighteen neither heads nor hearts ache long, and a loving word can medicine most ills.\r\n\r\nBut Jo had made up her mind, and after pondering over a project for some days, she confided it to her mother.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou asked me the other day what my wishes were. I\u2019ll tell you one of them, Marmee,\u201d she began, as they sat along together. \u201cI want to go away somewhere this winter for a change.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Jo?\u201d and her mother looked up quickly, as if the words suggested a double meaning.\r\n\r\nWith her eyes on her work Jo answered soberly, \u201cI want something new. I feel restless and anxious to be seeing, doing, and learning more than I am. I brood too much over my own small affairs, and need stirring up, so as I can be spared this winter, I\u2019d like to hop a little way and try my wings.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere will you hop?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTo New York. I had a bright idea yesterday, and this is it. You know Mrs. Kirke wrote to you for some respectable young person to teach her children and sew. It\u2019s rather hard to find just the thing, but I think I should suit if I tried.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy dear, go out to service in that great boarding house!\u201d and Mrs. March looked surprised, but not displeased.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s not exactly going out to service, for Mrs. Kirke is your friend\u2014the kindest soul that ever lived\u2014and would make things pleasant for me, I know. Her family is separate from the rest, and no one knows me there. Don\u2019t care if they do. It\u2019s honest work, and I\u2019m not ashamed of it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNor I. But your writing?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll the better for the change. I shall see and hear new things, get new ideas, and even if I haven\u2019t much time there, I shall bring home quantities of material for my rubbish.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI have no doubt of it, but are these your only reasons for this sudden fancy?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, Mother.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMay I know the others?\u201d\r\n\r\nJo looked up and Jo looked down, then said slowly, with sudden color in her cheeks. \u201cIt may be vain and wrong to say it, but\u2014I\u2019m afraid\u2014Laurie is getting too fond of me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen you don\u2019t care for him in the way it is evident he begins to care for you?\u201d and Mrs. March looked anxious as she put the question.\r\n\r\n\u201cMercy, no! I love the dear boy, as I always have, and am immensely proud of him, but as for anything more, it\u2019s out of the question.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad of that, Jo.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, please?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause, dear, I don\u2019t think you suited to one another. As friends you are very happy, and your frequent quarrels soon blow over, but I fear you would both rebel if you were mated for life. You are too much alike and too fond of freedom, not to mention hot tempers and strong wills, to get on happily together, in a relation which needs infinite patience and forbearance, as well as love.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s just the feeling I had, though I couldn\u2019t express it. I\u2019m glad you think he is only beginning to care for me. It would trouble me sadly to make him unhappy, for I couldn\u2019t fall in love with the dear old fellow merely out of gratitude, could I?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou are sure of his feeling for you?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe color deepened in Jo\u2019s cheeks as she answered, with the look of mingled pleasure, pride, and pain which young girls wear when speaking of first lovers, \u201cI\u2019m afraid it is so, Mother. He hasn\u2019t said anything, but he looks a great deal. I think I had better go away before it comes to anything.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI agree with you, and if it can be managed you shall go.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo looked relieved, and after a pause, said, smiling, \u201cHow Mrs. Moffat would wonder at your want of management, if she knew, and how she will rejoice that Annie may still hope.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAh, Jo, mothers may differ in their management, but the hope is the same in all\u2014the desire to see their children happy. Meg is so, and I am content with her success. You I leave to enjoy your liberty till you tire of it, for only then will you find that there is something sweeter. Amy is my chief care now, but her good sense will help her. For Beth, I indulge no hopes except that she may be well. By the way, she seems brighter this last day or two. Have you spoken to her?\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, she owned she had a trouble, and promised to tell me by-and-by. I said no more, for I think I know it,\u201d and Jo told her little story.\r\n\r\nMrs. March shook her head, and did not take so romantic a view of the case, but looked grave, and repeated her opinion that for Laurie\u2019s sake Jo should go away for a time.\r\n\r\n\u201cLet us say nothing about it to him till the plan is settled, then I\u2019ll run away before he can collect his wits and be tragic. Beth must think I\u2019m going to please myself, as I am, for I can\u2019t talk about Laurie to her. But she can pet and comfort him after I\u2019m gone, and so cure him of this romantic notion. He\u2019s been through so many little trials of the sort, he\u2019s used to it, and will soon get over his lovelornity.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo spoke hopefully, but could not rid herself of the foreboding fear that this \u2018little trial\u2019 would be harder than the others, and that Laurie would not get over his \u2018lovelornity\u2019 as easily as heretofore.\r\n\r\nThe plan was talked over in a family council and agreed upon, for Mrs. Kirke gladly accepted Jo, and promised to make a pleasant home for her. The teaching would render her independent, and such leisure as she got might be made profitable by writing, while the new scenes and society would be both useful and agreeable. Jo liked the prospect and was eager to be gone, for the home nest was growing too narrow for her restless nature and adventurous spirit. When all was settled, with fear and trembling she told Laurie, but to her surprise he took it very quietly. He had been graver than usual of late, but very pleasant, and when jokingly accused of turning over a new leaf, he answered soberly, \u201cSo I am, and I mean this one shall stay turned.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo was very much relieved that one of his virtuous fits should come on just then, and made her preparations with a lightened heart, for Beth seemed more cheerful, and hoped she was doing the best for all.\r\n\r\n\u201cOne thing I leave in your especial care,\u201d she said, the night before she left.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou mean your papers?\u201d asked Beth.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, my boy. Be very good to him, won\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course I will, but I can\u2019t fill your place, and he\u2019ll miss you sadly.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt won\u2019t hurt him, so remember, I leave him in your charge, to plague, pet, and keep in order.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll do my best, for your sake,\u201d promised Beth, wondering why Jo looked at her so queerly.\r\n\r\nWhen Laurie said good-by, he whispered significantly, \u201cIt won\u2019t do a bit of good, Jo. My eye is on you, so mind what you do, or I\u2019ll come and bring you home.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-THREE\r\nJO\u2019S JOURNAL\r\n\r\nNew York, November\r\n\r\nDear Marmee and Beth,\r\n\r\nI\u2019m going to write you a regular volume, for I\u2019ve got heaps to tell, though I\u2019m not a fine young lady traveling on the continent. When I lost sight of Father\u2019s dear old face, I felt a trifle blue, and might have shed a briny drop or two, if an Irish lady with four small children, all crying more or less, hadn\u2019t diverted my mind, for I amused myself by dropping gingerbread nuts over the seat every time they opened their mouths to roar.\r\n\r\nSoon the sun came out, and taking it as a good omen, I cleared up likewise and enjoyed my journey with all my heart.\r\n\r\nMrs. Kirke welcomed me so kindly I felt at home at once, even in that big house full of strangers. She gave me a funny little sky parlor\u2014all she had, but there is a stove in it, and a nice table in a sunny window, so I can sit here and write whenever I like. A fine view and a church tower opposite atone for the many stairs, and I took a fancy to my den on the spot. The nursery, where I am to teach and sew, is a pleasant room next Mrs. Kirke\u2019s private parlor, and the two little girls are pretty children, rather spoiled, I fancy, but they took to me after telling them The Seven Bad Pigs, and I\u2019ve no doubt I shall make a model governess.\r\n\r\nI am to have my meals with the children, if I prefer it to the great table, and for the present I do, for I am bashful, though no one will believe it.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, my dear, make yourself at home,\u201d said Mrs. K. in her motherly way, \u201cI\u2019m on the drive from morning to night, as you may suppose with such a family, but a great anxiety will be off my mind if I know the children are safe with you. My rooms are always open to you, and your own shall be as comfortable as I can make it. There are some pleasant people in the house if you feel sociable, and your evenings are always free. Come to me if anything goes wrong, and be as happy as you can. There\u2019s the tea bell, I must run and change my cap.\u201d And off she bustled, leaving me to settle myself in my new nest.\r\n\r\nAs I went downstairs soon after, I saw something I liked. The flights are very long in this tall house, and as I stood waiting at the head of the third one for a little servant girl to lumber up, I saw a gentleman come along behind her, take the heavy hod of coal out of her hand, carry it all the way up, put it down at a door near by, and walk away, saying, with a kind nod and a foreign accent, \u201cIt goes better so. The little back is too young to haf such heaviness.\u201d\r\n\r\nWasn\u2019t it good of him? I like such things, for as Father says, trifles show character. When I mentioned it to Mrs. K., that evening, she laughed, and said, \u201cThat must have been Professor Bhaer, he\u2019s always doing things of that sort.\u201d\r\n\r\nMrs. K. told me he was from Berlin, very learned and good, but poor as a church mouse, and gives lessons to support himself and two little orphan nephews whom he is educating here, according to the wishes of his sister, who married an American. Not a very romantic story, but it interested me, and I was glad to hear that Mrs. K. lends him her parlor for some of his scholars. There is a glass door between it and the nursery, and I mean to peep at him, and then I\u2019ll tell you how he looks. He\u2019s almost forty, so it\u2019s no harm, Marmee.\r\n\r\nAfter tea and a go-to-bed romp with the little girls, I attacked the big workbasket, and had a quiet evening chatting with my new friend. I shall keep a journal-letter, and send it once a week, so goodnight, and more tomorrow.\r\n\r\nTuesday Eve\r\n\r\nHad a lively time in my seminary this morning, for the children acted like Sancho, and at one time I really thought I should shake them all round. Some good angel inspired me to try gymnastics, and I kept it up till they were glad to sit down and keep still. After luncheon, the girl took them out for a walk, and I went to my needlework like little Mabel \u2018with a willing mind\u2019. I was thanking my stars that I\u2019d learned to make nice buttonholes, when the parlor door opened and shut, and someone began to hum, Kennst Du Das Land, like a big bumblebee. It was dreadfully improper, I know, but I couldn\u2019t resist the temptation, and lifting one end of the curtain before the glass door, I peeped in. Professor Bhaer was there, and while he arranged his books, I took a good look at him. A regular German\u2014rather stout, with brown hair tumbled all over his head, a bushy beard, good nose, the kindest eyes I ever saw, and a splendid big voice that does one\u2019s ears good, after our sharp or slipshod American gabble. His clothes were rusty, his hands were large, and he hadn\u2019t a really handsome feature in his face, except his beautiful teeth, yet I liked him, for he had a fine head, his linen was very nice, and he looked like a gentleman, though two buttons were off his coat and there was a patch on one shoe. He looked sober in spite of his humming, till he went to the window to turn the hyacinth bulbs toward the sun, and stroke the cat, who received him like an old friend. Then he smiled, and when a tap came at the door, called out in a loud, brisk tone, \u201cHerein!\u201d\r\n\r\nI was just going to run, when I caught sight of a morsel of a child carrying a big book, and stopped, to see what was going on.\r\n\r\n\u201cMe wants me Bhaer,\u201d said the mite, slamming down her book and running to meet him.\r\n\r\n\u201cThou shalt haf thy Bhaer. Come, then, and take a goot hug from him, my Tina,\u201d said the Professor, catching her up with a laugh, and holding her so high over his head that she had to stoop her little face to kiss him.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow me mus tuddy my lessin,\u201d went on the funny little thing. So he put her up at the table, opened the great dictionary she had brought, and gave her a paper and pencil, and she scribbled away, turning a leaf now and then, and passing her little fat finger down the page, as if finding a word, so soberly that I nearly betrayed myself by a laugh, while Mr. Bhaer stood stroking her pretty hair with a fatherly look that made me think she must be his own, though she looked more French than German.\r\n\r\nAnother knock and the appearance of two young ladies sent me back to my work, and there I virtuously remained through all the noise and gabbling that went on next door. One of the girls kept laughing affectedly, and saying, \u201cNow Professor,\u201d in a coquettish tone, and the other pronounced her German with an accent that must have made it hard for him to keep sober.\r\n\r\nBoth seemed to try his patience sorely, for more than once I heard him say emphatically, \u201cNo, no, it is not so, you haf not attend to what I say,\u201d and once there was a loud rap, as if he struck the table with his book, followed by the despairing exclamation, \u201cPrut! It all goes bad this day.\u201d\r\n\r\nPoor man, I pitied him, and when the girls were gone, took just one more peep to see if he survived it. He seemed to have thrown himself back in his chair, tired out, and sat there with his eyes shut till the clock struck two, when he jumped up, put his books in his pocket, as if ready for another lesson, and taking little Tina who had fallen asleep on the sofa in his arms, he carried her quietly away. I fancy he has a hard life of it. Mrs. Kirke asked me if I wouldn\u2019t go down to the five o\u2019clock dinner, and feeling a little bit homesick, I thought I would, just to see what sort of people are under the same roof with me. So I made myself respectable and tried to slip in behind Mrs. Kirke, but as she is short and I\u2019m tall, my efforts at concealment were rather a failure. She gave me a seat by her, and after my face cooled off, I plucked up courage and looked about me. The long table was full, and every one intent on getting their dinner, the gentlemen especially, who seemed to be eating on time, for they bolted in every sense of the word, vanishing as soon as they were done. There was the usual assortment of young men absorbed in themselves, young couples absorbed in each other, married ladies in their babies, and old gentlemen in politics. I don\u2019t think I shall care to have much to do with any of them, except one sweetfaced maiden lady, who looks as if she had something in her.\r\n\r\nCast away at the very bottom of the table was the Professor, shouting answers to the questions of a very inquisitive, deaf old gentleman on one side, and talking philosophy with a Frenchman on the other. If Amy had been here, she\u2019d have turned her back on him forever because, sad to relate, he had a great appetite, and shoveled in his dinner in a manner which would have horrified \u2018her ladyship\u2019. I didn\u2019t mind, for I like \u2018to see folks eat with a relish\u2019, as Hannah says, and the poor man must have needed a deal of food after teaching idiots all day.\r\n\r\nAs I went upstairs after dinner, two of the young men were settling their hats before the hall mirror, and I heard one say low to the other, \u201cWho\u2019s the new party?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGoverness, or something of that sort.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat the deuce is she at our table for?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFriend of the old lady\u2019s.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHandsome head, but no style.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a bit of it. Give us a light and come on.\u201d\r\n\r\nI felt angry at first, and then I didn\u2019t care, for a governess is as good as a clerk, and I\u2019ve got sense, if I haven\u2019t style, which is more than some people have, judging from the remarks of the elegant beings who clattered away, smoking like bad chimneys. I hate ordinary people!\r\n\r\nThursday\r\n\r\nYesterday was a quiet day spent in teaching, sewing, and writing in my little room, which is very cozy, with a light and fire. I picked up a few bits of news and was introduced to the Professor. It seems that Tina is the child of the Frenchwoman who does the fine ironing in the laundry here. The little thing has lost her heart to Mr. Bhaer, and follows him about the house like a dog whenever he is at home, which delights him, as he is very fond of children, though a \u2018bacheldore\u2019. Kitty and Minnie Kirke likewise regard him with affection, and tell all sorts of stories about the plays he invents, the presents he brings, and the splendid tales he tells. The younger men quiz him, it seems, call him Old Fritz, Lager Beer, Ursa Major, and make all manner of jokes on his name. But he enjoys it like a boy, Mrs. Kirke says, and takes it so good-naturedly that they all like him in spite of his foreign ways.\r\n\r\nThe maiden lady is a Miss Norton, rich, cultivated, and kind. She spoke to me at dinner today (for I went to table again, it\u2019s such fun to watch people), and asked me to come and see her at her room. She has fine books and pictures, knows interesting persons, and seems friendly, so I shall make myself agreeable, for I do want to get into good society, only it isn\u2019t the same sort that Amy likes.\r\n\r\nI was in our parlor last evening when Mr. Bhaer came in with some newspapers for Mrs. Kirke. She wasn\u2019t there, but Minnie, who is a little old woman, introduced me very prettily. \u201cThis is Mamma\u2019s friend, Miss March.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, and she\u2019s jolly and we like her lots,\u201d added Kitty, who is an \u2018enfant terrible\u2019.\r\n\r\nWe both bowed, and then we laughed, for the prim introduction and the blunt addition were rather a comical contrast.\r\n\r\n\u201cAh, yes, I hear these naughty ones go to vex you, Mees Marsch. If so again, call at me and I come,\u201d he said, with a threatening frown that delighted the little wretches.\r\n\r\nI promised I would, and he departed, but it seems as if I was doomed to see a good deal of him, for today as I passed his door on my way out, by accident I knocked against it with my umbrella. It flew open, and there he stood in his dressing gown, with a big blue sock on one hand and a darning needle in the other. He didn\u2019t seem at all ashamed of it, for when I explained and hurried on, he waved his hand, sock and all, saying in his loud, cheerful way...\r\n\r\n\u201cYou haf a fine day to make your walk. Bon voyage, Mademoiselle.\u201d\r\n\r\nI laughed all the way downstairs, but it was a little pathetic, also to think of the poor man having to mend his own clothes. The German gentlemen embroider, I know, but darning hose is another thing and not so pretty.\r\n\r\nSaturday\r\n\r\nNothing has happened to write about, except a call on Miss Norton, who has a room full of pretty things, and who was very charming, for she showed me all her treasures, and asked me if I would sometimes go with her to lectures and concerts, as her escort, if I enjoyed them. She put it as a favor, but I\u2019m sure Mrs. Kirke has told her about us, and she does it out of kindness to me. I\u2019m as proud as Lucifer, but such favors from such people don\u2019t burden me, and I accepted gratefully.\r\n\r\nWhen I got back to the nursery there was such an uproar in the parlor that I looked in, and there was Mr. Bhaer down on his hands and knees, with Tina on his back, Kitty leading him with a jump rope, and Minnie feeding two small boys with seedcakes, as they roared and ramped in cages built of chairs.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe are playing nargerie,\u201d explained Kitty.\r\n\r\n\u201cDis is mine effalunt!\u201d added Tina, holding on by the Professor\u2019s hair.\r\n\r\n\u201cMamma always allows us to do what we like Saturday afternoon, when Franz and Emil come, doesn\u2019t she, Mr. Bhaer?\u201d said Minnie.\r\n\r\nThe \u2018effalunt\u2019 sat up, looking as much in earnest as any of them, and said soberly to me, \u201cI gif you my wort it is so, if we make too large a noise you shall say Hush! to us, and we go more softly.\u201d\r\n\r\nI promised to do so, but left the door open and enjoyed the fun as much as they did, for a more glorious frolic I never witnessed. They played tag and soldiers, danced and sang, and when it began to grow dark they all piled onto the sofa about the Professor, while he told charming fairy stories of the storks on the chimney tops, and the little \u2018koblods\u2019, who ride the snowflakes as they fall. I wish Americans were as simple and natural as Germans, don\u2019t you?\r\n\r\nI\u2019m so fond of writing, I should go spinning on forever if motives of economy didn\u2019t stop me, for though I\u2019ve used thin paper and written fine, I tremble to think of the stamps this long letter will need. Pray forward Amy\u2019s as soon as you can spare them. My small news will sound very flat after her splendors, but you will like them, I know. Is Teddy studying so hard that he can\u2019t find time to write to his friends? Take good care of him for me, Beth, and tell me all about the babies, and give heaps of love to everyone. From your faithful Jo.\r\n\r\nP.S. On reading over my letter, it strikes me as rather Bhaery, but I am always interested in odd people, and I really had nothing else to write about. Bless you!\r\n\r\nDECEMBER\r\n\r\nMy Precious Betsey,\r\n\r\nAs this is to be a scribble-scrabble letter, I direct it to you, for it may amuse you, and give you some idea of my goings on, for though quiet, they are rather amusing, for which, oh, be joyful! After what Amy would call Herculaneum efforts, in the way of mental and moral agriculture, my young ideas begin to shoot and my little twigs to bend as I could wish. They are not so interesting to me as Tina and the boys, but I do my duty by them, and they are fond of me. Franz and Emil are jolly little lads, quite after my own heart, for the mixture of German and American spirit in them produces a constant state of effervescence. Saturday afternoons are riotous times, whether spent in the house or out, for on pleasant days they all go to walk, like a seminary, with the Professor and myself to keep order, and then such fun!\r\n\r\nWe are very good friends now, and I\u2019ve begun to take lessons. I really couldn\u2019t help it, and it all came about in such a droll way that I must tell you. To begin at the beginning, Mrs. Kirke called to me one day as I passed Mr. Bhaer\u2019s room where she was rummaging.\r\n\r\n\u201cDid you ever see such a den, my dear? Just come and help me put these books to rights, for I\u2019ve turned everything upside down, trying to discover what he has done with the six new handkerchiefs I gave him not long ago.\u201d\r\n\r\nI went in, and while we worked I looked about me, for it was \u2018a den\u2019 to be sure. Books and papers everywhere, a broken meerschaum, and an old flute over the mantlepiece as if done with, a ragged bird without any tail chirped on one window seat, and a box of white mice adorned the other. Half-finished boats and bits of string lay among the manuscripts. Dirty little boots stood drying before the fire, and traces of the dearly beloved boys, for whom he makes a slave of himself, were to be seen all over the room. After a grand rummage three of the missing articles were found, one over the bird cage, one covered with ink, and a third burned brown, having been used as a holder.\r\n\r\n\u201cSuch a man!\u201d laughed good-natured Mrs. K., as she put the relics in the rag bag. \u201cI suppose the others are torn up to rig ships, bandage cut fingers, or make kite tails. It\u2019s dreadful, but I can\u2019t scold him. He\u2019s so absent-minded and goodnatured, he lets those boys ride over him roughshod. I agreed to do his washing and mending, but he forgets to give out his things and I forget to look them over, so he comes to a sad pass sometimes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLet me mend them,\u201d said I. \u201cI don\u2019t mind it, and he needn\u2019t know. I\u2019d like to, he\u2019s so kind to me about bringing my letters and lending books.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo I have got his things in order, and knit heels into two pairs of the socks, for they were boggled out of shape with his queer darns. Nothing was said, and I hoped he wouldn\u2019t find it out, but one day last week he caught me at it. Hearing the lessons he gives to others has interested and amused me so much that I took a fancy to learn, for Tina runs in and out, leaving the door open, and I can hear. I had been sitting near this door, finishing off the last sock, and trying to understand what he said to a new scholar, who is as stupid as I am. The girl had gone, and I thought he had also, it was so still, and I was busily gabbling over a verb, and rocking to and fro in a most absurd way, when a little crow made me look up, and there was Mr. Bhaer looking and laughing quietly, while he made signs to Tina not to betray him.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo!\u201d he said, as I stopped and stared like a goose, \u201cyou peep at me, I peep at you, and this is not bad, but see, I am not pleasanting when I say, haf you a wish for German?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, but you are too busy. I am too stupid to learn,\u201d I blundered out, as red as a peony.\r\n\r\n\u201cPrut! We will make the time, and we fail not to find the sense. At efening I shall gif a little lesson with much gladness, for look you, Mees Marsch, I haf this debt to pay.\u201d And he pointed to my work \u2018Yes,\u2019 they say to one another, these so kind ladies, \u2018he is a stupid old fellow, he will see not what we do, he will never observe that his sock heels go not in holes any more, he will think his buttons grow out new when they fall, and believe that strings make theirselves.\u2019 \u201cAh! But I haf an eye, and I see much. I haf a heart, and I feel thanks for this. Come, a little lesson then and now, or\u2014no more good fairy works for me and mine.\u201d\r\n\r\nOf course I couldn\u2019t say anything after that, and as it really is a splendid opportunity, I made the bargain, and we began. I took four lessons, and then I stuck fast in a grammatical bog. The Professor was very patient with me, but it must have been torment to him, and now and then he\u2019d look at me with such an expression of mild despair that it was a toss-up with me whether to laugh or cry. I tried both ways, and when it came to a sniff or utter mortification and woe, he just threw the grammar on to the floor and marched out of the room. I felt myself disgraced and deserted forever, but didn\u2019t blame him a particle, and was scrambling my papers together, meaning to rush upstairs and shake myself hard, when in he came, as brisk and beaming as if I\u2019d covered myself in glory.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow we shall try a new way. You and I will read these pleasant little marchen together, and dig no more in that dry book, that goes in the corner for making us trouble.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe spoke so kindly, and opened Hans Anderson\u2019s fairy tales so invitingly before me, that I was more ashamed than ever, and went at my lesson in a neck-or-nothing style that seemed to amuse him immensely. I forgot my bashfulness, and pegged away (no other word will express it) with all my might, tumbling over long words, pronouncing according to inspiration of the minute, and doing my very best. When I finished reading my first page, and stopped for breath, he clapped his hands and cried out in his hearty way, \u201cDas ist gut! Now we go well! My turn. I do him in German, gif me your ear.\u201d And away he went, rumbling out the words with his strong voice and a relish which was good to see as well as hear. Fortunately the story was The Constant Tin Soldier, which is droll, you know, so I could laugh, and I did, though I didn\u2019t understand half he read, for I couldn\u2019t help it, he was so earnest, I so excited, and the whole thing so comical.\r\n\r\nAfter that we got on better, and now I read my lessons pretty well, for this way of studying suits me, and I can see that the grammar gets tucked into the tales and poetry as one gives pills in jelly. I like it very much, and he doesn\u2019t seem tired of it yet, which is very good of him, isn\u2019t it? I mean to give him something on Christmas, for I dare not offer money. Tell me something nice, Marmee.\r\n\r\nI\u2019m glad Laurie seems so happy and busy, that he has given up smoking and lets his hair grow. You see Beth manages him better than I did. I\u2019m not jealous, dear, do your best, only don\u2019t make a saint of him. I\u2019m afraid I couldn\u2019t like him without a spice of human naughtiness. Read him bits of my letters. I haven\u2019t time to write much, and that will do just as well. Thank Heaven Beth continues so comfortable.\r\n\r\nJANUARY\r\n\r\nA Happy New Year to you all, my dearest family, which of course includes Mr. L. and a young man by the name of Teddy. I can\u2019t tell you how much I enjoyed your Christmas bundle, for I didn\u2019t get it till night and had given up hoping. Your letter came in the morning, but you said nothing about a parcel, meaning it for a surprise, so I was disappointed, for I\u2019d had a \u2018kind of feeling\u2019 that you wouldn\u2019t forget me. I felt a little low in my mind as I sat up in my room after tea, and when the big, muddy, battered-looking bundle was brought to me, I just hugged it and pranced. It was so homey and refreshing that I sat down on the floor and read and looked and ate and laughed and cried, in my usual absurd way. The things were just what I wanted, and all the better for being made instead of bought. Beth\u2019s new \u2018ink bib\u2019 was capital, and Hannah\u2019s box of hard gingerbread will be a treasure. I\u2019ll be sure and wear the nice flannels you sent, Marmee, and read carefully the books Father has marked. Thank you all, heaps and heaps!\r\n\r\nSpeaking of books reminds me that I\u2019m getting rich in that line, for on New Year\u2019s Day Mr. Bhaer gave me a fine Shakespeare. It is one he values much, and I\u2019ve often admired it, set up in the place of honor with his German Bible, Plato, Homer, and Milton, so you may imagine how I felt when he brought it down, without its cover, and showed me my own name in it, \u201cfrom my friend Friedrich Bhaer\u201d.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou say often you wish a library. Here I gif you one, for between these lids (he meant covers) is many books in one. Read him well, and he will help you much, for the study of character in this book will help you to read it in the world and paint it with your pen.\u201d\r\n\r\nI thanked him as well as I could, and talk now about \u2018my library\u2019, as if I had a hundred books. I never knew how much there was in Shakespeare before, but then I never had a Bhaer to explain it to me. Now don\u2019t laugh at his horrid name. It isn\u2019t pronounced either Bear or Beer, as people will say it, but something between the two, as only Germans can give it. I\u2019m glad you both like what I tell you about him, and hope you will know him some day. Mother would admire his warm heart, Father his wise head. I admire both, and feel rich in my new \u2018friend Friedrich Bhaer\u2019.\r\n\r\nNot having much money, or knowing what he\u2019d like, I got several little things, and put them about the room, where he would find them unexpectedly. They were useful, pretty, or funny, a new standish on his table, a little vase for his flower, he always has one, or a bit of green in a glass, to keep him fresh, he says, and a holder for his blower, so that he needn\u2019t burn up what Amy calls \u2018mouchoirs\u2019. I made it like those Beth invented, a big butterfly with a fat body, and black and yellow wings, worsted feelers, and bead eyes. It took his fancy immensely, and he put it on his mantlepiece as an article of virtue, so it was rather a failure after all. Poor as he is, he didn\u2019t forget a servant or a child in the house, and not a soul here, from the French laundrywoman to Miss Norton forgot him. I was so glad of that.\r\n\r\nThey got up a masquerade, and had a gay time New Year\u2019s Eve. I didn\u2019t mean to go down, having no dress. But at the last minute, Mrs. Kirke remembered some old brocades, and Miss Norton lent me lace and feathers. So I dressed up as Mrs. Malaprop, and sailed in with a mask on. No one knew me, for I disguised my voice, and no one dreamed of the silent, haughty Miss March (for they think I am very stiff and cool, most of them, and so I am to whippersnappers) could dance and dress, and burst out into a \u2018nice derangement of epitaphs, like an allegory on the banks of the Nile\u2019. I enjoyed it very much, and when we unmasked it was fun to see them stare at me. I heard one of the young men tell another that he knew I\u2019d been an actress, in fact, he thought he remembered seeing me at one of the minor theaters. Meg will relish that joke. Mr. Bhaer was Nick Bottom, and Tina was Titania, a perfect little fairy in his arms. To see them dance was \u2018quite a landscape\u2019, to use a Teddyism.\r\n\r\nI had a very happy New Year, after all, and when I thought it over in my room, I felt as if I was getting on a little in spite of my many failures, for I\u2019m cheerful all the time now, work with a will, and take more interest in other people than I used to, which is satisfactory. Bless you all! Ever your loving... Jo\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR\r\nFRIEND\r\n\r\nThough very happy in the social atmosphere about her, and very busy with the daily work that earned her bread and made it sweeter for the effort, Jo still found time for literary labors. The purpose which now took possession of her was a natural one to a poor and ambitious girl, but the means she took to gain her end were not the best. She saw that money conferred power, money and power, therefore, she resolved to have, not to be used for herself alone, but for those whom she loved more than life. The dream of filling home with comforts, giving Beth everything she wanted, from strawberries in winter to an organ in her bedroom, going abroad herself, and always having more than enough, so that she might indulge in the luxury of charity, had been for years Jo\u2019s most cherished castle in the air.\r\n\r\nThe prize-story experience had seemed to open a way which might, after long traveling and much uphill work, lead to this delightful chateau en Espagne. But the novel disaster quenched her courage for a time, for public opinion is a giant which has frightened stouter-hearted Jacks on bigger beanstalks than hers. Like that immortal hero, she reposed awhile after the first attempt, which resulted in a tumble and the least lovely of the giant\u2019s treasures, if I remember rightly. But the \u2018up again and take another\u2019 spirit was as strong in Jo as in Jack, so she scrambled up on the shady side this time and got more booty, but nearly left behind her what was far more precious than the moneybags.\r\n\r\nShe took to writing sensation stories, for in those dark ages, even all-perfect America read rubbish. She told no one, but concocted a \u2018thrilling tale\u2019, and boldly carried it herself to Mr. Dashwood, editor of the Weekly Volcano. She had never read Sartor Resartus, but she had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manners. So she dressed herself in her best, and trying to persuade herself that she was neither excited nor nervous, bravely climbed two pairs of dark and dirty stairs to find herself in a disorderly room, a cloud of cigar smoke, and the presence of three gentlemen, sitting with their heels rather higher than their hats, which articles of dress none of them took the trouble to remove on her appearance. Somewhat daunted by this reception, Jo hesitated on the threshold, murmuring in much embarrassment...\r\n\r\n\u201cExcuse me, I was looking for the Weekly Volcano office. I wished to see Mr. Dashwood.\u201d\r\n\r\nDown went the highest pair of heels, up rose the smokiest gentleman, and carefully cherishing his cigar between his fingers, he advanced with a nod and a countenance expressive of nothing but sleep. Feeling that she must get through the matter somehow, Jo produced her manuscript and, blushing redder and redder with each sentence, blundered out fragments of the little speech carefully prepared for the occasion.\r\n\r\n\u201cA friend of mine desired me to offer\u2014a story\u2014just as an experiment\u2014would like your opinion\u2014be glad to write more if this suits.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhile she blushed and blundered, Mr. Dashwood had taken the manuscript, and was turning over the leaves with a pair of rather dirty fingers, and casting critical glances up and down the neat pages.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a first attempt, I take it?\u201d observing that the pages were numbered, covered only on one side, and not tied up with a ribbon\u2014sure sign of a novice.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, sir. She has had some experience, and got a prize for a tale in the Blarneystone Banner.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, did she?\u201d and Mr. Dashwood gave Jo a quick look, which seemed to take note of everything she had on, from the bow in her bonnet to the buttons on her boots. \u201cWell, you can leave it, if you like. We\u2019ve more of this sort of thing on hand than we know what to do with at present, but I\u2019ll run my eye over it, and give you an answer next week.\u201d\r\n\r\nNow, Jo did not like to leave it, for Mr. Dashwood didn\u2019t suit her at all, but, under the circumstances, there was nothing for her to do but bow and walk away, looking particularly tall and dignified, as she was apt to do when nettled or abashed. Just then she was both, for it was perfectly evident from the knowing glances exchanged among the gentlemen that her little fiction of \u2018my friend\u2019 was considered a good joke, and a laugh, produced by some inaudible remark of the editor, as he closed the door, completed her discomfiture. Half resolving never to return, she went home, and worked off her irritation by stitching pinafores vigorously, and in an hour or two was cool enough to laugh over the scene and long for next week.\r\n\r\nWhen she went again, Mr. Dashwood was alone, whereat she rejoiced. Mr. Dashwood was much wider awake than before, which was agreeable, and Mr. Dashwood was not too deeply absorbed in a cigar to remember his manners, so the second interview was much more comfortable than the first.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe\u2019ll take this (editors never say I), if you don\u2019t object to a few alterations. It\u2019s too long, but omitting the passages I\u2019ve marked will make it just the right length,\u201d he said, in a businesslike tone.\r\n\r\nJo hardly knew her own MS. again, so crumpled and underscored were its pages and paragraphs, but feeling as a tender parent might on being asked to cut off her baby\u2019s legs in order that it might fit into a new cradle, she looked at the marked passages and was surprised to find that all the moral reflections\u2014which she had carefully put in as ballast for much romance\u2014had been stricken out.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut, Sir, I thought every story should have some sort of a moral, so I took care to have a few of my sinners repent.\u201d\r\n\r\nMr. Dashwoods\u2019s editorial gravity relaxed into a smile, for Jo had forgotten her \u2018friend\u2019, and spoken as only an author could.\r\n\r\n\u201cPeople want to be amused, not preached at, you know. Morals don\u2019t sell nowadays.\u201d Which was not quite a correct statement, by the way.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou think it would do with these alterations, then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, it\u2019s a new plot, and pretty well worked up\u2014language good, and so on,\u201d was Mr. Dashwood\u2019s affable reply.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you\u2014that is, what compensation\u2014\u201d began Jo, not exactly knowing how to express herself.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes, well, we give from twenty-five to thirty for things of this sort. Pay when it comes out,\u201d returned Mr. Dashwood, as if that point had escaped him. Such trifles do escape the editorial mind, it is said.\r\n\r\n\u201cVery well, you can have it,\u201d said Jo, handing back the story with a satisfied air, for after the dollar-a-column work, even twenty-five seemed good pay.\r\n\r\n\u201cShall I tell my friend you will take another if she has one better than this?\u201d asked Jo, unconscious of her little slip of the tongue, and emboldened by her success.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, we\u2019ll look at it. Can\u2019t promise to take it. Tell her to make it short and spicy, and never mind the moral. What name would your friend like to put on it?\u201d in a careless tone.\r\n\r\n\u201cNone at all, if you please, she doesn\u2019t wish her name to appear and has no nom de plume,\u201d said Jo, blushing in spite of herself.\r\n\r\n\u201cJust as she likes, of course. The tale will be out next week. Will you call for the money, or shall I send it?\u201d asked Mr. Dashwood, who felt a natural desire to know who his new contributor might be.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll call. Good morning, Sir.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs she departed, Mr. Dashwood put up his feet, with the graceful remark, \u201cPoor and proud, as usual, but she\u2019ll do.\u201d\r\n\r\nFollowing Mr. Dashwood\u2019s directions, and making Mrs. Northbury her model, Jo rashly took a plunge into the frothy sea of sensational literature, but thanks to the life preserver thrown her by a friend, she came up again not much the worse for her ducking.\r\n\r\nLike most young scribblers, she went abroad for her characters and scenery, and banditti, counts, gypsies, nuns, and duchesses appeared upon her stage, and played their parts with as much accuracy and spirit as could be expected. Her readers were not particular about such trifles as grammar, punctuation, and probability, and Mr. Dashwood graciously permitted her to fill his columns at the lowest prices, not thinking it necessary to tell her that the real cause of his hospitality was the fact that one of his hacks, on being offered higher wages, had basely left him in the lurch.\r\n\r\nShe soon became interested in her work, for her emaciated purse grew stout, and the little hoard she was making to take Beth to the mountains next summer grew slowly but surely as the weeks passed. One thing disturbed her satisfaction, and that was that she did not tell them at home. She had a feeling that Father and Mother would not approve, and preferred to have her own way first, and beg pardon afterward. It was easy to keep her secret, for no name appeared with her stories. Mr. Dashwood had of course found it out very soon, but promised to be dumb, and for a wonder kept his word.\r\n\r\nShe thought it would do her no harm, for she sincerely meant to write nothing of which she would be ashamed, and quieted all pricks of conscience by anticipations of the happy minute when she should show her earnings and laugh over her well-kept secret.\r\n\r\nBut Mr. Dashwood rejected any but thrilling tales, and as thrills could not be produced except by harrowing up the souls of the readers, history and romance, land and sea, science and art, police records and lunatic asylums, had to be ransacked for the purpose. Jo soon found that her innocent experience had given her but few glimpses of the tragic world which underlies society, so regarding it in a business light, she set about supplying her deficiencies with characteristic energy. Eager to find material for stories, and bent on making them original in plot, if not masterly in execution, she searched newspapers for accidents, incidents, and crimes. She excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons. She studied faces in the street, and characters, good, bad, and indifferent, all about her. She delved in the dust of ancient times for facts or fictions so old that they were as good as new, and introduced herself to folly, sin, and misery, as well as her limited opportunities allowed. She thought she was prospering finely, but unconsciously she was beginning to desecrate some of the womanliest attributes of a woman\u2019s character. She was living in bad society, and imaginary though it was, its influence affected her, for she was feeding heart and fancy on dangerous and unsubstantial food, and was fast brushing the innocent bloom from her nature by a premature acquaintance with the darker side of life, which comes soon enough to all of us.\r\n\r\nShe was beginning to feel rather than see this, for much describing of other people\u2019s passions and feelings set her to studying and speculating about her own, a morbid amusement in which healthy young minds do not voluntarily indulge. Wrongdoing always brings its own punishment, and when Jo most needed hers, she got it.\r\n\r\nI don\u2019t know whether the study of Shakespeare helped her to read character, or the natural instinct of a woman for what was honest, brave, and strong, but while endowing her imaginary heroes with every perfection under the sun, Jo was discovering a live hero, who interested her in spite of many human imperfections. Mr. Bhaer, in one of their conversations, had advised her to study simple, true, and lovely characters, wherever she found them, as good training for a writer. Jo took him at his word, for she coolly turned round and studied him\u2014a proceeding which would have much surprised him, had he known it, for the worthy Professor was very humble in his own conceit.\r\n\r\nWhy everybody liked him was what puzzled Jo, at first. He was neither rich nor great, young nor handsome, in no respect what is called fascinating, imposing, or brilliant, and yet he was as attractive as a genial fire, and people seemed to gather about him as naturally as about a warm hearth. He was poor, yet always appeared to be giving something away; a stranger, yet everyone was his friend; no longer young, but as happy-hearted as a boy; plain and peculiar, yet his face looked beautiful to many, and his oddities were freely forgiven for his sake. Jo often watched him, trying to discover the charm, and at last decided that it was benevolence which worked the miracle. If he had any sorrow, \u2018it sat with its head under its wing\u2019, and he turned only his sunny side to the world. There were lines upon his forehead, but Time seemed to have touched him gently, remembering how kind he was to others. The pleasant curves about his mouth were the memorials of many friendly words and cheery laughs, his eyes were never cold or hard, and his big hand had a warm, strong grasp that was more expressive than words.\r\n\r\nHis very clothes seemed to partake of the hospitable nature of the wearer. They looked as if they were at ease, and liked to make him comfortable. His capacious waistcoat was suggestive of a large heart underneath. His rusty coat had a social air, and the baggy pockets plainly proved that little hands often went in empty and came out full. His very boots were benevolent, and his collars never stiff and raspy like other people\u2019s.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s it!\u201d said Jo to herself, when she at length discovered that genuine good will toward one\u2019s fellow men could beautify and dignify even a stout German teacher, who shoveled in his dinner, darned his own socks, and was burdened with the name of Bhaer.\r\n\r\nJo valued goodness highly, but she also possessed a most feminine respect for intellect, and a little discovery which she made about the Professor added much to her regard for him. He never spoke of himself, and no one ever knew that in his native city he had been a man much honored and esteemed for learning and integrity, till a countryman came to see him. He never spoke of himself, and in a conversation with Miss Norton divulged the pleasing fact. From her Jo learned it, and liked it all the better because Mr. Bhaer had never told it. She felt proud to know that he was an honored Professor in Berlin, though only a poor language-master in America, and his homely, hard-working life was much beautified by the spice of romance which this discovery gave it. Another and a better gift than intellect was shown her in a most unexpected manner. Miss Norton had the entree into most society, which Jo would have had no chance of seeing but for her. The solitary woman felt an interest in the ambitious girl, and kindly conferred many favors of this sort both on Jo and the Professor. She took them with her one night to a select symposium, held in honor of several celebrities.\r\n\r\nJo went prepared to bow down and adore the mighty ones whom she had worshiped with youthful enthusiasm afar off. But her reverence for genius received a severe shock that night, and it took her some time to recover from the discovery that the great creatures were only men and women after all. Imagine her dismay, on stealing a glance of timid admiration at the poet whose lines suggested an ethereal being fed on \u2018spirit, fire, and dew\u2019, to behold him devouring his supper with an ardor which flushed his intellectual countenance. Turning as from a fallen idol, she made other discoveries which rapidly dispelled her romantic illusions. The great novelist vibrated between two decanters with the regularity of a pendulum; the famous divine flirted openly with one of the Madame de Staels of the age, who looked daggers at another Corinne, who was amiably satirizing her, after outmaneuvering her in efforts to absorb the profound philosopher, who imbibed tea Johnsonianly and appeared to slumber, the loquacity of the lady rendering speech impossible. The scientific celebrities, forgetting their mollusks and glacial periods, gossiped about art, while devoting themselves to oysters and ices with characteristic energy; the young musician, who was charming the city like a second Orpheus, talked horses; and the specimen of the British nobility present happened to be the most ordinary man of the party.\r\n\r\nBefore the evening was half over, Jo felt so completely disillusioned, that she sat down in a corner to recover herself. Mr. Bhaer soon joined her, looking rather out of his element, and presently several of the philosophers, each mounted on his hobby, came ambling up to hold an intellectual tournament in the recess. The conversations were miles beyond Jo\u2019s comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing \u2018evolved from her inner consciousness\u2019 was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before, that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.\r\n\r\nShe looked round to see how the Professor liked it, and found him looking at her with the grimmest expression she had ever seen him wear. He shook his head and beckoned her to come away, but she was fascinated just then by the freedom of Speculative Philosophy, and kept her seat, trying to find out what the wise gentlemen intended to rely upon after they had annihilated all the old beliefs.\r\n\r\nNow, Mr. Bhaer was a diffident man and slow to offer his own opinions, not because they were unsettled, but too sincere and earnest to be lightly spoken. As he glanced from Jo to several other young people, attracted by the brilliancy of the philosophic pyrotechnics, he knit his brows and longed to speak, fearing that some inflammable young soul would be led astray by the rockets, to find when the display was over that they had only an empty stick or a scorched hand.\r\n\r\nHe bore it as long as he could, but when he was appealed to for an opinion, he blazed up with honest indignation and defended religion with all the eloquence of truth\u2014an eloquence which made his broken English musical and his plain face beautiful. He had a hard fight, for the wise men argued well, but he didn\u2019t know when he was beaten and stood to his colors like a man. Somehow, as he talked, the world got right again to Jo. The old beliefs, that had lasted so long, seemed better than the new. God was not a blind force, and immortality was not a pretty fable, but a blessed fact. She felt as if she had solid ground under her feet again, and when Mr. Bhaer paused, outtalked but not one whit convinced, Jo wanted to clap her hands and thank him.\r\n\r\nShe did neither, but she remembered the scene, and gave the Professor her heartiest respect, for she knew it cost him an effort to speak out then and there, because his conscience would not let him be silent. She began to see that character is a better possession than money, rank, intellect, or beauty, and to feel that if greatness is what a wise man has defined it to be, \u2018truth, reverence, and good will\u2019, then her friend Friedrich Bhaer was not only good, but great.\r\n\r\nThis belief strengthened daily. She valued his esteem, she coveted his respect, she wanted to be worthy of his friendship, and just when the wish was sincerest, she came near to losing everything. It all grew out of a cocked hat, for one evening the Professor came in to give Jo her lesson with a paper soldier cap on his head, which Tina had put there and he had forgotten to take off.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s evident he doesn\u2019t look in his glass before coming down,\u201d thought Jo, with a smile, as he said \u201cGoot efening,\u201d and sat soberly down, quite unconscious of the ludicrous contrast between his subject and his headgear, for he was going to read her the Death of Wallenstein.\r\n\r\nShe said nothing at first, for she liked to hear him laugh out his big, hearty laugh when anything funny happened, so she left him to discover it for himself, and presently forgot all about it, for to hear a German read Schiller is rather an absorbing occupation. After the reading came the lesson, which was a lively one, for Jo was in a gay mood that night, and the cocked hat kept her eyes dancing with merriment. The Professor didn\u2019t know what to make of her, and stopped at last to ask with an air of mild surprise that was irresistible. . .\r\n\r\n\u201cMees Marsch, for what do you laugh in your master\u2019s face? Haf you no respect for me, that you go on so bad?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow can I be respectful, Sir, when you forget to take your hat off?\u201d said Jo.\r\n\r\nLifting his hand to his head, the absent-minded Professor gravely felt and removed the little cocked hat, looked at it a minute, and then threw back his head and laughed like a merry bass viol.\r\n\r\n\u201cAh! I see him now, it is that imp Tina who makes me a fool with my cap. Well, it is nothing, but see you, if this lesson goes not well, you too shall wear him.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut the lesson did not go at all for a few minutes because Mr. Bhaer caught sight of a picture on the hat, and unfolding it, said with great disgust, \u201cI wish these papers did not come in the house. They are not for children to see, nor young people to read. It is not well, and I haf no patience with those who make this harm.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo glanced at the sheet and saw a pleasing illustration composed of a lunatic, a corpse, a villain, and a viper. She did not like it, but the impulse that made her turn it over was not one of displeasure but fear, because for a minute she fancied the paper was the Volcano. It was not, however, and her panic subsided as she remembered that even if it had been and one of her own tales in it, there would have been no name to betray her. She had betrayed herself, however, by a look and a blush, for though an absent man, the Professor saw a good deal more than people fancied. He knew that Jo wrote, and had met her down among the newspaper offices more than once, but as she never spoke of it, he asked no questions in spite of a strong desire to see her work. Now it occurred to him that she was doing what she was ashamed to own, and it troubled him. He did not say to himself, \u201cIt is none of my business. I\u2019ve no right to say anything,\u201d as many people would have done. He only remembered that she was young and poor, a girl far away from mother\u2019s love and father\u2019s care, and he was moved to help her with an impulse as quick and natural as that which would prompt him to put out his hand to save a baby from a puddle. All this flashed through his mind in a minute, but not a trace of it appeared in his face, and by the time the paper was turned, and Jo\u2019s needle threaded, he was ready to say quite naturally, but very gravely...\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, you are right to put it from you. I do not think that good young girls should see such things. They are made pleasant to some, but I would more rather give my boys gunpowder to play with than this bad trash.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll may not be bad, only silly, you know, and if there is a demand for it, I don\u2019t see any harm in supplying it. Many very respectable people make an honest living out of what are called sensation stories,\u201d said Jo, scratching gathers so energetically that a row of little slits followed her pin.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere is a demand for whisky, but I think you and I do not care to sell it. If the respectable people knew what harm they did, they would not feel that the living was honest. They haf no right to put poison in the sugarplum, and let the small ones eat it. No, they should think a little, and sweep mud in the street before they do this thing.\u201d\r\n\r\nMr. Bhaer spoke warmly, and walked to the fire, crumpling the paper in his hands. Jo sat still, looking as if the fire had come to her, for her cheeks burned long after the cocked hat had turned to smoke and gone harmlessly up the chimney.\r\n\r\n\u201cI should like much to send all the rest after him,\u201d muttered the Professor, coming back with a relieved air.\r\n\r\nJo thought what a blaze her pile of papers upstairs would make, and her hard-earned money lay rather heavily on her conscience at that minute. Then she thought consolingly to herself, \u201cMine are not like that, they are only silly, never bad, so I won\u2019t be worried,\u201d and taking up her book, she said, with a studious face, \u201cShall we go on, Sir? I\u2019ll be very good and proper now.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI shall hope so,\u201d was all he said, but he meant more than she imagined, and the grave, kind look he gave her made her feel as if the words Weekly Volcano were printed in large type on her forehead.\r\n\r\nAs soon as she went to her room, she got out her papers, and carefully reread every one of her stories. Being a little shortsighted, Mr. Bhaer sometimes used eye glasses, and Jo had tried them once, smiling to see how they magnified the fine print of her book. Now she seemed to have on the Professor\u2019s mental or moral spectacles also, for the faults of these poor stories glared at her dreadfully and filled her with dismay.\r\n\r\n\u201cThey are trash, and will soon be worse trash if I go on, for each is more sensational than the last. I\u2019ve gone blindly on, hurting myself and other people, for the sake of money. I know it\u2019s so, for I can\u2019t read this stuff in sober earnest without being horribly ashamed of it, and what should I do if they were seen at home or Mr. Bhaer got hold of them?\u201d\r\n\r\nJo turned hot at the bare idea, and stuffed the whole bundle into her stove, nearly setting the chimney afire with the blaze.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, that\u2019s the best place for such inflammable nonsense. I\u2019d better burn the house down, I suppose, than let other people blow themselves up with my gunpowder,\u201d she thought as she watched the Demon of the Jura whisk away, a little black cinder with fiery eyes.\r\n\r\nBut when nothing remained of all her three month\u2019s work except a heap of ashes and the money in her lap, Jo looked sober, as she sat on the floor, wondering what she ought to do about her wages.\r\n\r\n\u201cI think I haven\u2019t done much harm yet, and may keep this to pay for my time,\u201d she said, after a long meditation, adding impatiently, \u201cI almost wish I hadn\u2019t any conscience, it\u2019s so inconvenient. If I didn\u2019t care about doing right, and didn\u2019t feel uncomfortable when doing wrong, I should get on capitally. I can\u2019t help wishing sometimes, that Mother and Father hadn\u2019t been so particular about such things.\u201d\r\n\r\nAh, Jo, instead of wishing that, thank God that \u2018Father and Mother were particular\u2019, and pity from your heart those who have no such guardians to hedge them round with principles which may seem like prison walls to impatient youth, but which will prove sure foundations to build character upon in womanhood.\r\n\r\nJo wrote no more sensational stories, deciding that the money did not pay for her share of the sensation, but going to the other extreme, as is the way with people of her stamp, she took a course of Mrs. Sherwood, Miss Edgeworth, and Hannah More, and then produced a tale which might have been more properly called an essay or a sermon, so intensely moral was it. She had her doubts about it from the beginning, for her lively fancy and girlish romance felt as ill at ease in the new style as she would have done masquerading in the stiff and cumbrous costume of the last century. She sent this didactic gem to several markets, but it found no purchaser, and she was inclined to agree with Mr. Dashwood that morals didn\u2019t sell.\r\n\r\nThen she tried a child\u2019s story, which she could easily have disposed of if she had not been mercenary enough to demand filthy lucre for it. The only person who offered enough to make it worth her while to try juvenile literature was a worthy gentleman who felt it his mission to convert all the world to his particular belief. But much as she liked to write for children, Jo could not consent to depict all her naughty boys as being eaten by bears or tossed by mad bulls because they did not go to a particular Sabbath school, nor all the good infants who did go as rewarded by every kind of bliss, from gilded gingerbread to escorts of angels when they departed this life with psalms or sermons on their lisping tongues. So nothing came of these trials, and Jo corked up her inkstand, and said in a fit of very wholesome humility...\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know anything. I\u2019ll wait until I do before I try again, and meantime, \u2018sweep mud in the street\u2019 if I can\u2019t do better, that\u2019s honest, at least.\u201d Which decision proved that her second tumble down the beanstalk had done her some good.\r\n\r\nWhile these internal revolutions were going on, her external life had been as busy and uneventful as usual, and if she sometimes looked serious or a little sad no one observed it but Professor Bhaer. He did it so quietly that Jo never knew he was watching to see if she would accept and profit by his reproof, but she stood the test, and he was satisfied, for though no words passed between them, he knew that she had given up writing. Not only did he guess it by the fact that the second finger of her right hand was no longer inky, but she spent her evenings downstairs now, was met no more among newspaper offices, and studied with a dogged patience, which assured him that she was bent on occupying her mind with something useful, if not pleasant.\r\n\r\nHe helped her in many ways, proving himself a true friend, and Jo was happy, for while her pen lay idle, she was learning other lessons besides German, and laying a foundation for the sensation story of her own life.\r\n\r\nIt was a pleasant winter and a long one, for she did not leave Mrs. Kirke till June. Everyone seemed sorry when the time came. The children were inconsolable, and Mr. Bhaer\u2019s hair stuck straight up all over his head, for he always rumpled it wildly when disturbed in mind.\r\n\r\n\u201cGoing home? Ah, you are happy that you haf a home to go in,\u201d he said, when she told him, and sat silently pulling his beard in the corner, while she held a little levee on that last evening.\r\n\r\nShe was going early, so she bade them all goodbye overnight, and when his turn came, she said warmly, \u201cNow, Sir, you won\u2019t forget to come and see us, if you ever travel our way, will you? I\u2019ll never forgive you if you do, for I want them all to know my friend.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you? Shall I come?\u201d he asked, looking down at her with an eager expression which she did not see.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, come next month. Laurie graduates then, and you\u2019d enjoy commencement as something new.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat is your best friend, of whom you speak?\u201d he said in an altered tone.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, my boy Teddy. I\u2019m very proud of him and should like you to see him.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo looked up then, quite unconscious of anything but her own pleasure in the prospect of showing them to one another. Something in Mr. Bhaer\u2019s face suddenly recalled the fact that she might find Laurie more than a \u2018best friend\u2019, and simply because she particularly wished not to look as if anything was the matter, she involuntarily began to blush, and the more she tried not to, the redder she grew. If it had not been for Tina on her knee. She didn\u2019t know what would have become of her. Fortunately the child was moved to hug her, so she managed to hide her face an instant, hoping the Professor did not see it. But he did, and his own changed again from that momentary anxiety to its usual expression, as he said cordially...\r\n\r\n\u201cI fear I shall not make the time for that, but I wish the friend much success, and you all happiness. Gott bless you!\u201d And with that, he shook hands warmly, shouldered Tina, and went away.\r\n\r\nBut after the boys were abed, he sat long before his fire with the tired look on his face and the \u2018heimweh\u2019, or homesickness, lying heavy at his heart. Once, when he remembered Jo as she sat with the little child in her lap and that new softness in her face, he leaned his head on his hands a minute, and then roamed about the room, as if in search of something that he could not find.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is not for me, I must not hope it now,\u201d he said to himself, with a sigh that was almost a groan. Then, as if reproaching himself for the longing that he could not repress, he went and kissed the two tousled heads upon the pillow, took down his seldom-used meerschaum, and opened his Plato.\r\n\r\nHe did his best and did it manfully, but I don\u2019t think he found that a pair of rampant boys, a pipe, or even the divine Plato, were very satisfactory substitutes for wife and child at home.\r\n\r\nEarly as it was, he was at the station next morning to see Jo off, and thanks to him, she began her solitary journey with the pleasant memory of a familiar face smiling its farewell, a bunch of violets to keep her company, and best of all, the happy thought, \u201cWell, the winter\u2019s gone, and I\u2019ve written no books, earned no fortune, but I\u2019ve made a friend worth having and I\u2019ll try to keep him all my life.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE\r\nHEARTACHE\r\n\r\nWhatever his motive might have been, Laurie studied to some purpose that year, for he graduated with honor, and gave the Latin oration with the grace of a Phillips and the eloquence of a Demosthenes, so his friends said. They were all there, his grandfather\u2014oh, so proud\u2014Mr. and Mrs. March, John and Meg, Jo and Beth, and all exulted over him with the sincere admiration which boys make light of at the time, but fail to win from the world by any after-triumphs.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve got to stay for this confounded supper, but I shall be home early tomorrow. You\u2019ll come and meet me as usual, girls?\u201d Laurie said, as he put the sisters into the carriage after the joys of the day were over. He said \u2018girls\u2019, but he meant Jo, for she was the only one who kept up the old custom. She had not the heart to refuse her splendid, successful boy anything, and answered warmly...\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll come, Teddy, rain or shine, and march before you, playing \u2018Hail the conquering hero comes\u2019 on a jew\u2019s-harp.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie thanked her with a look that made her think in a sudden panic, \u201cOh, deary me! I know he\u2019ll say something, and then what shall I do?\u201d\r\n\r\nEvening meditation and morning work somewhat allayed her fears, and having decided that she wouldn\u2019t be vain enough to think people were going to propose when she had given them every reason to know what her answer would be, she set forth at the appointed time, hoping Teddy wouldn\u2019t do anything to make her hurt his poor feelings. A call at Meg\u2019s, and a refreshing sniff and sip at the Daisy and Demijohn, still further fortified her for the tete-a-tete, but when she saw a stalwart figure looming in the distance, she had a strong desire to turn about and run away.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere\u2019s the jew\u2019s-harp, Jo?\u201d cried Laurie, as soon as he was within speaking distance.\r\n\r\n\u201cI forgot it.\u201d And Jo took heart again, for that salutation could not be called lover-like.\r\n\r\nShe always used to take his arm on these occasions, now she did not, and he made no complaint, which was a bad sign, but talked on rapidly about all sorts of faraway subjects, till they turned from the road into the little path that led homeward through the grove. Then he walked more slowly, suddenly lost his fine flow of language, and now and then a dreadful pause occurred. To rescue the conversation from one of the wells of silence into which it kept falling, Jo said hastily, \u201cNow you must have a good long holiday!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI intend to.\u201d\r\n\r\nSomething in his resolute tone made Jo look up quickly to find him looking down at her with an expression that assured her the dreaded moment had come, and made her put out her hand with an imploring, \u201cNo, Teddy. Please don\u2019t!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI will, and you must hear me. It\u2019s no use, Jo, we\u2019ve got to have it out, and the sooner the better for both of us,\u201d he answered, getting flushed and excited all at once.\r\n\r\n\u201cSay what you like then. I\u2019ll listen,\u201d said Jo, with a desperate sort of patience.\r\n\r\nLaurie was a young lover, but he was in earnest, and meant to \u2018have it out\u2019, if he died in the attempt, so he plunged into the subject with characteristic impetuousity, saying in a voice that would get choky now and then, in spite of manful efforts to keep it steady...\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve loved you ever since I\u2019ve known you, Jo, couldn\u2019t help it, you\u2019ve been so good to me. I\u2019ve tried to show it, but you wouldn\u2019t let me. Now I\u2019m going to make you hear, and give me an answer, for I can\u2019t go on so any longer.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wanted to save you this. I thought you\u2019d understand...\u201d began Jo, finding it a great deal harder than she expected.\r\n\r\n\u201cI know you did, but the girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say no when they mean yes, and drive a man out of his wits just for the fun of it,\u201d returned Laurie, entrenching himself behind an undeniable fact.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t. I never wanted to make you care for me so, and I went away to keep you from it if I could.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought so. It was like you, but it was no use. I only loved you all the more, and I worked hard to please you, and I gave up billiards and everything you didn\u2019t like, and waited and never complained, for I hoped you\u2019d love me, though I\u2019m not half good enough...\u201d Here there was a choke that couldn\u2019t be controlled, so he decapitated buttercups while he cleared his \u2018confounded throat\u2019.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou, you are, you\u2019re a great deal too good for me, and I\u2019m so grateful to you, and so proud and fond of you, I don\u2019t know why I can\u2019t love you as you want me to. I\u2019ve tried, but I can\u2019t change the feeling, and it would be a lie to say I do when I don\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cReally, truly, Jo?\u201d\r\n\r\nHe stopped short, and caught both her hands as he put his question with a look that she did not soon forget.\r\n\r\n\u201cReally, truly, dear.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey were in the grove now, close by the stile, and when the last words fell reluctantly from Jo\u2019s lips, Laurie dropped her hands and turned as if to go on, but for once in his life the fence was too much for him. So he just laid his head down on the mossy post, and stood so still that Jo was frightened.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Teddy, I\u2019m sorry, so desperately sorry, I could kill myself if it would do any good! I wish you wouldn\u2019t take it so hard, I can\u2019t help it. You know it\u2019s impossible for people to make themselves love other people if they don\u2019t,\u201d cried Jo inelegantly but remorsefully, as she softly patted his shoulder, remembering the time when he had comforted her so long ago.\r\n\r\n\u201cThey do sometimes,\u201d said a muffled voice from the post. \u201cI don\u2019t believe it\u2019s the right sort of love, and I\u2019d rather not try it,\u201d was the decided answer.\r\n\r\nThere was a long pause, while a blackbird sung blithely on the willow by the river, and the tall grass rustled in the wind. Presently Jo said very soberly, as she sat down on the step of the stile, \u201cLaurie, I want to tell you something.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe started as if he had been shot, threw up his head, and cried out in a fierce tone, \u201cDon\u2019t tell me that, Jo, I can\u2019t bear it now!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTell what?\u201d she asked, wondering at his violence.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat you love that old man.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat old man?\u201d demanded Jo, thinking he must mean his grandfather.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat devilish Professor you were always writing about. If you say you love him, I know I shall do something desperate;\u201d and he looked as if he would keep his word, as he clenched his hands with a wrathful spark in his eyes.\r\n\r\nJo wanted to laugh, but restrained herself and said warmly, for she too, was getting excited with all this, \u201cDon\u2019t swear, Teddy! He isn\u2019t old, nor anything bad, but good and kind, and the best friend I\u2019ve got, next to you. Pray, don\u2019t fly into a passion. I want to be kind, but I know I shall get angry if you abuse my Professor. I haven\u2019t the least idea of loving him or anybody else.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut you will after a while, and then what will become of me?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ll love someone else too, like a sensible boy, and forget all this trouble.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t love anyone else, and I\u2019ll never forget you, Jo, Never! Never!\u201d with a stamp to emphasize his passionate words.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat shall I do with him?\u201d sighed Jo, finding that emotions were more unmanagable than she expected. \u201cYou haven\u2019t heard what I wanted to tell you. Sit down and listen, for indeed I want to do right and make you happy,\u201d she said, hoping to soothe him with a little reason, which proved that she knew nothing about love.\r\n\r\nSeeing a ray of hope in that last speech, Laurie threw himself down on the grass at her feet, leaned his arm on the lower step of the stile, and looked up at her with an expectant face. Now that arrangement was not conducive to calm speech or clear thought on Jo\u2019s part, for how could she say hard things to her boy while he watched her with eyes full of love and longing, and lashes still wet with the bitter drop or two her hardness of heart had wrung from him? She gently turned his head away, saying, as she stroked the wavy hair which had been allowed to grow for her sake\u2014how touching that was, to be sure! \u201cI agree with Mother that you and I are not suited to each other, because our quick tempers and strong wills would probably make us very miserable, if we were so foolish as to...\u201d Jo paused a little over the last word, but Laurie uttered it with a rapturous expression.\r\n\r\n\u201cMarry\u2014no we shouldn\u2019t! If you loved me, Jo, I should be a perfect saint, for you could make me anything you like.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I can\u2019t. I\u2019ve tried and failed, and I won\u2019t risk our happiness by such a serious experiment. We don\u2019t agree and we never shall, so we\u2019ll be good friends all our lives, but we won\u2019t go and do anything rash.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, we will if we get the chance,\u201d muttered Laurie rebelliously.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow do be reasonable, and take a sensible view of the case,\u201d implored Jo, almost at her wit\u2019s end.\r\n\r\n\u201cI won\u2019t be reasonable. I don\u2019t want to take what you call \u2018a sensible view\u2019. It won\u2019t help me, and it only makes it harder. I don\u2019t believe you\u2019ve got any heart.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish I hadn\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\nThere was a little quiver in Jo\u2019s voice, and thinking it a good omen, Laurie turned round, bringing all his persuasive powers to bear as he said, in the wheedlesome tone that had never been so dangerously wheedlesome before, \u201cDon\u2019t disappoint us, dear! Everyone expects it. Grandpa has set his heart upon it, your people like it, and I can\u2019t get on without you. Say you will, and let\u2019s be happy. Do, do!\u201d\r\n\r\nNot until months afterward did Jo understand how she had the strength of mind to hold fast to the resolution she had made when she decided that she did not love her boy, and never could. It was very hard to do, but she did it, knowing that delay was both useless and cruel.\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t say \u2018yes\u2019 truly, so I won\u2019t say it at all. You\u2019ll see that I\u2019m right, by-and-by, and thank me for it...\u201d she began solemnly.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll be hanged if I do!\u201d and Laurie bounced up off the grass, burning with indignation at the very idea.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, you will!\u201d persisted Jo. \u201cYou\u2019ll get over this after a while, and find some lovely accomplished girl, who will adore you, and make a fine mistress for your fine house. I shouldn\u2019t. I\u2019m homely and awkward and odd and old, and you\u2019d be ashamed of me, and we should quarrel\u2014we can\u2019t help it even now, you see\u2014and I shouldn\u2019t like elegant society and you would, and you\u2019d hate my scribbling, and I couldn\u2019t get on without it, and we should be unhappy, and wish we hadn\u2019t done it, and everything would be horrid!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnything more?\u201d asked Laurie, finding it hard to listen patiently to this prophetic burst.\r\n\r\n\u201cNothing more, except that I don\u2019t believe I shall ever marry. I\u2019m happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI know better!\u201d broke in Laurie. \u201cYou think so now, but there\u2019ll come a time when you will care for somebody, and you\u2019ll love him tremendously, and live and die for him. I know you will, it\u2019s your way, and I shall have to stand by and see it,\u201d and the despairing lover cast his hat upon the ground with a gesture that would have seemed comical, if his face had not been so tragic.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I will live and die for him, if he ever comes and makes me love him in spite of myself, and you must do the best you can!\u201d cried Jo, losing patience with poor Teddy. \u201cI\u2019ve done my best, but you won\u2019t be reasonable, and it\u2019s selfish of you to keep teasing for what I can\u2019t give. I shall always be fond of you, very fond indeed, as a friend, but I\u2019ll never marry you, and the sooner you believe it the better for both of us\u2014so now!\u201d\r\n\r\nThat speech was like gunpowder. Laurie looked at her a minute as if he did not quite know what to do with himself, then turned sharply away, saying in a desperate sort of tone, \u201cYou\u2019ll be sorry some day, Jo.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, where are you going?\u201d she cried, for his face frightened her.\r\n\r\n\u201cTo the devil!\u201d was the consoling answer.\r\n\r\nFor a minute Jo\u2019s heart stood still, as he swung himself down the bank toward the river, but it takes much folly, sin or misery to send a young man to a violent death, and Laurie was not one of the weak sort who are conquered by a single failure. He had no thought of a melodramatic plunge, but some blind instinct led him to fling hat and coat into his boat, and row away with all his might, making better time up the river than he had done in any race. Jo drew a long breath and unclasped her hands as she watched the poor fellow trying to outstrip the trouble which he carried in his heart.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat will do him good, and he\u2019ll come home in such a tender, penitent state of mind, that I shan\u2019t dare to see him,\u201d she said, adding, as she went slowly home, feeling as if she had murdered some innocent thing, and buried it under the leaves. \u201cNow I must go and prepare Mr. Laurence to be very kind to my poor boy. I wish he\u2019d love Beth, perhaps he may in time, but I begin to think I was mistaken about her. Oh dear! How can girls like to have lovers and refuse them? I think it\u2019s dreadful.\u201d\r\n\r\nBeing sure that no one could do it so well as herself, she went straight to Mr. Laurence, told the hard story bravely through, and then broke down, crying so dismally over her own insensibility that the kind old gentleman, though sorely disappointed, did not utter a reproach. He found it difficult to understand how any girl could help loving Laurie, and hoped she would change her mind, but he knew even better than Jo that love cannot be forced, so he shook his head sadly and resolved to carry his boy out of harm\u2019s way, for Young Impetuosity\u2019s parting words to Jo disturbed him more than he would confess.\r\n\r\nWhen Laurie came home, dead tired but quite composed, his grandfather met him as if he knew nothing, and kept up the delusion very successfully for an hour or two. But when they sat together in the twilight, the time they used to enjoy so much, it was hard work for the old man to ramble on as usual, and harder still for the young one to listen to praises of the last year\u2019s success, which to him now seemed like love\u2019s labor lost. He bore it as long as he could, then went to his piano and began to play. The windows were open, and Jo, walking in the garden with Beth, for once understood music better than her sister, for he played the \u2018Sonata Pathetique\u2019, and played it as he never did before.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s very fine, I dare say, but it\u2019s sad enough to make one cry. Give us something gayer, lad,\u201d said Mr. Laurence, whose kind old heart was full of sympathy, which he longed to show but knew not how.\r\n\r\nLaurie dashed into a livelier strain, played stormily for several minutes, and would have got through bravely, if in a momentary lull Mrs. March\u2019s voice had not been heard calling, \u201cJo, dear, come in. I want you.\u201d\r\n\r\nJust what Laurie longed to say, with a different meaning! As he listened, he lost his place, the music ended with a broken chord, and the musician sat silent in the dark.\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t stand this,\u201d muttered the old gentleman. Up he got, groped his way to the piano, laid a kind hand on either of the broad shoulders, and said, as gently as a woman, \u201cI know, my boy, I know.\u201d\r\n\r\nNo answer for an instant, then Laurie asked sharply, \u201cWho told you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJo herself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen there\u2019s an end of it!\u201d And he shook off his grandfather\u2019s hands with an impatient motion, for though grateful for the sympathy, his man\u2019s pride could not bear a man\u2019s pity.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot quite. I want to say one thing, and then there shall be an end of it,\u201d returned Mr. Laurence with unusual mildness. \u201cYou won\u2019t care to stay at home now, perhaps?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t intend to run away from a girl. Jo can\u2019t prevent my seeing her, and I shall stay and do it as long as I like,\u201d interrupted Laurie in a defiant tone.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot if you are the gentleman I think you. I\u2019m disappointed, but the girl can\u2019t help it, and the only thing left for you to do is to go away for a time. Where will you go?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnywhere. I don\u2019t care what becomes of me,\u201d and Laurie got up with a reckless laugh that grated on his grandfather\u2019s ear.\r\n\r\n\u201cTake it like a man, and don\u2019t do anything rash, for God\u2019s sake. Why not go abroad, as you planned, and forget it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut you\u2019ve been wild to go, and I promised you should when you got through college.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAh, but I didn\u2019t mean to go alone!\u201d and Laurie walked fast through the room with an expression which it was well his grandfather did not see.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t ask you to go alone. There\u2019s someone ready and glad to go with you, anywhere in the world.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho, Sir?\u201d stopping to listen.\r\n\r\n\u201cMyself.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie came back as quickly as he went, and put out his hand, saying huskily, \u201cI\u2019m a selfish brute, but\u2014you know\u2014Grandfather\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLord help me, yes, I do know, for I\u2019ve been through it all before, once in my own young days, and then with your father. Now, my dear boy, just sit quietly down and hear my plan. It\u2019s all settled, and can be carried out at once,\u201d said Mr. Laurence, keeping hold of the young man, as if fearful that he would break away as his father had done before him.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, sir, what is it?\u201d and Laurie sat down, without a sign of interest in face or voice.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere is business in London that needs looking after. I meant you should attend to it, but I can do it better myself, and things here will get on very well with Brooke to manage them. My partners do almost everything, I\u2019m merely holding on until you take my place, and can be off at any time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut you hate traveling, Sir. I can\u2019t ask it of you at your age,\u201d began Laurie, who was grateful for the sacrifice, but much preferred to go alone, if he went at all.\r\n\r\nThe old gentleman knew that perfectly well, and particularly desired to prevent it, for the mood in which he found his grandson assured him that it would not be wise to leave him to his own devices. So, stifling a natural regret at the thought of the home comforts he would leave behind him, he said stoutly, \u201cBless your soul, I\u2019m not superannuated yet. I quite enjoy the idea. It will do me good, and my old bones won\u2019t suffer, for traveling nowadays is almost as easy as sitting in a chair.\u201d\r\n\r\nA restless movement from Laurie suggested that his chair was not easy, or that he did not like the plan, and made the old man add hastily, \u201cI don\u2019t mean to be a marplot or a burden. I go because I think you\u2019d feel happier than if I was left behind. I don\u2019t intend to gad about with you, but leave you free to go where you like, while I amuse myself in my own way. I\u2019ve friends in London and Paris, and should like to visit them. Meantime you can go to Italy, Germany, Switzerland, where you will, and enjoy pictures, music, scenery, and adventures to your heart\u2019s content.\u201d\r\n\r\nNow, Laurie felt just then that his heart was entirely broken and the world a howling wilderness, but at the sound of certain words which the old gentleman artfully introduced into his closing sentence, the broken heart gave an unexpected leap, and a green oasis or two suddenly appeared in the howling wilderness. He sighed, and then said, in a spiritless tone, \u201cJust as you like, Sir. It doesn\u2019t matter where I go or what I do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt does to me, remember that, my lad. I give you entire liberty, but I trust you to make an honest use of it. Promise me that, Laurie.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnything you like, Sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood,\u201d thought the old gentleman. \u201cYou don\u2019t care now, but there\u2019ll come a time when that promise will keep you out of mischief, or I\u2019m much mistaken.\u201d\r\n\r\nBeing an energetic individual, Mr. Laurence struck while the iron was hot, and before the blighted being recovered spirit enough to rebel, they were off. During the time necessary for preparation, Laurie bore himself as young gentleman usually do in such cases. He was moody, irritable, and pensive by turns, lost his appetite, neglected his dress and devoted much time to playing tempestuously on his piano, avoided Jo, but consoled himself by staring at her from his window, with a tragic face that haunted her dreams by night and oppressed her with a heavy sense of guilt by day. Unlike some sufferers, he never spoke of his unrequited passion, and would allow no one, not even Mrs. March, to attempt consolation or offer sympathy. On some accounts, this was a relief to his friends, but the weeks before his departure were very uncomfortable, and everyone rejoiced that the \u2018poor, dear fellow was going away to forget his trouble, and come home happy\u2019. Of course, he smiled darkly at their delusion, but passed it by with the sad superiority of one who knew that his fidelity like his love was unalterable.\r\n\r\nWhen the parting came he affected high spirits, to conceal certain inconvenient emotions which seemed inclined to assert themselves. This gaiety did not impose upon anybody, but they tried to look as if it did for his sake, and he got on very well till Mrs. March kissed him, with a whisper full of motherly solicitude. Then feeling that he was going very fast, he hastily embraced them all round, not forgetting the afflicted Hannah, and ran downstairs as if for his life. Jo followed a minute after to wave her hand to him if he looked round. He did look round, came back, put his arms about her as she stood on the step above him, and looked up at her with a face that made his short appeal eloquent and pathetic.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Jo, can\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTeddy, dear, I wish I could!\u201d\r\n\r\nThat was all, except a little pause. Then Laurie straightened himself up, said, \u201cIt\u2019s all right, never mind,\u201d and went away without another word. Ah, but it wasn\u2019t all right, and Jo did mind, for while the curly head lay on her arm a minute after her hard answer, she felt as if she had stabbed her dearest friend, and when he left her without a look behind him, she knew that the boy Laurie never would come again.\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-SIX\r\nBETH\u2019S SECRET\r\n\r\nWhen Jo came home that spring, she had been struck with the change in Beth. No one spoke of it or seemed aware of it, for it had come too gradually to startle those who saw her daily, but to eyes sharpened by absence, it was very plain and a heavy weight fell on Jo\u2019s heart as she saw her sister\u2019s face. It was no paler and but littler thinner than in the autumn, yet there was a strange, transparent look about it, as if the mortal was being slowly refined away, and the immortal shining through the frail flesh with an indescribably pathetic beauty. Jo saw and felt it, but said nothing at the time, and soon the first impression lost much of its power, for Beth seemed happy, no one appeared to doubt that she was better, and presently in other cares Jo for a time forgot her fear.\r\n\r\nBut when Laurie was gone, and peace prevailed again, the vague anxiety returned and haunted her. She had confessed her sins and been forgiven, but when she showed her savings and proposed a mountain trip, Beth had thanked her heartily, but begged not to go so far away from home. Another little visit to the seashore would suit her better, and as Grandma could not be prevailed upon to leave the babies, Jo took Beth down to the quiet place, where she could live much in the open air, and let the fresh sea breezes blow a little color into her pale cheeks.\r\n\r\nIt was not a fashionable place, but even among the pleasant people there, the girls made few friends, preferring to live for one another. Beth was too shy to enjoy society, and Jo too wrapped up in her to care for anyone else. So they were all in all to each other, and came and went, quite unconscious of the interest they excited in those about them, who watched with sympathetic eyes the strong sister and the feeble one, always together, as if they felt instinctively that a long separation was not far away.\r\n\r\nThey did feel it, yet neither spoke of it, for often between ourselves and those nearest and dearest to us there exists a reserve which it is very hard to overcome. Jo felt as if a veil had fallen between her heart and Beth\u2019s, but when she put out her hand to lift it up, there seemed something sacred in the silence, and she waited for Beth to speak. She wondered, and was thankful also, that her parents did not seem to see what she saw, and during the quiet weeks when the shadows grew so plain to her, she said nothing of it to those at home, believing that it would tell itself when Beth came back no better. She wondered still more if her sister really guessed the hard truth, and what thoughts were passing through her mind during the long hours when she lay on the warm rocks with her head in Jo\u2019s lap, while the winds blew healthfully over her and the sea made music at her feet.\r\n\r\nOne day Beth told her. Jo thought she was asleep, she lay so still, and putting down her book, sat looking at her with wistful eyes, trying to see signs of hope in the faint color on Beth\u2019s cheeks. But she could not find enough to satisfy her, for the cheeks were very thin, and the hands seemed too feeble to hold even the rosy little shells they had been collecting. It came to her then more bitterly than ever that Beth was slowly drifting away from her, and her arms instinctively tightened their hold upon the dearest treasure she possessed. For a minute her eyes were too dim for seeing, and when they cleared, Beth was looking up at her so tenderly that there was hardly any need for her to say, \u201cJo, dear, I\u2019m glad you know it. I\u2019ve tried to tell you, but I couldn\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\nThere was no answer except her sister\u2019s cheek against her own, not even tears, for when most deeply moved, Jo did not cry. She was the weaker then, and Beth tried to comfort and sustain her, with her arms about her and the soothing words she whispered in her ear.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve known it for a good while, dear, and now I\u2019m used to it, it isn\u2019t hard to think of or to bear. Try to see it so and don\u2019t be troubled about me, because it\u2019s best, indeed it is.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIs this what made you so unhappy in the autumn, Beth? You did not feel it then, and keep it to yourself so long, did you?\u201d asked Jo, refusing to see or say that it was best, but glad to know that Laurie had no part in Beth\u2019s trouble.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I gave up hoping then, but I didn\u2019t like to own it. I tried to think it was a sick fancy, and would not let it trouble anyone. But when I saw you all so well and strong and full of happy plans, it was hard to feel that I could never be like you, and then I was miserable, Jo.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Beth, and you didn\u2019t tell me, didn\u2019t let me comfort and help you? How could you shut me out, bear it all alone?\u201d\r\n\r\nJo\u2019s voice was full of tender reproach, and her heart ached to think of the solitary struggle that must have gone on while Beth learned to say goodbye to health, love, and life, and take up her cross so cheerfully.\r\n\r\n\u201cPerhaps it was wrong, but I tried to do right. I wasn\u2019t sure, no one said anything, and I hoped I was mistaken. It would have been selfish to frighten you all when Marmee was so anxious about Meg, and Amy away, and you so happy with Laurie\u2014at least I thought so then.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd I thought you loved him, Beth, and I went away because I couldn\u2019t,\u201d cried Jo, glad to say all the truth.\r\n\r\nBeth looked so amazed at the idea that Jo smiled in spite of her pain, and added softly, \u201cThen you didn\u2019t, dearie? I was afraid it was so, and imagined your poor little heart full of lovelornity all that while.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Jo, how could I, when he was so fond of you?\u201d asked Beth, as innocently as a child. \u201cI do love him dearly. He is so good to me, how can I help It? But he could never be anything to me but my brother. I hope he truly will be, sometime.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot through me,\u201d said Jo decidedly. \u201cAmy is left for him, and they would suit excellently, but I have no heart for such things, now. I don\u2019t care what becomes of anybody but you, Beth. You must get well.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI want to, oh, so much! I try, but every day I lose a little, and feel more sure that I shall never gain it back. It\u2019s like the tide, Jo, when it turns, it goes slowly, but it can\u2019t be stopped.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt shall be stopped, your tide must not turn so soon, nineteen is too young, Beth. I can\u2019t let you go. I\u2019ll work and pray and fight against it. I\u2019ll keep you in spite of everything. There must be ways, it can\u2019t be too late. God won\u2019t be so cruel as to take you from me,\u201d cried poor Jo rebelliously, for her spirit was far less piously submissive than Beth\u2019s.\r\n\r\nSimple, sincere people seldom speak much of their piety. It shows itself in acts rather than in words, and has more influence than homilies or protestations. Beth could not reason upon or explain the faith that gave her courage and patience to give up life, and cheerfully wait for death. Like a confiding child, she asked no questions, but left everything to God and nature, Father and Mother of us all, feeling sure that they, and they only, could teach and strengthen heart and spirit for this life and the life to come. She did not rebuke Jo with saintly speeches, only loved her better for her passionate affection, and clung more closely to the dear human love, from which our Father never means us to be weaned, but through which He draws us closer to Himself. She could not say, \u201cI\u2019m glad to go,\u201d for life was very sweet for her. She could only sob out, \u201cI try to be willing,\u201d while she held fast to Jo, as the first bitter wave of this great sorrow broke over them together.\r\n\r\nBy and by Beth said, with recovered serenity, \u201cYou\u2019ll tell them this when we go home?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI think they will see it without words,\u201d sighed Jo, for now it seemed to her that Beth changed every day.\r\n\r\n\u201cPerhaps not. I\u2019ve heard that the people who love best are often blindest to such things. If they don\u2019t see it, you will tell them for me. I don\u2019t want any secrets, and it\u2019s kinder to prepare them. Meg has John and the babies to comfort her, but you must stand by Father and Mother, won\u2019t you Jo?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf I can. But, Beth, I don\u2019t give up yet. I\u2019m going to believe that it is a sick fancy, and not let you think it\u2019s true.\u201d said Jo, trying to speak cheerfully.\r\n\r\nBeth lay a minute thinking, and then said in her quiet way, \u201cI don\u2019t know how to express myself, and shouldn\u2019t try to anyone but you, because I can\u2019t speak out except to my Jo. I only mean to say that I have a feeling that it never was intended I should live long. I\u2019m not like the rest of you. I never made any plans about what I\u2019d do when I grew up. I never thought of being married, as you all did. I couldn\u2019t seem to imagine myself anything but stupid little Beth, trotting about at home, of no use anywhere but there. I never wanted to go away, and the hard part now is the leaving you all. I\u2019m not afraid, but it seems as if I should be homesick for you even in heaven.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo could not speak, and for several minutes there was no sound but the sigh of the wind and the lapping of the tide. A white-winged gull flew by, with the flash of sunshine on its silvery breast. Beth watched it till it vanished, and her eyes were full of sadness. A little gray-coated sand bird came tripping over the beach \u2018peeping\u2019 softly to itself, as if enjoying the sun and sea. It came quite close to Beth, and looked at her with a friendly eye and sat upon a warm stone, dressing its wet feathers, quite at home. Beth smiled and felt comforted, for the tiny thing seemed to offer its small friendship and remind her that a pleasant world was still to be enjoyed.\r\n\r\n\u201cDear little bird! See, Jo, how tame it is. I like peeps better than the gulls. They are not so wild and handsome, but they seem happy, confiding little things. I used to call them my birds last summer, and Mother said they reminded her of me\u2014busy, quaker-colored creatures, always near the shore, and always chirping that contented little song of theirs. You are the gull, Jo, strong and wild, fond of the storm and the wind, flying far out to sea, and happy all alone. Meg is the turtledove, and Amy is like the lark she writes about, trying to get up among the clouds, but always dropping down into its nest again. Dear little girl! She\u2019s so ambitious, but her heart is good and tender, and no matter how high she flies, she never will forget home. I hope I shall see her again, but she seems so far away.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShe is coming in the spring, and I mean that you shall be all ready to see and enjoy her. I\u2019m going to have you well and rosy by that time,\u201d began Jo, feeling that of all the changes in Beth, the talking change was the greatest, for it seemed to cost no effort now, and she thought aloud in a way quite unlike bashful Beth.\r\n\r\n\u201cJo, dear, don\u2019t hope any more. It won\u2019t do any good. I\u2019m sure of that. We won\u2019t be miserable, but enjoy being together while we wait. We\u2019ll have happy times, for I don\u2019t suffer much, and I think the tide will go out easily, if you help me.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo leaned down to kiss the tranquil face, and with that silent kiss, she dedicated herself soul and body to Beth.\r\n\r\nShe was right. There was no need of any words when they got home, for Father and Mother saw plainly now what they had prayed to be saved from seeing. Tired with her short journey, Beth went at once to bed, saying how glad she was to be home, and when Jo went down, she found that she would be spared the hard task of telling Beth\u2019s secret. Her father stood leaning his head on the mantelpiece and did not turn as she came in, but her mother stretched out her arms as if for help, and Jo went to comfort her without a word.\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN\r\nNEW IMPRESSIONS\r\n\r\nAt three o\u2019clock in the afternoon, all the fashionable world at Nice may be seen on the Promenade des Anglais\u2014a charming place, for the wide walk, bordered with palms, flowers, and tropical shrubs, is bounded on one side by the sea, on the other by the grand drive, lined with hotels and villas, while beyond lie orange orchards and the hills. Many nations are represented, many languages spoken, many costumes worn, and on a sunny day the spectacle is as gay and brilliant as a carnival. Haughty English, lively French, sober Germans, handsome Spaniards, ugly Russians, meek Jews, free-and-easy Americans, all drive, sit, or saunter here, chatting over the news, and criticizing the latest celebrity who has arrived\u2014Ristori or Dickens, Victor Emmanuel or the Queen of the Sandwich Islands. The equipages are as varied as the company and attract as much attention, especially the low basket barouches in which ladies drive themselves, with a pair of dashing ponies, gay nets to keep their voluminous flounces from overflowing the diminutive vehicles, and little grooms on the perch behind.\r\n\r\nAlong this walk, on Christmas Day, a tall young man walked slowly, with his hands behind him, and a somewhat absent expression of countenance. He looked like an Italian, was dressed like an Englishman, and had the independent air of an American\u2014a combination which caused sundry pairs of feminine eyes to look approvingly after him, and sundry dandies in black velvet suits, with rose-colored neckties, buff gloves, and orange flowers in their buttonholes, to shrug their shoulders, and then envy him his inches. There were plenty of pretty faces to admire, but the young man took little notice of them, except to glance now and then at some blonde girl in blue. Presently he strolled out of the promenade and stood a moment at the crossing, as if undecided whether to go and listen to the band in the Jardin Publique, or to wander along the beach toward Castle Hill. The quick trot of ponies\u2019 feet made him look up, as one of the little carriages, containing a single young lady, came rapidly down the street. The lady was young, blonde, and dressed in blue. He stared a minute, then his whole face woke up, and, waving his hat like a boy, he hurried forward to meet her.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Laurie, is it really you? I thought you\u2019d never come!\u201d cried Amy, dropping the reins and holding out both hands, to the great scandalization of a French mamma, who hastened her daughter\u2019s steps, lest she should be demoralized by beholding the free manners of these \u2018mad English\u2019.\r\n\r\n\u201cI was detained by the way, but I promised to spend Christmas with you, and here I am.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow is your grandfather? When did you come? Where are you staying?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cVery well\u2014last night\u2014at the Chauvain. I called at your hotel, but you were out.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI have so much to say, I don\u2019t know where to begin! Get in and we can talk at our ease. I was going for a drive and longing for company. Flo\u2019s saving up for tonight.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat happens then, a ball?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA Christmas party at our hotel. There are many Americans there, and they give it in honor of the day. You\u2019ll go with us, of course? Aunt will be charmed.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you. Where now?\u201d asked Laurie, leaning back and folding his arms, a proceeding which suited Amy, who preferred to drive, for her parasol whip and blue reins over the white ponies\u2019 backs afforded her infinite satisfaction.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m going to the bankers first for letters, and then to Castle Hill. The view is so lovely, and I like to feed the peacocks. Have you ever been there?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOften, years ago, but I don\u2019t mind having a look at it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow tell me all about yourself. The last I heard of you, your grandfather wrote that he expected you from Berlin.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I spent a month there and then joined him in Paris, where he has settled for the winter. He has friends there and finds plenty to amuse him, so I go and come, and we get on capitally.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s a sociable arrangement,\u201d said Amy, missing something in Laurie\u2019s manner, though she couldn\u2019t tell what.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, you see, he hates to travel, and I hate to keep still, so we each suit ourselves, and there is no trouble. I am often with him, and he enjoys my adventures, while I like to feel that someone is glad to see me when I get back from my wanderings. Dirty old hole, isn\u2019t it?\u201d he added, with a look of disgust as they drove along the boulevard to the Place Napoleon in the old city.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe dirt is picturesque, so I don\u2019t mind. The river and the hills are delicious, and these glimpses of the narrow cross streets are my delight. Now we shall have to wait for that procession to pass. It\u2019s going to the Church of St. John.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhile Laurie listlessly watched the procession of priests under their canopies, white-veiled nuns bearing lighted tapers, and some brotherhood in blue chanting as they walked, Amy watched him, and felt a new sort of shyness steal over her, for he was changed, and she could not find the merry-faced boy she left in the moody-looking man beside her. He was handsomer than ever and greatly improved, she thought, but now that the flush of pleasure at meeting her was over, he looked tired and spiritless\u2014not sick, nor exactly unhappy, but older and graver than a year or two of prosperous life should have made him. She couldn\u2019t understand it and did not venture to ask questions, so she shook her head and touched up her ponies, as the procession wound away across the arches of the Paglioni bridge and vanished in the church.\r\n\r\n\u201cQue pensez-vous?\u201d she said, airing her French, which had improved in quantity, if not in quality, since she came abroad.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat mademoiselle has made good use of her time, and the result is charming,\u201d replied Laurie, bowing with his hand on his heart and an admiring look.\r\n\r\nShe blushed with pleasure, but somehow the compliment did not satisfy her like the blunt praises he used to give her at home, when he promenaded round her on festival occasions, and told her she was \u2018altogether jolly\u2019, with a hearty smile and an approving pat on the head. She didn\u2019t like the new tone, for though not blase, it sounded indifferent in spite of the look.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf that\u2019s the way he\u2019s going to grow up, I wish he\u2019d stay a boy,\u201d she thought, with a curious sense of disappointment and discomfort, trying meantime to seem quite easy and gay.\r\n\r\nAt Avigdor\u2019s she found the precious home letters and, giving the reins to Laurie, read them luxuriously as they wound up the shady road between green hedges, where tea roses bloomed as freshly as in June.\r\n\r\n\u201cBeth is very poorly, Mother says. I often think I ought to go home, but they all say \u2018stay\u2019. So I do, for I shall never have another chance like this,\u201d said Amy, looking sober over one page.\r\n\r\n\u201cI think you are right, there. You could do nothing at home, and it is a great comfort to them to know that you are well and happy, and enjoying so much, my dear.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe drew a little nearer, and looked more like his old self as he said that, and the fear that sometimes weighed on Amy\u2019s heart was lightened, for the look, the act, the brotherly \u2018my dear\u2019, seemed to assure her that if any trouble did come, she would not be alone in a strange land. Presently she laughed and showed him a small sketch of Jo in her scribbling suit, with the bow rampantly erect upon her cap, and issuing from her mouth the words, \u2018Genius burns!\u2019.\r\n\r\nLaurie smiled, took it, put it in his vest pocket \u2018to keep it from blowing away\u2019, and listened with interest to the lively letter Amy read him.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis will be a regularly merry Christmas to me, with presents in the morning, you and letters in the afternoon, and a party at night,\u201d said Amy, as they alighted among the ruins of the old fort, and a flock of splendid peacocks came trooping about them, tamely waiting to be fed. While Amy stood laughing on the bank above him as she scattered crumbs to the brilliant birds, Laurie looked at her as she had looked at him, with a natural curiosity to see what changes time and absence had wrought. He found nothing to perplex or disappoint, much to admire and approve, for overlooking a few little affectations of speech and manner, she was as sprightly and graceful as ever, with the addition of that indescribable something in dress and bearing which we call elegance. Always mature for her age, she had gained a certain aplomb in both carriage and conversation, which made her seem more of a woman of the world than she was, but her old petulance now and then showed itself, her strong will still held its own, and her native frankness was unspoiled by foreign polish.\r\n\r\nLaurie did not read all this while he watched her feed the peacocks, but he saw enough to satisfy and interest him, and carried away a pretty little picture of a bright-faced girl standing in the sunshine, which brought out the soft hue of her dress, the fresh color of her cheeks, the golden gloss of her hair, and made her a prominent figure in the pleasant scene.\r\n\r\nAs they came up onto the stone plateau that crowns the hill, Amy waved her hand as if welcoming him to her favorite haunt, and said, pointing here and there, \u201cDo you remember the Cathedral and the Corso, the fishermen dragging their nets in the bay, and the lovely road to Villa Franca, Schubert\u2019s Tower, just below, and best of all, that speck far out to sea which they say is Corsica?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI remember. It\u2019s not much changed,\u201d he answered without enthusiasm.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat Jo would give for a sight of that famous speck!\u201d said Amy, feeling in good spirits and anxious to see him so also.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d was all he said, but he turned and strained his eyes to see the island which a greater usurper than even Napoleon now made interesting in his sight.\r\n\r\n\u201cTake a good look at it for her sake, and then come and tell me what you have been doing with yourself all this while,\u201d said Amy, seating herself, ready for a good talk.\r\n\r\nBut she did not get it, for though he joined her and answered all her questions freely, she could only learn that he had roved about the Continent and been to Greece. So after idling away an hour, they drove home again, and having paid his respects to Mrs. Carrol, Laurie left them, promising to return in the evening.\r\n\r\nIt must be recorded of Amy that she deliberately prinked that night. Time and absence had done its work on both the young people. She had seen her old friend in a new light, not as \u2018our boy\u2019, but as a handsome and agreeable man, and she was conscious of a very natural desire to find favor in his sight. Amy knew her good points, and made the most of them with the taste and skill which is a fortune to a poor and pretty woman.\r\n\r\nTarlatan and tulle were cheap at Nice, so she enveloped herself in them on such occasions, and following the sensible English fashion of simple dress for young girls, got up charming little toilettes with fresh flowers, a few trinkets, and all manner of dainty devices, which were both inexpensive and effective. It must be confessed that the artist sometimes got possession of the woman, and indulged in antique coiffures, statuesque attitudes, and classic draperies. But, dear heart, we all have our little weaknesses, and find it easy to pardon such in the young, who satisfy our eyes with their comeliness, and keep our hearts merry with their artless vanities.\r\n\r\n\u201cI do want him to think I look well, and tell them so at home,\u201d said Amy to herself, as she put on Flo\u2019s old white silk ball dress, and covered it with a cloud of fresh illusion, out of which her white shoulders and golden head emerged with a most artistic effect. Her hair she had the sense to let alone, after gathering up the thick waves and curls into a Hebe-like knot at the back of her head.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s not the fashion, but it\u2019s becoming, and I can\u2019t afford to make a fright of myself,\u201d she used to say, when advised to frizzle, puff, or braid, as the latest style commanded.\r\n\r\nHaving no ornaments fine enough for this important occasion, Amy looped her fleecy skirts with rosy clusters of azalea, and framed the white shoulders in delicate green vines. Remembering the painted boots, she surveyed her white satin slippers with girlish satisfaction, and chasseed down the room, admiring her aristocratic feet all by herself.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy new fan just matches my flowers, my gloves fit to a charm, and the real lace on Aunt\u2019s mouchoir gives an air to my whole dress. If I only had a classical nose and mouth I should be perfectly happy,\u201d she said, surveying herself with a critical eye and a candle in each hand.\r\n\r\nIn spite of this affliction, she looked unusually gay and graceful as she glided away. She seldom ran\u2014it did not suit her style, she thought, for being tall, the stately and Junoesque was more appropriate than the sportive or piquante. She walked up and down the long saloon while waiting for Laurie, and once arranged herself under the chandelier, which had a good effect upon her hair, then she thought better of it, and went away to the other end of the room, as if ashamed of the girlish desire to have the first view a propitious one. It so happened that she could not have done a better thing, for Laurie came in so quietly she did not hear him, and as she stood at the distant window, with her head half turned and one hand gathering up her dress, the slender, white figure against the red curtains was as effective as a well-placed statue.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood evening, Diana!\u201d said Laurie, with the look of satisfaction she liked to see in his eyes when they rested on her.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood evening, Apollo!\u201d she answered, smiling back at him, for he too looked unusually debonair, and the thought of entering the ballroom on the arm of such a personable man caused Amy to pity the four plain Misses Davis from the bottom of her heart.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere are your flowers. I arranged them myself, remembering that you didn\u2019t like what Hannah calls a \u2018sot-bookay\u2019,\u201d said Laurie, handing her a delicate nosegay, in a holder that she had long coveted as she daily passed it in Cardiglia\u2019s window.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow kind you are!\u201d she exclaimed gratefully. \u201cIf I\u2019d known you were coming I\u2019d have had something ready for you today, though not as pretty as this, I\u2019m afraid.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you. It isn\u2019t what it should be, but you have improved it,\u201d he added, as she snapped the silver bracelet on her wrist.\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease don\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought you liked that sort of thing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot from you, it doesn\u2019t sound natural, and I like your old bluntness better.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad of it,\u201d he answered, with a look of relief, then buttoned her gloves for her, and asked if his tie was straight, just as he used to do when they went to parties together at home.\r\n\r\nThe company assembled in the long salle a manger, that evening, was such as one sees nowhere but on the Continent. The hospitable Americans had invited every acquaintance they had in Nice, and having no prejudice against titles, secured a few to add luster to their Christmas ball.\r\n\r\nA Russian prince condescended to sit in a corner for an hour and talk with a massive lady, dressed like Hamlet\u2019s mother in black velvet with a pearl bridle under her chin. A Polish count, aged eighteen, devoted himself to the ladies, who pronounced him, \u2018a fascinating dear\u2019, and a German Serene Something, having come to supper alone, roamed vaguely about, seeking what he might devour. Baron Rothschild\u2019s private secretary, a large-nosed Jew in tight boots, affably beamed upon the world, as if his master\u2019s name crowned him with a golden halo. A stout Frenchman, who knew the Emperor, came to indulge his mania for dancing, and Lady de Jones, a British matron, adorned the scene with her little family of eight. Of course, there were many light-footed, shrill-voiced American girls, handsome, lifeless-looking English ditto, and a few plain but piquante French demoiselles, likewise the usual set of traveling young gentlemen who disported themselves gaily, while mammas of all nations lined the walls and smiled upon them benignly when they danced with their daughters.\r\n\r\nAny young girl can imagine Amy\u2019s state of mind when she \u2018took the stage\u2019 that night, leaning on Laurie\u2019s arm. She knew she looked well, she loved to dance, she felt that her foot was on her native heath in a ballroom, and enjoyed the delightful sense of power which comes when young girls first discover the new and lovely kingdom they are born to rule by virtue of beauty, youth, and womanhood. She did pity the Davis girls, who were awkward, plain, and destitute of escort, except a grim papa and three grimmer maiden aunts, and she bowed to them in her friendliest manner as she passed, which was good of her, as it permitted them to see her dress, and burn with curiosity to know who her distinguished-looking friend might be. With the first burst of the band, Amy\u2019s color rose, her eyes began to sparkle, and her feet to tap the floor impatiently, for she danced well and wanted Laurie to know it. Therefore the shock she received can better be imagined than described, when he said in a perfectly tranquil tone, \u201cDo you care to dance?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOne usually does at a ball.\u201d\r\n\r\nHer amazed look and quick answer caused Laurie to repair his error as fast as possible.\r\n\r\n\u201cI meant the first dance. May I have the honor?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can give you one if I put off the Count. He dances divinely, but he will excuse me, as you are an old friend,\u201d said Amy, hoping that the name would have a good effect, and show Laurie that she was not to be trifled with.\r\n\r\n\u201cNice little boy, but rather a short Pole to support...\r\n\r\nA daughter of the gods,\r\nDevinely tall, and most divinely fair,\u201d\r\n\r\nwas all the satisfaction she got, however.\r\n\r\nThe set in which they found themselves was composed of English, and Amy was compelled to walk decorously through a cotillion, feeling all the while as if she could dance the tarantella with relish. Laurie resigned her to the \u2018nice little boy\u2019, and went to do his duty to Flo, without securing Amy for the joys to come, which reprehensible want of forethought was properly punished, for she immediately engaged herself till supper, meaning to relent if he then gave any signs penitence. She showed him her ball book with demure satisfaction when he strolled instead of rushed up to claim her for the next, a glorious polka redowa. But his polite regrets didn\u2019t impose upon her, and when she galloped away with the Count, she saw Laurie sit down by her aunt with an actual expression of relief.\r\n\r\nThat was unpardonable, and Amy took no more notice of him for a long while, except a word now and then when she came to her chaperon between the dances for a necessary pin or a moment\u2019s rest. Her anger had a good effect, however, for she hid it under a smiling face, and seemed unusually blithe and brilliant. Laurie\u2019s eyes followed her with pleasure, for she neither romped nor sauntered, but danced with spirit and grace, making the delightsome pastime what it should be. He very naturally fell to studying her from this new point of view, and before the evening was half over, had decided that \u2018little Amy was going to make a very charming woman\u2019.\r\n\r\nIt was a lively scene, for soon the spirit of the social season took possession of everyone, and Christmas merriment made all faces shine, hearts happy, and heels light. The musicians fiddled, tooted, and banged as if they enjoyed it, everybody danced who could, and those who couldn\u2019t admired their neighbors with uncommon warmth. The air was dark with Davises, and many Joneses gamboled like a flock of young giraffes. The golden secretary darted through the room like a meteor with a dashing French-woman who carpeted the floor with her pink satin train. The serene Teuton found the supper-table and was happy, eating steadily through the bill of fare, and dismayed the garcons by the ravages he committed. But the Emperor\u2019s friend covered himself with glory, for he danced everything, whether he knew it or not, and introduced impromptu pirouettes when the figures bewildered him. The boyish abandon of that stout man was charming to behold, for though he \u2018carried weight\u2019, he danced like an India-rubber ball. He ran, he flew, he pranced, his face glowed, his bald head shown, his coattails waved wildly, his pumps actually twinkled in the air, and when the music stopped, he wiped the drops from his brow, and beamed upon his fellow men like a French Pickwick without glasses.\r\n\r\nAmy and her Pole distinguished themselves by equal enthusiasm but more graceful agility, and Laurie found himself involuntarily keeping time to the rhythmic rise and fall of the white slippers as they flew by as indefatigably as if winged. When little Vladimir finally relinquished her, with assurances that he was \u2018desolated to leave so early\u2019, she was ready to rest, and see how her recreant knight had borne his punishment.\r\n\r\nIt had been successful, for at three-and-twenty, blighted affections find a balm in friendly society, and young nerves will thrill, young blood dance, and healthy young spirits rise, when subjected to the enchantment of beauty, light, music, and motion. Laurie had a waked-up look as he rose to give her his seat, and when he hurried away to bring her some supper, she said to herself, with a satisfied smile, \u201cAh, I thought that would do him good!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou look like Balzac\u2019s \u2018Femme Peinte Par Elle-Meme\u2019,\u201d he said, as he fanned her with one hand and held her coffee cup in the other.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy rouge won\u2019t come off.\u201d and Amy rubbed her brilliant cheek, and showed him her white glove with a sober simplicity that made him laugh outright.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you call this stuff?\u201d he asked, touching a fold of her dress that had blown over his knee.\r\n\r\n\u201cIllusion.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood name for it. It\u2019s very pretty\u2014new thing, isn\u2019t it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s as old as the hills. You have seen it on dozens of girls, and you never found out that it was pretty till now\u2014stupide!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI never saw it on you before, which accounts for the mistake, you see.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNone of that, it is forbidden. I\u2019d rather take coffee than compliments just now. No, don\u2019t lounge, it makes me nervous.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie sat bold upright, and meekly took her empty plate feeling an odd sort of pleasure in having \u2018little Amy\u2019 order him about, for she had lost her shyness now, and felt an irrestible desire to trample on him, as girls have a delightful way of doing when lords of creation show any signs of subjection.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere did you learn all this sort of thing?\u201d he asked with a quizzical look.\r\n\r\n\u201cAs \u2018this sort of thing\u2019 is rather a vague expression, would you kindly explain?\u201d returned Amy, knowing perfectly well what he meant, but wickedly leaving him to describe what is indescribable.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell\u2014the general air, the style, the self-possession, the\u2014the\u2014illusion\u2014you know\u201d, laughed Laurie, breaking down and helping himself out of his quandary with the new word.\r\n\r\nAmy was gratified, but of course didn\u2019t show it, and demurely answered, \u201cForeign life polishes one in spite of one\u2019s self. I study as well as play, and as for this\u201d\u2014with a little gesture toward her dress\u2014\u201cwhy, tulle is cheap, posies to be had for nothing, and I am used to making the most of my poor little things.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy rather regretted that last sentence, fearing it wasn\u2019t in good taste, but Laurie liked her better for it, and found himself both admiring and respecting the brave patience that made the most of opportunity, and the cheerful spirit that covered poverty with flowers. Amy did not know why he looked at her so kindly, nor why he filled up her book with his own name, and devoted himself to her for the rest of the evening in the most delightful manner; but the impulse that wrought this agreeable change was the result of one of the new impressions which both of them were unconsciously giving and receiving.\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT\r\nON THE SHELF\r\n\r\nIn France the young girls have a dull time of it till they are married, when \u2018Vive la liberte!\u2019 becomes their motto. In America, as everyone knows, girls early sign the declaration of independence, and enjoy their freedom with republican zest, but the young matrons usually abdicate with the first heir to the throne and go into a seclusion almost as close as a French nunnery, though by no means as quiet. Whether they like it or not, they are virtually put upon the shelf as soon as the wedding excitement is over, and most of them might exclaim, as did a very pretty woman the other day, \u201cI\u2019m as handsome as ever, but no one takes any notice of me because I\u2019m married.\u201d\r\n\r\nNot being a belle or even a fashionable lady, Meg did not experience this affliction till her babies were a year old, for in her little world primitive customs prevailed, and she found herself more admired and beloved than ever.\r\n\r\nAs she was a womanly little woman, the maternal instinct was very strong, and she was entirely absorbed in her children, to the utter exclusion of everything and everybody else. Day and night she brooded over them with tireless devotion and anxiety, leaving John to the tender mercies of the help, for an Irish lady now presided over the kitchen department. Being a domestic man, John decidedly missed the wifely attentions he had been accustomed to receive, but as he adored his babies, he cheerfully relinquished his comfort for a time, supposing with masculine ignorance that peace would soon be restored. But three months passed, and there was no return of repose. Meg looked worn and nervous, the babies absorbed every minute of her time, the house was neglected, and Kitty, the cook, who took life \u2018aisy\u2019, kept him on short commons. When he went out in the morning he was bewildered by small commissions for the captive mamma, if he came gaily in at night, eager to embrace his family, he was quenched by a \u201cHush! They are just asleep after worrying all day.\u201d If he proposed a little amusement at home, \u201cNo, it would disturb the babies.\u201d If he hinted at a lecture or a concert, he was answered with a reproachful look, and a decided\u2014\u201cLeave my children for pleasure, never!\u201d His sleep was broken by infant wails and visions of a phantom figure pacing noiselessly to and fro in the watches of the night. His meals were interrupted by the frequent flight of the presiding genius, who deserted him, half-helped, if a muffled chirp sounded from the nest above. And when he read his paper of an evening, Demi\u2019s colic got into the shipping list and Daisy\u2019s fall affected the price of stocks, for Mrs. Brooke was only interested in domestic news.\r\n\r\nThe poor man was very uncomfortable, for the children had bereft him of his wife, home was merely a nursery and the perpetual \u2018hushing\u2019 made him feel like a brutal intruder whenever he entered the sacred precincts of Babyland. He bore it very patiently for six months, and when no signs of amendment appeared, he did what other paternal exiles do\u2014tried to get a little comfort elsewhere. Scott had married and gone to housekeeping not far off, and John fell into the way of running over for an hour or two of an evening, when his own parlor was empty, and his own wife singing lullabies that seemed to have no end. Mrs. Scott was a lively, pretty girl, with nothing to do but be agreeable, and she performed her mission most successfully. The parlor was always bright and attractive, the chessboard ready, the piano in tune, plenty of gay gossip, and a nice little supper set forth in tempting style.\r\n\r\nJohn would have preferred his own fireside if it had not been so lonely, but as it was he gratefully took the next best thing and enjoyed his neighbor\u2019s society.\r\n\r\nMeg rather approved of the new arrangement at first, and found it a relief to know that John was having a good time instead of dozing in the parlor, or tramping about the house and waking the children. But by-and-by, when the teething worry was over and the idols went to sleep at proper hours, leaving Mamma time to rest, she began to miss John, and find her workbasket dull company, when he was not sitting opposite in his old dressing gown, comfortably scorching his slippers on the fender. She would not ask him to stay at home, but felt injured because he did not know that she wanted him without being told, entirely forgetting the many evenings he had waited for her in vain. She was nervous and worn out with watching and worry, and in that unreasonable frame of mind which the best of mothers occasionally experience when domestic cares oppress them. Want of exercise robs them of cheerfulness, and too much devotion to that idol of American women, the teapot, makes them feel as if they were all nerve and no muscle.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d she would say, looking in the glass, \u201cI\u2019m getting old and ugly. John doesn\u2019t find me interesting any longer, so he leaves his faded wife and goes to see his pretty neighbor, who has no incumbrances. Well, the babies love me, they don\u2019t care if I am thin and pale and haven\u2019t time to crimp my hair, they are my comfort, and some day John will see what I\u2019ve gladly sacrificed for them, won\u2019t he, my precious?\u201d\r\n\r\nTo which pathetic appeal Daisy would answer with a coo, or Demi with a crow, and Meg would put by her lamentations for a maternal revel, which soothed her solitude for the time being. But the pain increased as politics absorbed John, who was always running over to discuss interesting points with Scott, quite unconscious that Meg missed him. Not a word did she say, however, till her mother found her in tears one day, and insisted on knowing what the matter was, for Meg\u2019s drooping spirits had not escaped her observation.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wouldn\u2019t tell anyone except you, Mother, but I really do need advice, for if John goes on much longer I might as well be widowed,\u201d replied Mrs. Brooke, drying her tears on Daisy\u2019s bib with an injured air.\r\n\r\n\u201cGoes on how, my dear?\u201d asked her mother anxiously.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s away all day, and at night when I want to see him, he is continually going over to the Scotts\u2019. It isn\u2019t fair that I should have the hardest work, and never any amusement. Men are very selfish, even the best of them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo are women. Don\u2019t blame John till you see where you are wrong yourself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut it can\u2019t be right for him to neglect me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you neglect him?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, Mother, I thought you\u2019d take my part!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo I do, as far as sympathizing goes, but I think the fault is yours, Meg.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t see how.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLet me show you. Did John ever neglect you, as you call it, while you made it a point to give him your society of an evening, his only leisure time?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, but I can\u2019t do it now, with two babies to tend.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI think you could, dear, and I think you ought. May I speak quite freely, and will you remember that it\u2019s Mother who blames as well as Mother who sympathizes?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIndeed I will! Speak to me as if I were little Meg again. I often feel as if I needed teaching more than ever since these babies look to me for everything.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg drew her low chair beside her mother\u2019s, and with a little interruption in either lap, the two women rocked and talked lovingly together, feeling that the tie of motherhood made them more one than ever.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou have only made the mistake that most young wives make\u2014forgotten your duty to your husband in your love for your children. A very natural and forgivable mistake, Meg, but one that had better be remedied before you take to different ways, for children should draw you nearer than ever, not separate you, as if they were all yours, and John had nothing to do but support them. I\u2019ve seen it for some weeks, but have not spoken, feeling sure it would come right in time.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m afraid it won\u2019t. If I ask him to stay, he\u2019ll think I\u2019m jealous, and I wouldn\u2019t insult him by such an idea. He doesn\u2019t see that I want him, and I don\u2019t know how to tell him without words.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMake it so pleasant he won\u2019t want to go away. My dear, he\u2019s longing for his little home, but it isn\u2019t home without you, and you are always in the nursery.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOughtn\u2019t I to be there?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot all the time, too much confinement makes you nervous, and then you are unfitted for everything. Besides, you owe something to John as well as to the babies. Don\u2019t neglect husband for children, don\u2019t shut him out of the nursery, but teach him how to help in it. His place is there as well as yours, and the children need him. Let him feel that he has a part to do, and he will do it gladly and faithfully, and it will be better for you all.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou really think so, Mother?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI know it, Meg, for I\u2019ve tried it, and I seldom give advice unless I\u2019ve proved its practicability. When you and Jo were little, I went on just as you are, feeling as if I didn\u2019t do my duty unless I devoted myself wholly to you. Poor Father took to his books, after I had refused all offers of help, and left me to try my experiment alone. I struggled along as well as I could, but Jo was too much for me. I nearly spoiled her by indulgence. You were poorly, and I worried about you till I fell sick myself. Then Father came to the rescue, quietly managed everything, and made himself so helpful that I saw my mistake, and never have been able to get on without him since. That is the secret of our home happiness. He does not let business wean him from the little cares and duties that affect us all, and I try not to let domestic worries destroy my interest in his pursuits. Each do our part alone in many things, but at home we work together, always.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is so, Mother, and my great wish is to be to my husband and children what you have been to yours. Show me how, I\u2019ll do anything you say.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou always were my docile daughter. Well, dear, if I were you, I\u2019d let John have more to do with the management of Demi, for the boy needs training, and it\u2019s none too soon to begin. Then I\u2019d do what I have often proposed, let Hannah come and help you. She is a capital nurse, and you may trust the precious babies to her while you do more housework. You need the exercise, Hannah would enjoy the rest, and John would find his wife again. Go out more, keep cheerful as well as busy, for you are the sunshine-maker of the family, and if you get dismal there is no fair weather. Then I\u2019d try to take an interest in whatever John likes\u2014talk with him, let him read to you, exchange ideas, and help each other in that way. Don\u2019t shut yourself up in a bandbox because you are a woman, but understand what is going on, and educate yourself to take your part in the world\u2019s work, for it all affects you and yours.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJohn is so sensible, I\u2019m afraid he will think I\u2019m stupid if I ask questions about politics and things.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t believe he would. Love covers a multitude of sins, and of whom could you ask more freely than of him? Try it, and see if he doesn\u2019t find your society far more agreeable than Mrs. Scott\u2019s suppers.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI will. Poor John! I\u2019m afraid I have neglected him sadly, but I thought I was right, and he never said anything.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe tried not to be selfish, but he has felt rather forlorn, I fancy. This is just the time, Meg, when young married people are apt to grow apart, and the very time when they ought to be most together, for the first tenderness soon wears off, unless care is taken to preserve it. And no time is so beautiful and precious to parents as the first years of the little lives given to them to train. Don\u2019t let John be a stranger to the babies, for they will do more to keep him safe and happy in this world of trial and temptation than anything else, and through them you will learn to know and love one another as you should. Now, dear, good-by. Think over Mother\u2019s preachment, act upon it if it seems good, and God bless you all.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg did think it over, found it good, and acted upon it, though the first attempt was not made exactly as she planned to have it. Of course the children tyrannized over her, and ruled the house as soon as they found out that kicking and squalling brought them whatever they wanted. Mamma was an abject slave to their caprices, but Papa was not so easily subjugated, and occasionally afflicted his tender spouse by an attempt at paternal discipline with his obstreperous son. For Demi inherited a trifle of his sire\u2019s firmness of character, we won\u2019t call it obstinacy, and when he made up his little mind to have or to do anything, all the king\u2019s horses and all the king\u2019s men could not change that pertinacious little mind. Mamma thought the dear too young to be taught to conquer his prejudices, but Papa believed that it never was too soon to learn obedience. So Master Demi early discovered that when he undertook to \u2018wrastle\u2019 with \u2018Parpar\u2019, he always got the worst of it, yet like the Englishman, baby respected the man who conquered him, and loved the father whose grave \u201cNo, no,\u201d was more impressive than all Mamma\u2019s love pats.\r\n\r\nA few days after the talk with her mother, Meg resolved to try a social evening with John, so she ordered a nice supper, set the parlor in order, dressed herself prettily, and put the children to bed early, that nothing should interfere with her experiment. But unfortunately Demi\u2019s most unconquerable prejudice was against going to bed, and that night he decided to go on a rampage. So poor Meg sang and rocked, told stories and tried every sleep-prevoking wile she could devise, but all in vain, the big eyes wouldn\u2019t shut, and long after Daisy had gone to byelow, like the chubby little bunch of good nature she was, naughty Demi lay staring at the light, with the most discouragingly wide-awake expression of countenance.\r\n\r\n\u201cWill Demi lie still like a good boy, while Mamma runs down and gives poor Papa his tea?\u201d asked Meg, as the hall door softly closed, and the well-known step went tip-toeing into the dining room.\r\n\r\n\u201cMe has tea!\u201d said Demi, preparing to join in the revel.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, but I\u2019ll save you some little cakies for breakfast, if you\u2019ll go bye-bye like Daisy. Will you, lovey?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIss!\u201d and Demi shut his eyes tight, as if to catch sleep and hurry the desired day.\r\n\r\nTaking advantage of the propitious moment, Meg slipped away and ran down to greet her husband with a smiling face and the little blue bow in her hair which was his especial admiration. He saw it at once and said with pleased surprise, \u201cWhy, little mother, how gay we are tonight. Do you expect company?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOnly you, dear.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIs it a birthday, anniversary, or anything?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I\u2019m tired of being dowdy, so I dressed up as a change. You always make yourself nice for table, no matter how tired you are, so why shouldn\u2019t I when I have the time?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI do it out of respect for you, my dear,\u201d said old-fashioned John.\r\n\r\n\u201cDitto, ditto, Mr. Brooke,\u201d laughed Meg, looking young and pretty again, as she nodded to him over the teapot.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, it\u2019s altogether delightful, and like old times. This tastes right. I drink your health, dear.\u201d and John sipped his tea with an air of reposeful rapture, which was of very short duration however, for as he put down his cup, the door handle rattled mysteriously, and a little voice was heard, saying impatiently...\r\n\r\n\u201cOpy doy. Me\u2019s tummin!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s that naughty boy. I told him to go to sleep alone, and here he is, downstairs, getting his death a-cold pattering over that canvas,\u201d said Meg, answering the call.\r\n\r\n\u201cMornin\u2019 now,\u201d announced Demi in joyful tone as he entered, with his long nightgown gracefully festooned over his arm and every curl bobbing gayly as he pranced about the table, eyeing the \u2018cakies\u2019 with loving glances.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, it isn\u2019t morning yet. You must go to bed, and not trouble poor Mamma. Then you can have the little cake with sugar on it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMe loves Parpar,\u201d said the artful one, preparing to climb the paternal knee and revel in forbidden joys. But John shook his head, and said to Meg...\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you told him to stay up there, and go to sleep alone, make him do it, or he will never learn to mind you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, of course. Come, Demi,\u201d and Meg led her son away, feeling a strong desire to spank the little marplot who hopped beside her, laboring under the delusion that the bribe was to be administered as soon as they reached the nursery.\r\n\r\nNor was he disappointed, for that shortsighted woman actually gave him a lump of sugar, tucked him into his bed, and forbade any more promenades till morning.\r\n\r\n\u201cIss!\u201d said Demi the perjured, blissfully sucking his sugar, and regarding his first attempt as eminently successful.\r\n\r\nMeg returned to her place, and supper was progressing pleasantly, when the little ghost walked again, and exposed the maternal delinquencies by boldly demanding, \u201cMore sudar, Marmar.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow this won\u2019t do,\u201d said John, hardening his heart against the engaging little sinner. \u201cWe shall never know any peace till that child learns to go to bed properly. You have made a slave of yourself long enough. Give him one lesson, and then there will be an end of it. Put him in his bed and leave him, Meg.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe won\u2019t stay there, he never does unless I sit by him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll manage him. Demi, go upstairs, and get into your bed, as Mamma bids you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cS\u2019ant!\u201d replied the young rebel, helping himself to the coveted \u2018cakie\u2019, and beginning to eat the same with calm audacity.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou must never say that to Papa. I shall carry you if you don\u2019t go yourself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGo \u2019way, me don\u2019t love Parpar.\u201d and Demi retired to his mother\u2019s skirts for protection.\r\n\r\nBut even that refuge proved unavailing, for he was delivered over to the enemy, with a \u201cBe gentle with him, John,\u201d which struck the culprit with dismay, for when Mamma deserted him, then the judgment day was at hand. Bereft of his cake, defrauded of his frolic, and borne away by a strong hand to that detested bed, poor Demi could not restrain his wrath, but openly defied Papa, and kicked and screamed lustily all the way upstairs. The minute he was put into bed on one side, he rolled out on the other, and made for the door, only to be ignominiously caught up by the tail of his little toga and put back again, which lively performance was kept up till the young man\u2019s strength gave out, when he devoted himself to roaring at the top of his voice. This vocal exercise usually conquered Meg, but John sat as unmoved as the post which is popularly believed to be deaf. No coaxing, no sugar, no lullaby, no story, even the light was put out and only the red glow of the fire enlivened the \u2018big dark\u2019 which Demi regarded with curiosity rather than fear. This new order of things disgusted him, and he howled dismally for \u2018Marmar\u2019, as his angry passions subsided, and recollections of his tender bondwoman returned to the captive autocrat. The plaintive wail which succeeded the passionate roar went to Meg\u2019s heart, and she ran up to say beseechingly...\r\n\r\n\u201cLet me stay with him, he\u2019ll be good now, John.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, my dear. I\u2019ve told him he must go to sleep, as you bid him, and he must, if I stay here all night.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut he\u2019ll cry himself sick,\u201d pleaded Meg, reproaching herself for deserting her boy.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, he won\u2019t, he\u2019s so tired he will soon drop off and then the matter is settled, for he will understand that he has got to mind. Don\u2019t interfere, I\u2019ll manage him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s my child, and I can\u2019t have his spirit broken by harshness.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s my child, and I won\u2019t have his temper spoiled by indulgence. Go down, my dear, and leave the boy to me.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen John spoke in that masterful tone, Meg always obeyed, and never regretted her docility.\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease let me kiss him once, John?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCertainly. Demi, say good night to Mamma, and let her go and rest, for she is very tired with taking care of you all day.\u201d\r\n\r\nMeg always insisted upon it that the kiss won the victory, for after it was given, Demi sobbed more quietly, and lay quite still at the bottom of the bed, whither he had wriggled in his anguish of mind.\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor little man, he\u2019s worn out with sleep and crying. I\u2019ll cover him up, and then go and set Meg\u2019s heart at rest,\u201d thought John, creeping to the bedside, hoping to find his rebellious heir asleep.\r\n\r\nBut he wasn\u2019t, for the moment his father peeped at him, Demi\u2019s eyes opened, his little chin began to quiver, and he put up his arms, saying with a penitent hiccough, \u201cMe\u2019s dood, now.\u201d\r\n\r\nSitting on the stairs outside Meg wondered at the long silence which followed the uproar, and after imagining all sorts of impossible accidents, she slipped into the room to set her fears at rest. Demi lay fast asleep, not in his usual spreadeagle attitude, but in a subdued bunch, cuddled close in the circle of his father\u2019s arm and holding his father\u2019s finger, as if he felt that justice was tempered with mercy, and had gone to sleep a sadder and wiser baby. So held, John had waited with a womanly patience till the little hand relaxed its hold, and while waiting had fallen asleep, more tired by that tussle with his son than with his whole day\u2019s work.\r\n\r\nAs Meg stood watching the two faces on the pillow, she smiled to herself, and then slipped away again, saying in a satisfied tone, \u201cI never need fear that John will be too harsh with my babies. He does know how to manage them, and will be a great help, for Demi is getting too much for me.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen John came down at last, expecting to find a pensive or reproachful wife, he was agreeably surprised to find Meg placidly trimming a bonnet, and to be greeted with the request to read something about the election, if he was not too tired. John saw in a minute that a revolution of some kind was going on, but wisely asked no questions, knowing that Meg was such a transparent little person, she couldn\u2019t keep a secret to save her life, and therefore the clue would soon appear. He read a long debate with the most amiable readiness and then explained it in his most lucid manner, while Meg tried to look deeply interested, to ask intelligent questions, and keep her thoughts from wandering from the state of the nation to the state of her bonnet. In her secret soul, however, she decided that politics were as bad as mathematics, and that the mission of politicians seemed to be calling each other names, but she kept these feminine ideas to herself, and when John paused, shook her head and said with what she thought diplomatic ambiguity, \u201cWell, I really don\u2019t see what we are coming to.\u201d\r\n\r\nJohn laughed, and watched her for a minute, as she poised a pretty little preparation of lace and flowers on her hand, and regarded it with the genuine interest which his harangue had failed to waken.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe is trying to like politics for my sake, so I\u2019ll try and like millinery for hers, that\u2019s only fair,\u201d thought John the Just, adding aloud, \u201cThat\u2019s very pretty. Is it what you call a breakfast cap?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy dear man, it\u2019s a bonnet! My very best go-to-concert-and-theater bonnet.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI beg your pardon, it was so small, I naturally mistook it for one of the flyaway things you sometimes wear. How do you keep it on?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThese bits of lace are fastened under the chin with a rosebud, so,\u201d and Meg illustrated by putting on the bonnet and regarding him with an air of calm satisfaction that was irresistible.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a love of a bonnet, but I prefer the face inside, for it looks young and happy again,\u201d and John kissed the smiling face, to the great detriment of the rosebud under the chin.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad you like it, for I want you to take me to one of the new concerts some night. I really need some music to put me in tune. Will you, please?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course I will, with all my heart, or anywhere else you like. You have been shut up so long, it will do you no end of good, and I shall enjoy it, of all things. What put it into your head, little mother?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I had a talk with Marmee the other day, and told her how nervous and cross and out of sorts I felt, and she said I needed change and less care, so Hannah is to help me with the children, and I\u2019m to see to things about the house more, and now and then have a little fun, just to keep me from getting to be a fidgety, broken-down old woman before my time. It\u2019s only an experiment, John, and I want to try it for your sake as much as for mine, because I\u2019ve neglected you shamefully lately, and I\u2019m going to make home what it used to be, if I can. You don\u2019t object, I hope?\u201d\r\n\r\nNever mind what John said, or what a very narrow escape the little bonnet had from utter ruin. All that we have any business to know is that John did not appear to object, judging from the changes which gradually took place in the house and its inmates. It was not all Paradise by any means, but everyone was better for the division of labor system. The children throve under the paternal rule, for accurate, steadfast John brought order and obedience into Babydom, while Meg recovered her spirits and composed her nerves by plenty of wholesome exercise, a little pleasure, and much confidential conversation with her sensible husband. Home grew homelike again, and John had no wish to leave it, unless he took Meg with him. The Scotts came to the Brookes\u2019 now, and everyone found the little house a cheerful place, full of happiness, content, and family love. Even Sallie Moffatt liked to go there. \u201cIt is always so quiet and pleasant here, it does me good, Meg,\u201d she used to say, looking about her with wistful eyes, as if trying to discover the charm, that she might use it in her great house, full of splendid loneliness, for there were no riotous, sunny-faced babies there, and Ned lived in a world of his own, where there was no place for her.\r\n\r\nThis household happiness did not come all at once, but John and Meg had found the key to it, and each year of married life taught them how to use it, unlocking the treasuries of real home love and mutual helpfulness, which the poorest may possess, and the richest cannot buy. This is the sort of shelf on which young wives and mothers may consent to be laid, safe from the restless fret and fever of the world, finding loyal lovers in the little sons and daughters who cling to them, undaunted by sorrow, poverty, or age, walking side by side, through fair and stormy weather, with a faithful friend, who is, in the true sense of the good old Saxon word, the \u2018house-band\u2019, and learning, as Meg learned, that a woman\u2019s happiest kingdom is home, her highest honor the art of ruling it not as a queen, but as a wise wife and mother.\r\nCHAPTER THIRTY-NINE\r\nLAZY LAURENCE\r\n\r\nLaurie went to Nice intending to stay a week, and remained a month. He was tired of wandering about alone, and Amy\u2019s familiar presence seemed to give a homelike charm to the foreign scenes in which she bore a part. He rather missed the \u2018petting\u2019 he used to receive, and enjoyed a taste of it again, for no attentions, however flattering, from strangers, were half so pleasant as the sisterly adoration of the girls at home. Amy never would pet him like the others, but she was very glad to see him now, and quite clung to him, feeling that he was the representative of the dear family for whom she longed more than she would confess. They naturally took comfort in each other\u2019s society and were much together, riding, walking, dancing, or dawdling, for at Nice no one can be very industrious during the gay season. But, while apparently amusing themselves in the most careless fashion, they were half-consciously making discoveries and forming opinions about each other. Amy rose daily in the estimation of her friend, but he sank in hers, and each felt the truth before a word was spoken. Amy tried to please, and succeeded, for she was grateful for the many pleasures he gave her, and repaid him with the little services to which womanly women know how to lend an indescribable charm. Laurie made no effort of any kind, but just let himself drift along as comfortably as possible, trying to forget, and feeling that all women owed him a kind word because one had been cold to him. It cost him no effort to be generous, and he would have given Amy all the trinkets in Nice if she would have taken them, but at the same time he felt that he could not change the opinion she was forming of him, and he rather dreaded the keen blue eyes that seemed to watch him with such half-sorrowful, half-scornful surprise.\r\n\r\n\u201cAll the rest have gone to Monaco for the day. I preferred to stay at home and write letters. They are done now, and I am going to Valrosa to sketch, will you come?\u201d said Amy, as she joined Laurie one lovely day when he lounged in as usual, about noon.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, yes, but isn\u2019t it rather warm for such a long walk?\u201d he answered slowly, for the shaded salon looked inviting after the glare without.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m going to have the little carriage, and Baptiste can drive, so you\u2019ll have nothing to do but hold your umbrella, and keep your gloves nice,\u201d returned Amy, with a sarcastic glance at the immaculate kids, which were a weak point with Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cThen I\u2019ll go with pleasure.\u201d and he put out his hand for her sketchbook. But she tucked it under her arm with a sharp...\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t trouble yourself. It\u2019s no exertion to me, but you don\u2019t look equal to it.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie lifted his eyebrows and followed at a leisurely pace as she ran downstairs, but when they got into the carriage he took the reins himself, and left little Baptiste nothing to do but fold his arms and fall asleep on his perch.\r\n\r\nThe two never quarreled. Amy was too well-bred, and just now Laurie was too lazy, so in a minute he peeped under her hatbrim with an inquiring air. She answered him with a smile, and they went on together in the most amicable manner.\r\n\r\nIt was a lovely drive, along winding roads rich in the picturesque scenes that delight beauty-loving eyes. Here an ancient monastery, whence the solemn chanting of the monks came down to them. There a bare-legged shepherd, in wooden shoes, pointed hat, and rough jacket over one shoulder, sat piping on a stone while his goats skipped among the rocks or lay at his feet. Meek, mouse-colored donkeys, laden with panniers of freshly cut grass passed by, with a pretty girl in a capaline sitting between the green piles, or an old woman spinning with a distaff as she went. Brown, soft-eyed children ran out from the quaint stone hovels to offer nosegays, or bunches of oranges still on the bough. Gnarled olive trees covered the hills with their dusky foliage, fruit hung golden in the orchard, and great scarlet anemones fringed the roadside, while beyond green slopes and craggy heights, the Maritime Alps rose sharp and white against the blue Italian sky.\r\n\r\nValrosa well deserved its name, for in that climate of perpetual summer roses blossomed everywhere. They overhung the archway, thrust themselves between the bars of the great gate with a sweet welcome to passers-by, and lined the avenue, winding through lemon trees and feathery palms up to the villa on the hill. Every shadowy nook, where seats invited one to stop and rest, was a mass of bloom, every cool grotto had its marble nymph smiling from a veil of flowers and every fountain reflected crimson, white, or pale pink roses, leaning down to smile at their own beauty. Roses covered the walls of the house, draped the cornices, climbed the pillars, and ran riot over the balustrade of the wide terrace, whence one looked down on the sunny Mediterranean, and the white-walled city on its shore.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis is a regular honeymoon paradise, isn\u2019t it? Did you ever see such roses?\u201d asked Amy, pausing on the terrace to enjoy the view, and a luxurious whiff of perfume that came wandering by.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, nor felt such thorns,\u201d returned Laurie, with his thumb in his mouth, after a vain attempt to capture a solitary scarlet flower that grew just beyond his reach.\r\n\r\n\u201cTry lower down, and pick those that have no thorns,\u201d said Amy, gathering three of the tiny cream-colored ones that starred the wall behind her. She put them in his buttonhole as a peace offering, and he stood a minute looking down at them with a curious expression, for in the Italian part of his nature there was a touch of superstition, and he was just then in that state of half-sweet, half-bitter melancholy, when imaginative young men find significance in trifles and food for romance everywhere. He had thought of Jo in reaching after the thorny red rose, for vivid flowers became her, and she had often worn ones like that from the greenhouse at home. The pale roses Amy gave him were the sort that the Italians lay in dead hands, never in bridal wreaths, and for a moment he wondered if the omen was for Jo or for himself, but the next instant his American common sense got the better of sentimentality, and he laughed a heartier laugh than Amy had heard since he came.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s good advice, you\u2019d better take it and save your fingers,\u201d she said, thinking her speech amused him.\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you, I will,\u201d he answered in jest, and a few months later he did it in earnest.\r\n\r\n\u201cLaurie, when are you going to your grandfather?\u201d she asked presently, as she settled herself on a rustic seat.\r\n\r\n\u201cVery soon.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou have said that a dozen times within the last three weeks.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI dare say, short answers save trouble.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe expects you, and you really ought to go.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHospitable creature! I know it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen why don\u2019t you do it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNatural depravity, I suppose.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNatural indolence, you mean. It\u2019s really dreadful!\u201d and Amy looked severe.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot so bad as it seems, for I should only plague him if I went, so I might as well stay and plague you a little longer, you can bear it better, in fact I think it agrees with you excellently,\u201d and Laurie composed himself for a lounge on the broad ledge of the balustrade.\r\n\r\nAmy shook her head and opened her sketchbook with an air of resignation, but she had made up her mind to lecture \u2018that boy\u2019 and in a minute she began again.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat are you doing just now?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWatching lizards.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, no. I mean what do you intend and wish to do?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSmoke a cigarette, if you\u2019ll allow me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow provoking you are! I don\u2019t approve of cigars and I will only allow it on condition that you let me put you into my sketch. I need a figure.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWith all the pleasure in life. How will you have me, full length or three-quarters, on my head or my heels? I should respectfully suggest a recumbent posture, then put yourself in also and call it \u2018Dolce far niente\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStay as you are, and go to sleep if you like. I intend to work hard,\u201d said Amy in her most energetic tone.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat delightful enthusiasm!\u201d and he leaned against a tall urn with an air of entire satisfaction.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat would Jo say if she saw you now?\u201d asked Amy impatiently, hoping to stir him up by the mention of her still more energetic sister\u2019s name.\r\n\r\n\u201cAs usual, \u2018Go away, Teddy. I\u2019m busy!\u2019\u201d He laughed as he spoke, but the laugh was not natural, and a shade passed over his face, for the utterance of the familiar name touched the wound that was not healed yet. Both tone and shadow struck Amy, for she had seen and heard them before, and now she looked up in time to catch a new expression on Laurie\u2019s face\u2014a hard bitter look, full of pain, dissatisfaction, and regret. It was gone before she could study it and the listless expression back again. She watched him for a moment with artistic pleasure, thinking how like an Italian he looked, as he lay basking in the sun with uncovered head and eyes full of southern dreaminess, for he seemed to have forgotten her and fallen into a reverie.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou look like the effigy of a young knight asleep on his tomb,\u201d she said, carefully tracing the well-cut profile defined against the dark stone.\r\n\r\n\u201cWish I was!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s a foolish wish, unless you have spoiled your life. You are so changed, I sometimes think\u2014\u201d there Amy stopped, with a half-timid, half-wistful look, more significant than her unfinished speech.\r\n\r\nLaurie saw and understood the affectionate anxiety which she hesitated to express, and looking straight into her eyes, said, just as he used to say it to her mother, \u201cIt\u2019s all right, ma\u2019am.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat satisfied her and set at rest the doubts that had begun to worry her lately. It also touched her, and she showed that it did, by the cordial tone in which she said...\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad of that! I didn\u2019t think you\u2019d been a very bad boy, but I fancied you might have wasted money at that wicked Baden-Baden, lost your heart to some charming Frenchwoman with a husband, or got into some of the scrapes that young men seem to consider a necessary part of a foreign tour. Don\u2019t stay out there in the sun, come and lie on the grass here and \u2018let us be friendly\u2019, as Jo used to say when we got in the sofa corner and told secrets.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie obediently threw himself down on the turf, and began to amuse himself by sticking daisies into the ribbons of Amy\u2019s hat, that lay there.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m all ready for the secrets.\u201d and he glanced up with a decided expression of interest in his eyes.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve none to tell. You may begin.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHaven\u2019t one to bless myself with. I thought perhaps you\u2019d had some news from home..\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou have heard all that has come lately. Don\u2019t you hear often? I fancied Jo would send you volumes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShe\u2019s very busy. I\u2019m roving about so, it\u2019s impossible to be regular, you know. When do you begin your great work of art, Raphaella?\u201d he asked, changing the subject abruptly after another pause, in which he had been wondering if Amy knew his secret and wanted to talk about it.\r\n\r\n\u201cNever,\u201d she answered, with a despondent but decided air. \u201cRome took all the vanity out of me, for after seeing the wonders there, I felt too insignificant to live and gave up all my foolish hopes in despair.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy should you, with so much energy and talent?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s just why, because talent isn\u2019t genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing. I won\u2019t be a common-place dauber, so I don\u2019t intend to try any more.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd what are you going to do with yourself now, if I may ask?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPolish up my other talents, and be an ornament to society, if I get the chance.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt was a characteristic speech, and sounded daring, but audacity becomes young people, and Amy\u2019s ambition had a good foundation. Laurie smiled, but he liked the spirit with which she took up a new purpose when a long-cherished one died, and spent no time lamenting.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood! And here is where Fred Vaughn comes in, I fancy.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy preserved a discreet silence, but there was a conscious look in her downcast face that made Laurie sit up and say gravely, \u201cNow I\u2019m going to play brother, and ask questions. May I?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t promise to answer.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYour face will, if your tongue won\u2019t. You aren\u2019t woman of the world enough yet to hide your feelings, my dear. I heard rumors about Fred and you last year, and it\u2019s my private opinion that if he had not been called home so suddenly and detained so long, something would have come of it, hey?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s not for me to say,\u201d was Amy\u2019s grim reply, but her lips would smile, and there was a traitorous sparkle of the eye which betrayed that she knew her power and enjoyed the knowledge.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou are not engaged, I hope?\u201d and Laurie looked very elder-brotherly and grave all of a sudden.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut you will be, if he comes back and goes properly down on his knees, won\u2019t you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cVery likely.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen you are fond of old Fred?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI could be, if I tried.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut you don\u2019t intend to try till the proper moment? Bless my soul, what unearthly prudence! He\u2019s a good fellow, Amy, but not the man I fancied you\u2019d like.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe is rich, a gentleman, and has delightful manners,\u201d began Amy, trying to be quite cool and dignified, but feeling a little ashamed of herself, in spite of the sincerity of her intentions.\r\n\r\n\u201cI understand. Queens of society can\u2019t get on without money, so you mean to make a good match, and start in that way? Quite right and proper, as the world goes, but it sounds odd from the lips of one of your mother\u2019s girls.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTrue, nevertheless.\u201d\r\n\r\nA short speech, but the quiet decision with which it was uttered contrasted curiously with the young speaker. Laurie felt this instinctively and laid himself down again, with a sense of disappointment which he could not explain. His look and silence, as well as a certain inward self-disapproval, ruffled Amy, and made her resolve to deliver her lecture without delay.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish you\u2019d do me the favor to rouse yourself a little,\u201d she said sharply.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo it for me, there\u2019s a dear girl.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI could, if I tried.\u201d and she looked as if she would like doing it in the most summary style.\r\n\r\n\u201cTry, then. I give you leave,\u201d returned Laurie, who enjoyed having someone to tease, after his long abstinence from his favorite pastime.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019d be angry in five minutes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m never angry with you. It takes two flints to make a fire. You are as cool and soft as snow.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t know what I can do. Snow produces a glow and a tingle, if applied rightly. Your indifference is half affectation, and a good stirring up would prove it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStir away, it won\u2019t hurt me and it may amuse you, as the big man said when his little wife beat him. Regard me in the light of a husband or a carpet, and beat till you are tired, if that sort of exercise agrees with you.\u201d\r\n\r\nBeing decidedly nettled herself, and longing to see him shake off the apathy that so altered him, Amy sharpened both tongue and pencil, and began.\r\n\r\n\u201cFlo and I have got a new name for you. It\u2019s Lazy Laurence. How do you like it?\u201d\r\n\r\nShe thought it would annoy him, but he only folded his arms under his head, with an imperturbable, \u201cThat\u2019s not bad. Thank you, ladies.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you want to know what I honestly think of you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPining to be told.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I despise you.\u201d\r\n\r\nIf she had even said \u2018I hate you\u2019 in a petulant or coquettish tone, he would have laughed and rather liked it, but the grave, almost sad, accent in her voice made him open his eyes, and ask quickly...\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, if you please?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause, with every chance for being good, useful, and happy, you are faulty, lazy, and miserable.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStrong language, mademoiselle.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you like it, I\u2019ll go on.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPray do, it\u2019s quite interesting.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought you\u2019d find it so. Selfish people always like to talk about themselves.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAm I selfish?\u201d the question slipped out involuntarily and in a tone of surprise, for the one virtue on which he prided himself was generosity.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, very selfish,\u201d continued Amy, in a calm, cool voice, twice as effective just then as an angry one. \u201cI\u2019ll show you how, for I\u2019ve studied you while we were frolicking, and I\u2019m not at all satisfied with you. Here you have been abroad nearly six months, and done nothing but waste time and money and disappoint your friends.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIsn\u2019t a fellow to have any pleasure after a four-year grind?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t look as if you\u2019d had much. At any rate, you are none the better for it, as far as I can see. I said when we first met that you had improved. Now I take it all back, for I don\u2019t think you half so nice as when I left you at home. You have grown abominably lazy, you like gossip, and waste time on frivolous things, you are contented to be petted and admired by silly people, instead of being loved and respected by wise ones. With money, talent, position, health, and beauty, ah you like that old Vanity! But it\u2019s the truth, so I can\u2019t help saying it, with all these splendid things to use and enjoy, you can find nothing to do but dawdle, and instead of being the man you ought to be, you are only...\u201d there she stopped, with a look that had both pain and pity in it.\r\n\r\n\u201cSaint Laurence on a gridiron,\u201d added Laurie, blandly finishing the sentence. But the lecture began to take effect, for there was a wide-awake sparkle in his eyes now and a half-angry, half-injured expression replaced the former indifference.\r\n\r\n\u201cI supposed you\u2019d take it so. You men tell us we are angels, and say we can make you what we will, but the instant we honestly try to do you good, you laugh at us and won\u2019t listen, which proves how much your flattery is worth.\u201d Amy spoke bitterly, and turned her back on the exasperating martyr at her feet.\r\n\r\nIn a minute a hand came down over the page, so that she could not draw, and Laurie\u2019s voice said, with a droll imitation of a penitent child, \u201cI will be good, oh, I will be good!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut Amy did not laugh, for she was in earnest, and tapping on the outspread hand with her pencil, said soberly, \u201cAren\u2019t you ashamed of a hand like that? It\u2019s as soft and white as a woman\u2019s, and looks as if it never did anything but wear Jouvin\u2019s best gloves and pick flowers for ladies. You are not a dandy, thank Heaven, so I\u2019m glad to see there are no diamonds or big seal rings on it, only the little old one Jo gave you so long ago. Dear soul, I wish she was here to help me!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo do I!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe hand vanished as suddenly as it came, and there was energy enough in the echo of her wish to suit even Amy. She glanced down at him with a new thought in her mind, but he was lying with his hat half over his face, as if for shade, and his mustache hid his mouth. She only saw his chest rise and fall, with a long breath that might have been a sigh, and the hand that wore the ring nestled down into the grass, as if to hide something too precious or too tender to be spoken of. All in a minute various hints and trifles assumed shape and significance in Amy\u2019s mind, and told her what her sister never had confided to her. She remembered that Laurie never spoke voluntarily of Jo, she recalled the shadow on his face just now, the change in his character, and the wearing of the little old ring which was no ornament to a handsome hand. Girls are quick to read such signs and feel their eloquence. Amy had fancied that perhaps a love trouble was at the bottom of the alteration, and now she was sure of it. Her keen eyes filled, and when she spoke again, it was in a voice that could be beautifully soft and kind when she chose to make it so.\r\n\r\n\u201cI know I have no right to talk so to you, Laurie, and if you weren\u2019t the sweetest-tempered fellow in the world, you\u2019d be very angry with me. But we are all so fond and proud of you, I couldn\u2019t bear to think they should be disappointed in you at home as I have been, though, perhaps they would understand the change better than I do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI think they would,\u201d came from under the hat, in a grim tone, quite as touching as a broken one.\r\n\r\n\u201cThey ought to have told me, and not let me go blundering and scolding, when I should have been more kind and patient than ever. I never did like that Miss Randal and now I hate her!\u201d said artful Amy, wishing to be sure of her facts this time.\r\n\r\n\u201cHang Miss Randal!\u201d and Laurie knocked the hat off his face with a look that left no doubt of his sentiments toward that young lady.\r\n\r\n\u201cI beg pardon, I thought...\u201d and there she paused diplomatically.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, you didn\u2019t, you knew perfectly well I never cared for anyone but Jo,\u201d Laurie said that in his old, impetuous tone, and turned his face away as he spoke.\r\n\r\n\u201cI did think so, but as they never said anything about it, and you came away, I supposed I was mistaken. And Jo wouldn\u2019t be kind to you? Why, I was sure she loved you dearly.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShe was kind, but not in the right way, and it\u2019s lucky for her she didn\u2019t love me, if I\u2019m the good-for-nothing fellow you think me. It\u2019s her fault though, and you may tell her so.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe hard, bitter look came back again as he said that, and it troubled Amy, for she did not know what balm to apply.\r\n\r\n\u201cI was wrong, I didn\u2019t know. I\u2019m very sorry I was so cross, but I can\u2019t help wishing you\u2019d bear it better, Teddy, dear.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t, that\u2019s her name for me!\u201d and Laurie put up his hand with a quick gesture to stop the words spoken in Jo\u2019s half-kind, half-reproachful tone. \u201cWait till you\u2019ve tried it yourself,\u201d he added in a low voice, as he pulled up the grass by the handful.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019d take it manfully, and be respected if I couldn\u2019t be loved,\u201d said Amy, with the decision of one who knew nothing about it.\r\n\r\nNow, Laurie flattered himself that he had borne it remarkably well, making no moan, asking no sympathy, and taking his trouble away to live it down alone. Amy\u2019s lecture put the matter in a new light, and for the first time it did look weak and selfish to lose heart at the first failure, and shut himself up in moody indifference. He felt as if suddenly shaken out of a pensive dream and found it impossible to go to sleep again. Presently he sat up and asked slowly, \u201cDo you think Jo would despise me as you do?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, if she saw you now. She hates lazy people. Why don\u2019t you do something splendid, and make her love you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI did my best, but it was no use.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGraduating well, you mean? That was no more than you ought to have done, for your grandfather\u2019s sake. It would have been shameful to fail after spending so much time and money, when everyone knew that you could do well.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI did fail, say what you will, for Jo wouldn\u2019t love me,\u201d began Laurie, leaning his head on his hand in a despondent attitude.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, you didn\u2019t, and you\u2019ll say so in the end, for it did you good, and proved that you could do something if you tried. If you\u2019d only set about another task of some sort, you\u2019d soon be your hearty, happy self again, and forget your trouble.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s impossible.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTry it and see. You needn\u2019t shrug your shoulders, and think, \u2018Much she knows about such things\u2019. I don\u2019t pretend to be wise, but I am observing, and I see a great deal more than you\u2019d imagine. I\u2019m interested in other people\u2019s experiences and inconsistencies, and though I can\u2019t explain, I remember and use them for my own benefit. Love Jo all your days, if you choose, but don\u2019t let it spoil you, for it\u2019s wicked to throw away so many good gifts because you can\u2019t have the one you want. There, I won\u2019t lecture any more, for I know you\u2019ll wake up and be a man in spite of that hardhearted girl.\u201d\r\n\r\nNeither spoke for several minutes. Laurie sat turning the little ring on his finger, and Amy put the last touches to the hasty sketch she had been working at while she talked. Presently she put it on his knee, merely saying, \u201cHow do you like that?\u201d\r\n\r\nHe looked and then he smiled, as he could not well help doing, for it was capitally done, the long, lazy figure on the grass, with listless face, half-shut eyes, and one hand holding a cigar, from which came the little wreath of smoke that encircled the dreamer\u2019s head.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow well you draw!\u201d he said, with a genuine surprise and pleasure at her skill, adding, with a half-laugh, \u201cYes, that\u2019s me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAs you are. This is as you were.\u201d and Amy laid another sketch beside the one he held.\r\n\r\nIt was not nearly so well done, but there was a life and spirit in it which atoned for many faults, and it recalled the past so vividly that a sudden change swept over the young man\u2019s face as he looked. Only a rough sketch of Laurie taming a horse. Hat and coat were off, and every line of the active figure, resolute face, and commanding attitude was full of energy and meaning. The handsome brute, just subdued, stood arching his neck under the tightly drawn rein, with one foot impatiently pawing the ground, and ears pricked up as if listening for the voice that had mastered him. In the ruffled mane, the rider\u2019s breezy hair and erect attitude, there was a suggestion of suddenly arrested motion, of strength, courage, and youthful buoyancy that contrasted sharply with the supine grace of the \u2018Dolce far Niente\u2019 sketch. Laurie said nothing but as his eye went from one to the other, Amy saw him flush up and fold his lips together as if he read and accepted the little lesson she had given him. That satisfied her, and without waiting for him to speak, she said, in her sprightly way...\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t you remember the day you played Rarey with Puck, and we all looked on? Meg and Beth were frightened, but Jo clapped and pranced, and I sat on the fence and drew you. I found that sketch in my portfolio the other day, touched it up, and kept it to show you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMuch obliged. You\u2019ve improved immensely since then, and I congratulate you. May I venture to suggest in \u2018a honeymoon paradise\u2019 that five o\u2019clock is the dinner hour at your hotel?\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie rose as he spoke, returned the pictures with a smile and a bow and looked at his watch, as if to remind her that even moral lectures should have an end. He tried to resume his former easy, indifferent air, but it was an affectation now, for the rousing had been more effacious than he would confess. Amy felt the shade of coldness in his manner, and said to herself...\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, I\u2019ve offended him. Well, if it does him good, I\u2019m glad, if it makes him hate me, I\u2019m sorry, but it\u2019s true, and I can\u2019t take back a word of it.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey laughed and chatted all the way home, and little Baptiste, up behind, thought that monsieur and madamoiselle were in charming spirits. But both felt ill at ease. The friendly frankness was disturbed, the sunshine had a shadow over it, and despite their apparent gaiety, there was a secret discontent in the heart of each.\r\n\r\n\u201cShall we see you this evening, mon frere?\u201d asked Amy, as they parted at her aunt\u2019s door.\r\n\r\n\u201cUnfortunately I have an engagement. Au revoir, madamoiselle,\u201d and Laurie bent as if to kiss her hand, in the foreign fashion, which became him better than many men. Something in his face made Amy say quickly and warmly...\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, be yourself with me, Laurie, and part in the good old way. I\u2019d rather have a hearty English handshake than all the sentimental salutations in France.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGoodbye, dear,\u201d and with these words, uttered in the tone she liked, Laurie left her, after a handshake almost painful in its heartiness.\r\n\r\nNext morning, instead of the usual call, Amy received a note which made her smile at the beginning and sigh at the end.\r\n\r\nMy Dear Mentor, Please make my adieux to your aunt, and exult within yourself, for \u2018Lazy Laurence\u2019 has gone to his grandpa, like the best of boys. A pleasant winter to you, and may the gods grant you a blissful honeymoon at Valrosa! I think Fred would be benefited by a rouser. Tell him so, with my congratulations.\r\n\r\nYours gratefully, Telemachus\r\n\r\n\u201cGood boy! I\u2019m glad he\u2019s gone,\u201d said Amy, with an approving smile. The next minute her face fell as she glanced about the empty room, adding, with an involuntary sigh, \u201cYes, I am glad, but how I shall miss him.\u201d\r\nCHAPTER FORTY\r\nTHE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW\r\n\r\nWhen the first bitterness was over, the family accepted the inevitable, and tried to bear it cheerfully, helping one another by the increased affection which comes to bind households tenderly together in times of trouble. They put away their grief, and each did his or her part toward making that last year a happy one.\r\n\r\nThe pleasantest room in the house was set apart for Beth, and in it was gathered everything that she most loved, flowers, pictures, her piano, the little worktable, and the beloved pussies. Father\u2019s best books found their way there, Mother\u2019s easy chair, Jo\u2019s desk, Amy\u2019s finest sketches, and every day Meg brought her babies on a loving pilgrimage, to make sunshine for Aunty Beth. John quietly set apart a little sum, that he might enjoy the pleasure of keeping the invalid supplied with the fruit she loved and longed for. Old Hannah never wearied of concocting dainty dishes to tempt a capricious appetite, dropping tears as she worked, and from across the sea came little gifts and cheerful letters, seeming to bring breaths of warmth and fragrance from lands that know no winter.\r\n\r\nHere, cherished like a household saint in its shrine, sat Beth, tranquil and busy as ever, for nothing could change the sweet, unselfish nature, and even while preparing to leave life, she tried to make it happier for those who should remain behind. The feeble fingers were never idle, and one of her pleasures was to make little things for the school children daily passing to and fro, to drop a pair of mittens from her window for a pair of purple hands, a needlebook for some small mother of many dolls, penwipers for young penmen toiling through forests of pothooks, scrapbooks for picture-loving eyes, and all manner of pleasant devices, till the reluctant climbers of the ladder of learning found their way strewn with flowers, as it were, and came to regard the gentle giver as a sort of fairy godmother, who sat above there, and showered down gifts miraculously suited to their tastes and needs. If Beth had wanted any reward, she found it in the bright little faces always turned up to her window, with nods and smiles, and the droll little letters which came to her, full of blots and gratitude.\r\n\r\nThe first few months were very happy ones, and Beth often used to look round, and say \u201cHow beautiful this is!\u201d as they all sat together in her sunny room, the babies kicking and crowing on the floor, mother and sisters working near, and father reading, in his pleasant voice, from the wise old books which seemed rich in good and comfortable words, as applicable now as when written centuries ago, a little chapel, where a paternal priest taught his flock the hard lessons all must learn, trying to show them that hope can comfort love, and faith make resignation possible. Simple sermons, that went straight to the souls of those who listened, for the father\u2019s heart was in the minister\u2019s religion, and the frequent falter in the voice gave a double eloquence to the words he spoke or read.\r\n\r\nIt was well for all that this peaceful time was given them as preparation for the sad hours to come, for by-and-by, Beth said the needle was \u2018so heavy\u2019, and put it down forever. Talking wearied her, faces troubled her, pain claimed her for its own, and her tranquil spirit was sorrowfully perturbed by the ills that vexed her feeble flesh. Ah me! Such heavy days, such long, long nights, such aching hearts and imploring prayers, when those who loved her best were forced to see the thin hands stretched out to them beseechingly, to hear the bitter cry, \u201cHelp me, help me!\u201d and to feel that there was no help. A sad eclipse of the serene soul, a sharp struggle of the young life with death, but both were mercifully brief, and then the natural rebellion over, the old peace returned more beautiful than ever. With the wreck of her frail body, Beth\u2019s soul grew strong, and though she said little, those about her felt that she was ready, saw that the first pilgrim called was likewise the fittest, and waited with her on the shore, trying to see the Shining Ones coming to receive her when she crossed the river.\r\n\r\nJo never left her for an hour since Beth had said \u201cI feel stronger when you are here.\u201d She slept on a couch in the room, waking often to renew the fire, to feed, lift, or wait upon the patient creature who seldom asked for anything, and \u2018tried not to be a trouble\u2019. All day she haunted the room, jealous of any other nurse, and prouder of being chosen then than of any honor her life ever brought her. Precious and helpful hours to Jo, for now her heart received the teaching that it needed. Lessons in patience were so sweetly taught her that she could not fail to learn them, charity for all, the lovely spirit that can forgive and truly forget unkindness, the loyalty to duty that makes the hardest easy, and the sincere faith that fears nothing, but trusts undoubtingly.\r\n\r\nOften when she woke Jo found Beth reading in her well-worn little book, heard her singing softly, to beguile the sleepless night, or saw her lean her face upon her hands, while slow tears dropped through the transparent fingers, and Jo would lie watching her with thoughts too deep for tears, feeling that Beth, in her simple, unselfish way, was trying to wean herself from the dear old life, and fit herself for the life to come, by sacred words of comfort, quiet prayers, and the music she loved so well.\r\n\r\nSeeing this did more for Jo than the wisest sermons, the saintliest hymns, the most fervent prayers that any voice could utter. For with eyes made clear by many tears, and a heart softened by the tenderest sorrow, she recognized the beauty of her sister\u2019s life\u2014uneventful, unambitious, yet full of the genuine virtues which \u2018smell sweet, and blossom in the dust\u2019, the self-forgetfulness that makes the humblest on earth remembered soonest in heaven, the true success which is possible to all.\r\n\r\nOne night when Beth looked among the books upon her table, to find something to make her forget the mortal weariness that was almost as hard to bear as pain, as she turned the leaves of her old favorite, Pilgrims\u2019s Progress, she found a little paper, scribbled over in Jo\u2019s hand. The name caught her eye and the blurred look of the lines made her sure that tears had fallen on it.\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor Jo! She\u2019s fast asleep, so I won\u2019t wake her to ask leave. She shows me all her things, and I don\u2019t think she\u2019ll mind if I look at this\u201d, thought Beth, with a glance at her sister, who lay on the rug, with the tongs beside her, ready to wake up the minute the log fell apart.\r\n\r\nMY BETH\r\n\r\nSitting patient in the shadow\r\nTill the blessed light shall come,\r\nA serene and saintly presence\r\nSanctifies our troubled home.\r\nEarthly joys and hopes and sorrows\r\nBreak like ripples on the strand\r\nOf the deep and solemn river\r\nWhere her willing feet now stand.\r\n\r\nO my sister, passing from me,\r\nOut of human care and strife,\r\nLeave me, as a gift, those virtues\r\nWhich have beautified your life.\r\nDear, bequeath me that great patience\r\nWhich has power to sustain\r\nA cheerful, uncomplaining spirit\r\nIn its prison-house of pain.\r\n\r\nGive me, for I need it sorely,\r\nOf that courage, wise and sweet,\r\nWhich has made the path of duty\r\nGreen beneath your willing feet.\r\nGive me that unselfish nature,\r\nThat with charity divine\r\nCan pardon wrong for love\u2019s dear sake\u2014\r\nMeek heart, forgive me mine!\r\n\r\nThus our parting daily loseth\r\nSomething of its bitter pain,\r\nAnd while learning this hard lesson,\r\nMy great loss becomes my gain.\r\nFor the touch of grief will render\r\nMy wild nature more serene,\r\nGive to life new aspirations,\r\nA new trust in the unseen.\r\n\r\nHenceforth, safe across the river,\r\nI shall see forever more\r\nA beloved, household spirit\r\nWaiting for me on the shore.\r\nHope and faith, born of my sorrow,\r\nGuardian angels shall become,\r\nAnd the sister gone before me\r\nBy their hands shall lead me home.\r\n\r\nBlurred and blotted, faulty and feeble as the lines were, they brought a look of inexpressible comfort to Beth\u2019s face, for her one regret had been that she had done so little, and this seemed to assure her that her life had not been useless, that her death would not bring the despair she feared. As she sat with the paper folded between her hands, the charred log fell asunder. Jo started up, revived the blaze, and crept to the bedside, hoping Beth slept.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot asleep, but so happy, dear. See, I found this and read it. I knew you wouldn\u2019t care. Have I been all that to you, Jo?\u201d she asked, with wistful, humble earnestness.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Beth, so much, so much!\u201d and Jo\u2019s head went down upon the pillow beside her sister\u2019s.\r\n\r\n\u201cThen I don\u2019t feel as if I\u2019d wasted my life. I\u2019m not so good as you make me, but I have tried to do right. And now, when it\u2019s too late to begin even to do better, it\u2019s such a comfort to know that someone loves me so much, and feels as if I\u2019d helped them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMore than any one in the world, Beth. I used to think I couldn\u2019t let you go, but I\u2019m learning to feel that I don\u2019t lose you, that you\u2019ll be more to me than ever, and death can\u2019t part us, though it seems to.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI know it cannot, and I don\u2019t fear it any longer, for I\u2019m sure I shall be your Beth still, to love and help you more than ever. You must take my place, Jo, and be everything to Father and Mother when I\u2019m gone. They will turn to you, don\u2019t fail them, and if it\u2019s hard to work alone, remember that I don\u2019t forget you, and that you\u2019ll be happier in doing that than writing splendid books or seeing all the world, for love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll try, Beth.\u201d and then and there Jo renounced her old ambition, pledged herself to a new and better one, acknowledging the poverty of other desires, and feeling the blessed solace of a belief in the immortality of love.\r\n\r\nSo the spring days came and went, the sky grew clearer, the earth greener, the flowers were up fairly early, and the birds came back in time to say goodbye to Beth, who, like a tired but trustful child, clung to the hands that had led her all her life, as Father and Mother guided her tenderly through the Valley of the Shadow, and gave her up to God.\r\n\r\nSeldom except in books do the dying utter memorable words, see visions, or depart with beatified countenances, and those who have sped many parting souls know that to most the end comes as naturally and simply as sleep. As Beth had hoped, the \u2018tide went out easily\u2019, and in the dark hour before dawn, on the bosom where she had drawn her first breath, she quietly drew her last, with no farewell but one loving look, one little sigh.\r\n\r\nWith tears and prayers and tender hands, Mother and sisters made her ready for the long sleep that pain would never mar again, seeing with grateful eyes the beautiful serenity that soon replaced the pathetic patience that had wrung their hearts so long, and feeling with reverent joy that to their darling death was a benignant angel, not a phantom full of dread.\r\n\r\nWhen morning came, for the first time in many months the fire was out, Jo\u2019s place was empty, and the room was very still. But a bird sang blithely on a budding bough, close by, the snowdrops blossomed freshly at the window, and the spring sunshine streamed in like a benediction over the placid face upon the pillow, a face so full of painless peace that those who loved it best smiled through their tears, and thanked God that Beth was well at last.\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-ONE\r\nLEARNING TO FORGET\r\n\r\nAmy\u2019s lecture did Laurie good, though, of course, he did not own it till long afterward. Men seldom do, for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don\u2019t take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole. Laurie went back to his grandfather, and was so dutifully devoted for several weeks that the old gentleman declared the climate of Nice had improved him wonderfully, and he had better try it again. There was nothing the young gentleman would have liked better, but elephants could not have dragged him back after the scolding he had received. Pride forbid, and whenever the longing grew very strong, he fortified his resolution by repeating the words that had made the deepest impression\u2014\u201cI despise you.\u201d \u201cGo and do something splendid that will make her love you.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie turned the matter over in his mind so often that he soon brought himself to confess that he had been selfish and lazy, but then when a man has a great sorrow, he should be indulged in all sorts of vagaries till he has lived it down. He felt that his blighted affections were quite dead now, and though he should never cease to be a faithful mourner, there was no occasion to wear his weeds ostentatiously. Jo wouldn\u2019t love him, but he might make her respect and admire him by doing something which should prove that a girl\u2019s \u2018No\u2019 had not spoiled his life. He had always meant to do something, and Amy\u2019s advice was quite unnecessary. He had only been waiting till the aforesaid blighted affections were decently interred. That being done, he felt that he was ready to \u2018hide his stricken heart, and still toil on\u2019.\r\n\r\nAs Goethe, when he had a joy or a grief, put it into a song, so Laurie resolved to embalm his love sorrow in music, and to compose a Requiem which should harrow up Jo\u2019s soul and melt the heart of every hearer. Therefore the next time the old gentleman found him getting restless and moody and ordered him off, he went to Vienna, where he had musical friends, and fell to work with the firm determination to distinguish himself. But whether the sorrow was too vast to be embodied in music, or music too ethereal to uplift a mortal woe, he soon discovered that the Requiem was beyond him just at present. It was evident that his mind was not in working order yet, and his ideas needed clarifying, for often in the middle of a plaintive strain, he would find himself humming a dancing tune that vividly recalled the Christmas ball at Nice, especially the stout Frenchman, and put an effectual stop to tragic composition for the time being.\r\n\r\nThen he tried an opera, for nothing seemed impossible in the beginning, but here again unforeseen difficulties beset him. He wanted Jo for his heroine, and called upon his memory to supply him with tender recollections and romantic visions of his love. But memory turned traitor, and as if possessed by the perverse spirit of the girl, would only recall Jo\u2019s oddities, faults, and freaks, would only show her in the most unsentimental aspects\u2014beating mats with her head tied up in a bandanna, barricading herself with the sofa pillow, or throwing cold water over his passion a la Gummidge\u2014and an irresistable laugh spoiled the pensive picture he was endeavoring to paint. Jo wouldn\u2019t be put into the opera at any price, and he had to give her up with a \u201cBless that girl, what a torment she is!\u201d and a clutch at his hair, as became a distracted composer.\r\n\r\nWhen he looked about him for another and a less intractable damsel to immortalize in melody, memory produced one with the most obliging readiness. This phantom wore many faces, but it always had golden hair, was enveloped in a diaphanous cloud, and floated airily before his mind\u2019s eye in a pleasing chaos of roses, peacocks, white ponies, and blue ribbons. He did not give the complacent wraith any name, but he took her for his heroine and grew quite fond of her, as well he might, for he gifted her with every gift and grace under the sun, and escorted her, unscathed, through trials which would have annihilated any mortal woman.\r\n\r\nThanks to this inspiration, he got on swimmingly for a time, but gradually the work lost its charm, and he forgot to compose, while he sat musing, pen in hand, or roamed about the gay city to get some new ideas and refresh his mind, which seemed to be in a somewhat unsettled state that winter. He did not do much, but he thought a great deal and was conscious of a change of some sort going on in spite of himself. \u201cIt\u2019s genius simmering, perhaps. I\u2019ll let it simmer, and see what comes of it,\u201d he said, with a secret suspicion all the while that it wasn\u2019t genius, but something far more common. Whatever it was, it simmered to some purpose, for he grew more and more discontented with his desultory life, began to long for some real and earnest work to go at, soul and body, and finally came to the wise conclusion that everyone who loved music was not a composer. Returning from one of Mozart\u2019s grand operas, splendidly performed at the Royal Theatre, he looked over his own, played a few of the best parts, sat staring at the busts of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Bach, who stared benignly back again. Then suddenly he tore up his music sheets, one by one, and as the last fluttered out of his hand, he said soberly to himself...\r\n\r\n\u201cShe is right! Talent isn\u2019t genius, and you can\u2019t make it so. That music has taken the vanity out of me as Rome took it out of her, and I won\u2019t be a humbug any longer. Now what shall I do?\u201d\r\n\r\nThat seemed a hard question to answer, and Laurie began to wish he had to work for his daily bread. Now if ever, occurred an eligible opportunity for \u2018going to the devil\u2019, as he once forcibly expressed it, for he had plenty of money and nothing to do, and Satan is proverbially fond of providing employment for full and idle hands. The poor fellow had temptations enough from without and from within, but he withstood them pretty well, for much as he valued liberty, he valued good faith and confidence more, so his promise to his grandfather, and his desire to be able to look honestly into the eyes of the women who loved him, and say \u201cAll\u2019s well,\u201d kept him safe and steady.\r\n\r\nVery likely some Mrs. Grundy will observe, \u201cI don\u2019t believe it, boys will be boys, young men must sow their wild oats, and women must not expect miracles.\u201d I dare say you don\u2019t, Mrs. Grundy, but it\u2019s true nevertheless. Women work a good many miracles, and I have a persuasion that they may perform even that of raising the standard of manhood by refusing to echo such sayings. Let the boys be boys, the longer the better, and let the young men sow their wild oats if they must. But mothers, sisters, and friends may help to make the crop a small one, and keep many tares from spoiling the harvest, by believing, and showing that they believe, in the possibility of loyalty to the virtues which make men manliest in good women\u2019s eyes. If it is a feminine delusion, leave us to enjoy it while we may, for without it half the beauty and the romance of life is lost, and sorrowful forebodings would embitter all our hopes of the brave, tenderhearted little lads, who still love their mothers better than themselves and are not ashamed to own it.\r\n\r\nLaurie thought that the task of forgetting his love for Jo would absorb all his powers for years, but to his great surprise he discovered it grew easier every day. He refused to believe it at first, got angry with himself, and couldn\u2019t understand it, but these hearts of ours are curious and contrary things, and time and nature work their will in spite of us. Laurie\u2019s heart wouldn\u2019t ache. The wound persisted in healing with a rapidity that astonished him, and instead of trying to forget, he found himself trying to remember. He had not foreseen this turn of affairs, and was not prepared for it. He was disgusted with himself, surprised at his own fickleness, and full of a queer mixture of disappointment and relief that he could recover from such a tremendous blow so soon. He carefully stirred up the embers of his lost love, but they refused to burst into a blaze. There was only a comfortable glow that warmed and did him good without putting him into a fever, and he was reluctantly obliged to confess that the boyish passion was slowly subsiding into a more tranquil sentiment, very tender, a little sad and resentful still, but that was sure to pass away in time, leaving a brotherly affection which would last unbroken to the end.\r\n\r\nAs the word \u2018brotherly\u2019 passed through his mind in one of his reveries, he smiled, and glanced up at the picture of Mozart that was before him...\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, he was a great man, and when he couldn\u2019t have one sister he took the other, and was happy.\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie did not utter the words, but he thought them, and the next instant kissed the little old ring, saying to himself, \u201cNo, I won\u2019t! I haven\u2019t forgotten, I never can. I\u2019ll try again, and if that fails, why then...\u201d\r\n\r\nLeaving his sentence unfinished, he seized pen and paper and wrote to Jo, telling her that he could not settle to anything while there was the least hope of her changing her mind. Couldn\u2019t she, wouldn\u2019t she\u2014and let him come home and be happy? While waiting for an answer he did nothing, but he did it energetically, for he was in a fever of impatience. It came at last, and settled his mind effectually on one point, for Jo decidedly couldn\u2019t and wouldn\u2019t. She was wrapped up in Beth, and never wished to hear the word love again. Then she begged him to be happy with somebody else, but always keep a little corner of his heart for his loving sister Jo. In a postscript she desired him not to tell Amy that Beth was worse, she was coming home in the spring and there was no need of saddening the remainder of her stay. That would be time enough, please God, but Laurie must write to her often, and not let her feel lonely, homesick or anxious.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo I will, at once. Poor little girl, it will be a sad going home for her, I\u2019m afraid,\u201d and Laurie opened his desk, as if writing to Amy had been the proper conclusion of the sentence left unfinished some weeks before.\r\n\r\nBut he did not write the letter that day, for as he rummaged out his best paper, he came across something which changed his purpose. Tumbling about in one part of the desk among bills, passports, and business documents of various kinds were several of Jo\u2019s letters, and in another compartment were three notes from Amy, carefully tied up with one of her blue ribbons and sweetly suggestive of the little dead roses put away inside. With a half-repentant, half-amused expression, Laurie gathered up all Jo\u2019s letters, smoothed, folded, and put them neatly into a small drawer of the desk, stood a minute turning the ring thoughtfully on his finger, then slowly drew it off, laid it with the letters, locked the drawer, and went out to hear High Mass at Saint Stefan\u2019s, feeling as if there had been a funeral, and though not overwhelmed with affliction, this seemed a more proper way to spend the rest of the day than in writing letters to charming young ladies.\r\n\r\nThe letter went very soon, however, and was promptly answered, for Amy was homesick, and confessed it in the most delightfully confiding manner. The correspondence flourished famously, and letters flew to and fro with unfailing regularity all through the early spring. Laurie sold his busts, made allumettes of his opera, and went back to Paris, hoping somebody would arrive before long. He wanted desperately to go to Nice, but would not till he was asked, and Amy would not ask him, for just then she was having little experiences of her own, which made her rather wish to avoid the quizzical eyes of \u2018our boy\u2019.\r\n\r\nFred Vaughn had returned, and put the question to which she had once decided to answer, \u201cYes, thank you,\u201d but now she said, \u201cNo, thank you,\u201d kindly but steadily, for when the time came, her courage failed her, and she found that something more than money and position was needed to satisfy the new longing that filled her heart so full of tender hopes and fears. The words, \u201cFred is a good fellow, but not at all the man I fancied you would ever like,\u201d and Laurie\u2019s face when he uttered them, kept returning to her as pertinaciously as her own did when she said in look, if not in words, \u201cI shall marry for money.\u201d It troubled her to remember that now, she wished she could take it back, it sounded so unwomanly. She didn\u2019t want Laurie to think her a heartless, worldly creature. She didn\u2019t care to be a queen of society now half so much as she did to be a lovable woman. She was so glad he didn\u2019t hate her for the dreadful things she said, but took them so beautifully and was kinder than ever. His letters were such a comfort, for the home letters were very irregular and not half so satisfactory as his when they did come. It was not only a pleasure, but a duty to answer them, for the poor fellow was forlorn, and needed petting, since Jo persisted in being stonyhearted. She ought to have made an effort and tried to love him. It couldn\u2019t be very hard, many people would be proud and glad to have such a dear boy care for them. But Jo never would act like other girls, so there was nothing to do but be very kind and treat him like a brother.\r\n\r\nIf all brothers were treated as well as Laurie was at this period, they would be a much happier race of beings than they are. Amy never lectured now. She asked his opinion on all subjects, she was interested in everything he did, made charming little presents for him, and sent him two letters a week, full of lively gossip, sisterly confidences, and captivating sketches of the lovely scenes about her. As few brothers are complimented by having their letters carried about in their sister\u2019s pockets, read and reread diligently, cried over when short, kissed when long, and treasured carefully, we will not hint that Amy did any of these fond and foolish things. But she certainly did grow a little pale and pensive that spring, lost much of her relish for society, and went out sketching alone a good deal. She never had much to show when she came home, but was studying nature, I dare say, while she sat for hours, with her hands folded, on the terrace at Valrosa, or absently sketched any fancy that occurred to her, a stalwart knight carved on a tomb, a young man asleep in the grass, with his hat over his eyes, or a curly haired girl in gorgeous array, promenading down a ballroom on the arm of a tall gentleman, both faces being left a blur according to the last fashion in art, which was safe but not altogether satisfactory.\r\n\r\nHer aunt thought that she regretted her answer to Fred, and finding denials useless and explanations impossible, Amy left her to think what she liked, taking care that Laurie should know that Fred had gone to Egypt. That was all, but he understood it, and looked relieved, as he said to himself, with a venerable air...\r\n\r\n\u201cI was sure she would think better of it. Poor old fellow! I\u2019ve been through it all, and I can sympathize.\u201d\r\n\r\nWith that he heaved a great sigh, and then, as if he had discharged his duty to the past, put his feet up on the sofa and enjoyed Amy\u2019s letter luxuriously.\r\n\r\nWhile these changes were going on abroad, trouble had come at home. But the letter telling that Beth was failing never reached Amy, and when the next found her the grass was green above her sister. The sad news met her at Vevay, for the heat had driven them from Nice in May, and they had travelled slowly to Switzerland, by way of Genoa and the Italian lakes. She bore it very well, and quietly submitted to the family decree that she should not shorten her visit, for since it was too late to say goodbye to Beth, she had better stay, and let absence soften her sorrow. But her heart was very heavy, she longed to be at home, and every day looked wistfully across the lake, waiting for Laurie to come and comfort her.\r\n\r\nHe did come very soon, for the same mail brought letters to them both, but he was in Germany, and it took some days to reach him. The moment he read it, he packed his knapsack, bade adieu to his fellow pedestrians, and was off to keep his promise, with a heart full of joy and sorrow, hope and suspense.\r\n\r\nHe knew Vevay well, and as soon as the boat touched the little quay, he hurried along the shore to La Tour, where the Carrols were living en pension. The garcon was in despair that the whole family had gone to take a promenade on the lake, but no, the blonde mademoiselle might be in the chateau garden. If monsieur would give himself the pain of sitting down, a flash of time should present her. But monsieur could not wait even a \u2018flash of time\u2019, and in the middle of the speech departed to find mademoiselle himself.\r\n\r\nA pleasant old garden on the borders of the lovely lake, with chestnuts rustling overhead, ivy climbing everywhere, and the black shadow of the tower falling far across the sunny water. At one corner of the wide, low wall was a seat, and here Amy often came to read or work, or console herself with the beauty all about her. She was sitting here that day, leaning her head on her hand, with a homesick heart and heavy eyes, thinking of Beth and wondering why Laurie did not come. She did not hear him cross the courtyard beyond, nor see him pause in the archway that led from the subterranean path into the garden. He stood a minute looking at her with new eyes, seeing what no one had ever seen before, the tender side of Amy\u2019s character. Everything about her mutely suggested love and sorrow, the blotted letters in her lap, the black ribbon that tied up her hair, the womanly pain and patience in her face, even the little ebony cross at her throat seemed pathetic to Laurie, for he had given it to her, and she wore it as her only ornament. If he had any doubts about the reception she would give him, they were set at rest the minute she looked up and saw him, for dropping everything, she ran to him, exclaiming in a tone of unmistakable love and longing...\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Laurie, Laurie, I knew you\u2019d come to me!\u201d\r\n\r\nI think everything was said and settled then, for as they stood together quite silent for a moment, with the dark head bent down protectingly over the light one, Amy felt that no one could comfort and sustain her so well as Laurie, and Laurie decided that Amy was the only woman in the world who could fill Jo\u2019s place and make him happy. He did not tell her so, but she was not disappointed, for both felt the truth, were satisfied, and gladly left the rest to silence.\r\n\r\nIn a minute Amy went back to her place, and while she dried her tears, Laurie gathered up the scattered papers, finding in the sight of sundry well-worn letters and suggestive sketches good omens for the future. As he sat down beside her, Amy felt shy again, and turned rosy red at the recollection of her impulsive greeting.\r\n\r\n\u201cI couldn\u2019t help it, I felt so lonely and sad, and was so very glad to see you. It was such a surprise to look up and find you, just as I was beginning to fear you wouldn\u2019t come,\u201d she said, trying in vain to speak quite naturally.\r\n\r\n\u201cI came the minute I heard. I wish I could say something to comfort you for the loss of dear little Beth, but I can only feel, and...\u201d He could not get any further, for he too turned bashful all of a sudden, and did not quite know what to say. He longed to lay Amy\u2019s head down on his shoulder, and tell her to have a good cry, but he did not dare, so took her hand instead, and gave it a sympathetic squeeze that was better than words.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou needn\u2019t say anything, this comforts me,\u201d she said softly. \u201cBeth is well and happy, and I mustn\u2019t wish her back, but I dread the going home, much as I long to see them all. We won\u2019t talk about it now, for it makes me cry, and I want to enjoy you while you stay. You needn\u2019t go right back, need you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot if you want me, dear.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI do, so much. Aunt and Flo are very kind, but you seem like one of the family, and it would be so comfortable to have you for a little while.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy spoke and looked so like a homesick child whose heart was full that Laurie forgot his bashfulness all at once, and gave her just what she wanted\u2014the petting she was used to and the cheerful conversation she needed.\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor little soul, you look as if you\u2019d grieved yourself half sick! I\u2019m going to take care of you, so don\u2019t cry any more, but come and walk about with me, the wind is too chilly for you to sit still,\u201d he said, in the half-caressing, half-commanding way that Amy liked, as he tied on her hat, drew her arm through his, and began to pace up and down the sunny walk under the new-leaved chestnuts. He felt more at ease upon his legs, and Amy found it pleasant to have a strong arm to lean upon, a familiar face to smile at her, and a kind voice to talk delightfully for her alone.\r\n\r\nThe quaint old garden had sheltered many pairs of lovers, and seemed expressly made for them, so sunny and secluded was it, with nothing but the tower to overlook them, and the wide lake to carry away the echo of their words, as it rippled by below. For an hour this new pair walked and talked, or rested on the wall, enjoying the sweet influences which gave such a charm to time and place, and when an unromantic dinner bell warned them away, Amy felt as if she left her burden of loneliness and sorrow behind her in the chateau garden.\r\n\r\nThe moment Mrs. Carrol saw the girl\u2019s altered face, she was illuminated with a new idea, and exclaimed to herself, \u201cNow I understand it all\u2014the child has been pining for young Laurence. Bless my heart, I never thought of such a thing!\u201d\r\n\r\nWith praiseworthy discretion, the good lady said nothing, and betrayed no sign of enlightenment, but cordially urged Laurie to stay and begged Amy to enjoy his society, for it would do her more good than so much solitude. Amy was a model of docility, and as her aunt was a good deal occupied with Flo, she was left to entertain her friend, and did it with more than her usual success.\r\n\r\nAt Nice, Laurie had lounged and Amy had scolded. At Vevay, Laurie was never idle, but always walking, riding, boating, or studying in the most energetic manner, while Amy admired everything he did and followed his example as far and as fast as she could. He said the change was owing to the climate, and she did not contradict him, being glad of a like excuse for her own recovered health and spirits.\r\n\r\nThe invigorating air did them both good, and much exercise worked wholesome changes in minds as well as bodies. They seemed to get clearer views of life and duty up there among the everlasting hills. The fresh winds blew away desponding doubts, delusive fancies, and moody mists. The warm spring sunshine brought out all sorts of aspiring ideas, tender hopes, and happy thoughts. The lake seemed to wash away the troubles of the past, and the grand old mountains to look benignly down upon them saying, \u201cLittle children, love one another.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn spite of the new sorrow, it was a very happy time, so happy that Laurie could not bear to disturb it by a word. It took him a little while to recover from his surprise at the cure of his first, and as he had firmly believed, his last and only love. He consoled himself for the seeming disloyalty by the thought that Jo\u2019s sister was almost the same as Jo\u2019s self, and the conviction that it would have been impossible to love any other woman but Amy so soon and so well. His first wooing had been of the tempestuous order, and he looked back upon it as if through a long vista of years with a feeling of compassion blended with regret. He was not ashamed of it, but put it away as one of the bitter-sweet experiences of his life, for which he could be grateful when the pain was over. His second wooing, he resolved, should be as calm and simple as possible. There was no need of having a scene, hardly any need of telling Amy that he loved her, she knew it without words and had given him his answer long ago. It all came about so naturally that no one could complain, and he knew that everybody would be pleased, even Jo. But when our first little passion has been crushed, we are apt to be wary and slow in making a second trial, so Laurie let the days pass, enjoying every hour, and leaving to chance the utterance of the word that would put an end to the first and sweetest part of his new romance.\r\n\r\nHe had rather imagined that the denoument would take place in the chateau garden by moonlight, and in the most graceful and decorous manner, but it turned out exactly the reverse, for the matter was settled on the lake at noonday in a few blunt words. They had been floating about all the morning, from gloomy St. Gingolf to sunny Montreux, with the Alps of Savoy on one side, Mont St. Bernard and the Dent du Midi on the other, pretty Vevay in the valley, and Lausanne upon the hill beyond, a cloudless blue sky overhead, and the bluer lake below, dotted with the picturesque boats that look like white-winged gulls.\r\n\r\nThey had been talking of Bonnivard, as they glided past Chillon, and of Rousseau, as they looked up at Clarens, where he wrote his Heloise. Neither had read it, but they knew it was a love story, and each privately wondered if it was half as interesting as their own. Amy had been dabbling her hand in the water during the little pause that fell between them, and when she looked up, Laurie was leaning on his oars with an expression in his eyes that made her say hastily, merely for the sake of saying something...\r\n\r\n\u201cYou must be tired. Rest a little, and let me row. It will do me good, for since you came I have been altogether lazy and luxurious.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m not tired, but you may take an oar, if you like. There\u2019s room enough, though I have to sit nearly in the middle, else the boat won\u2019t trim,\u201d returned Laurie, as if he rather liked the arrangement.\r\n\r\nFeeling that she had not mended matters much, Amy took the offered third of a seat, shook her hair over her face, and accepted an oar. She rowed as well as she did many other things, and though she used both hands, and Laurie but one, the oars kept time, and the boat went smoothly through the water.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow well we pull together, don\u2019t we?\u201d said Amy, who objected to silence just then.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo well that I wish we might always pull in the same boat. Will you, Amy?\u201d very tenderly.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Laurie,\u201d very low.\r\n\r\nThen they both stopped rowing, and unconsciously added a pretty little tableau of human love and happiness to the dissolving views reflected in the lake.\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-TWO\r\nALL ALONE\r\n\r\nIt was easy to promise self-abnegation when self was wrapped up in another, and heart and soul were purified by a sweet example. But when the helpful voice was silent, the daily lesson over, the beloved presence gone, and nothing remained but loneliness and grief, then Jo found her promise very hard to keep. How could she \u2018comfort Father and Mother\u2019 when her own heart ached with a ceaseless longing for her sister, how could she \u2018make the house cheerful\u2019 when all its light and warmth and beauty seemed to have deserted it when Beth left the old home for the new, and where in all the world could she \u2018find some useful, happy work to do\u2019, that would take the place of the loving service which had been its own reward? She tried in a blind, hopeless way to do her duty, secretly rebelling against it all the while, for it seemed unjust that her few joys should be lessened, her burdens made heavier, and life get harder and harder as she toiled along. Some people seemed to get all sunshine, and some all shadow. It was not fair, for she tried more than Amy to be good, but never got any reward, only disappointment, trouble and hard work.\r\n\r\nPoor Jo, these were dark days to her, for something like despair came over her when she thought of spending all her life in that quiet house, devoted to humdrum cares, a few small pleasures, and the duty that never seemed to grow any easier. \u201cI can\u2019t do it. I wasn\u2019t meant for a life like this, and I know I shall break away and do something desperate if somebody doesn\u2019t come and help me,\u201d she said to herself, when her first efforts failed and she fell into the moody, miserable state of mind which often comes when strong wills have to yield to the inevitable.\r\n\r\nBut someone did come and help her, though Jo did not recognize her good angels at once because they wore familiar shapes and used the simple spells best fitted to poor humanity. Often she started up at night, thinking Beth called her, and when the sight of the little empty bed made her cry with the bitter cry of unsubmissive sorrow, \u201cOh, Beth, come back! Come back!\u201d she did not stretch out her yearning arms in vain. For, as quick to hear her sobbing as she had been to hear her sister\u2019s faintest whisper, her mother came to comfort her, not with words only, but the patient tenderness that soothes by a touch, tears that were mute reminders of a greater grief than Jo\u2019s, and broken whispers, more eloquent than prayers, because hopeful resignation went hand-in-hand with natural sorrow. Sacred moments, when heart talked to heart in the silence of the night, turning affliction to a blessing, which chastened grief and strengthened love. Feeling this, Jo\u2019s burden seemed easier to bear, duty grew sweeter, and life looked more endurable, seen from the safe shelter of her mother\u2019s arms.\r\n\r\nWhen aching heart was a little comforted, troubled mind likewise found help, for one day she went to the study, and leaning over the good gray head lifted to welcome her with a tranquil smile, she said very humbly, \u201cFather, talk to me as you did to Beth. I need it more than she did, for I\u2019m all wrong.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy dear, nothing can comfort me like this,\u201d he answered, with a falter in his voice, and both arms round her, as if he too, needed help, and did not fear to ask for it.\r\n\r\nThen, sitting in Beth\u2019s little chair close beside him, Jo told her troubles, the resentful sorrow for her loss, the fruitless efforts that discouraged her, the want of faith that made life look so dark, and all the sad bewilderment which we call despair. She gave him entire confidence, he gave her the help she needed, and both found consolation in the act. For the time had come when they could talk together not only as father and daughter, but as man and woman, able and glad to serve each other with mutual sympathy as well as mutual love. Happy, thoughtful times there in the old study which Jo called \u2018the church of one member\u2019, and from which she came with fresh courage, recovered cheerfulness, and a more submissive spirit. For the parents who had taught one child to meet death without fear, were trying now to teach another to accept life without despondency or distrust, and to use its beautiful opportunities with gratitude and power.\r\n\r\nOther helps had Jo\u2014humble, wholesome duties and delights that would not be denied their part in serving her, and which she slowly learned to see and value. Brooms and dishcloths never could be as distasteful as they once had been, for Beth had presided over both, and something of her housewifely spirit seemed to linger around the little mop and the old brush, never thrown away. As she used them, Jo found herself humming the songs Beth used to hum, imitating Beth\u2019s orderly ways, and giving the little touches here and there that kept everything fresh and cozy, which was the first step toward making home happy, though she didn\u2019t know it till Hannah said with an approving squeeze of the hand...\r\n\r\n\u201cYou thoughtful creeter, you\u2019re determined we shan\u2019t miss that dear lamb ef you can help it. We don\u2019t say much, but we see it, and the Lord will bless you for\u2019t, see ef He don\u2019t.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs they sat sewing together, Jo discovered how much improved her sister Meg was, how well she could talk, how much she knew about good, womanly impulses, thoughts, and feelings, how happy she was in husband and children, and how much they were all doing for each other.\r\n\r\n\u201cMarriage is an excellent thing, after all. I wonder if I should blossom out half as well as you have, if I tried it?, always \u2018perwisin\u2019 I could,\u201d said Jo, as she constructed a kite for Demi in the topsy-turvy nursery.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s just what you need to bring out the tender womanly half of your nature, Jo. You are like a chestnut burr, prickly outside, but silky-soft within, and a sweet kernal, if one can only get at it. Love will make you show your heart one day, and then the rough burr will fall off.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFrost opens chestnut burrs, ma\u2019am, and it takes a good shake to bring them down. Boys go nutting, and I don\u2019t care to be bagged by them,\u201d returned Jo, pasting away at the kite which no wind that blows would ever carry up, for Daisy had tied herself on as a bob.\r\n\r\nMeg laughed, for she was glad to see a glimmer of Jo\u2019s old spirit, but she felt it her duty to enforce her opinion by every argument in her power, and the sisterly chats were not wasted, especially as two of Meg\u2019s most effective arguments were the babies, whom Jo loved tenderly. Grief is the best opener of some hearts, and Jo\u2019s was nearly ready for the bag. A little more sunshine to ripen the nut, then, not a boy\u2019s impatient shake, but a man\u2019s hand reached up to pick it gently from the burr, and find the kernal sound and sweet. If she suspected this, she would have shut up tight, and been more prickly than ever, fortunately she wasn\u2019t thinking about herself, so when the time came, down she dropped.\r\n\r\nNow, if she had been the heroine of a moral storybook, she ought at this period of her life to have become quite saintly, renounced the world, and gone about doing good in a mortified bonnet, with tracts in her pocket. But, you see, Jo wasn\u2019t a heroine, she was only a struggling human girl like hundreds of others, and she just acted out her nature, being sad, cross, listless, or energetic, as the mood suggested. It\u2019s highly virtuous to say we\u2019ll be good, but we can\u2019t do it all at once, and it takes a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together before some of us even get our feet set in the right way. Jo had got so far, she was learning to do her duty, and to feel unhappy if she did not, but to do it cheerfully, ah, that was another thing! She had often said she wanted to do something splendid, no matter how hard, and now she had her wish, for what could be more beautiful than to devote her life to Father and Mother, trying to make home as happy to them as they had to her? And if difficulties were necessary to increase the splendor of the effort, what could be harder for a restless, ambitious girl than to give up her own hopes, plans, and desires, and cheerfully live for others?\r\n\r\nProvidence had taken her at her word. Here was the task, not what she had expected, but better because self had no part in it. Now, could she do it? She decided that she would try, and in her first attempt she found the helps I have suggested. Still another was given her, and she took it, not as a reward, but as a comfort, as Christian took the refreshment afforded by the little arbor where he rested, as he climbed the hill called Difficulty.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy don\u2019t you write? That always used to make you happy,\u201d said her mother once, when the desponding fit over-shadowed Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ve no heart to write, and if I had, nobody cares for my things.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe do. Write something for us, and never mind the rest of the world. Try it, dear. I\u2019m sure it would do you good, and please us very much.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t believe I can.\u201d But Jo got out her desk and began to overhaul her half-finished manuscripts.\r\n\r\nAn hour afterward her mother peeped in and there she was, scratching away, with her black pinafore on, and an absorbed expression, which caused Mrs. March to smile and slip away, well pleased with the success of her suggestion. Jo never knew how it happened, but something got into that story that went straight to the hearts of those who read it, for when her family had laughed and cried over it, her father sent it, much against her will, to one of the popular magazines, and to her utter surprise, it was not only paid for, but others requested. Letters from several persons, whose praise was honor, followed the appearance of the little story, newspapers copied it, and strangers as well as friends admired it. For a small thing it was a great success, and Jo was more astonished than when her novel was commended and condemned all at once.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t understand it. What can there be in a simple little story like that to make people praise it so?\u201d she said, quite bewildered.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere is truth in it, Jo, that\u2019s the secret. Humor and pathos make it alive, and you have found your style at last. You wrote with no thoughts of fame and money, and put your heart into it, my daughter. You have had the bitter, now comes the sweet. Do your best, and grow as happy as we are in your success.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf there is anything good or true in what I write, it isn\u2019t mine. I owe it all to you and Mother and Beth,\u201d said Jo, more touched by her father\u2019s words than by any amount of praise from the world.\r\n\r\nSo taught by love and sorrow, Jo wrote her little stories, and sent them away to make friends for themselves and her, finding it a very charitable world to such humble wanderers, for they were kindly welcomed, and sent home comfortable tokens to their mother, like dutiful children whom good fortune overtakes.\r\n\r\nWhen Amy and Laurie wrote of their engagement, Mrs. March feared that Jo would find it difficult to rejoice over it, but her fears were soon set at rest, for though Jo looked grave at first, she took it very quietly, and was full of hopes and plans for \u2018the children\u2019 before she read the letter twice. It was a sort of written duet, wherein each glorified the other in loverlike fashion, very pleasant to read and satisfactory to think of, for no one had any objection to make.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou like it, Mother?\u201d said Jo, as they laid down the closely written sheets and looked at one another.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I hoped it would be so, ever since Amy wrote that she had refused Fred. I felt sure then that something better than what you call the \u2018mercenary spirit\u2019 had come over her, and a hint here and there in her letters made me suspect that love and Laurie would win the day.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow sharp you are, Marmee, and how silent! You never said a word to me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMothers have need of sharp eyes and discreet tongues when they have girls to manage. I was half afraid to put the idea into your head, lest you should write and congratulate them before the thing was settled.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m not the scatterbrain I was. You may trust me. I\u2019m sober and sensible enough for anyone\u2019s confidante now.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo you are, my dear, and I should have made you mine, only I fancied it might pain you to learn that your Teddy loved someone else.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, Mother, did you really think I could be so silly and selfish, after I\u2019d refused his love, when it was freshest, if not best?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI knew you were sincere then, Jo, but lately I have thought that if he came back, and asked again, you might perhaps, feel like giving another answer. Forgive me, dear, I can\u2019t help seeing that you are very lonely, and sometimes there is a hungry look in your eyes that goes to my heart. So I fancied that your boy might fill the empty place if he tried now.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, Mother, it is better as it is, and I\u2019m glad Amy has learned to love him. But you are right in one thing. I am lonely, and perhaps if Teddy had tried again, I might have said \u2018Yes\u2019, not because I love him any more, but because I care more to be loved than when he went away.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad of that, Jo, for it shows that you are getting on. There are plenty to love you, so try to be satisfied with Father and Mother, sisters and brothers, friends and babies, till the best lover of all comes to give you your reward.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMothers are the best lovers in the world, but I don\u2019t mind whispering to Marmee that I\u2019d like to try all kinds. It\u2019s very curious, but the more I try to satisfy myself with all sorts of natural affections, the more I seem to want. I\u2019d no idea hearts could take in so many. Mine is so elastic, it never seems full now, and I used to be quite contented with my family. I don\u2019t understand it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI do,\u201d and Mrs. March smiled her wise smile, as Jo turned back the leaves to read what Amy said of Laurie.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is so beautiful to be loved as Laurie loves me. He isn\u2019t sentimental, doesn\u2019t say much about it, but I see and feel it in all he says and does, and it makes me so happy and so humble that I don\u2019t seem to be the same girl I was. I never knew how good and generous and tender he was till now, for he lets me read his heart, and I find it full of noble impulses and hopes and purposes, and am so proud to know it\u2019s mine. He says he feels as if he \u2018could make a prosperous voyage now with me aboard as mate, and lots of love for ballast\u2019. I pray he may, and try to be all he believes me, for I love my gallant captain with all my heart and soul and might, and never will desert him, while God lets us be together. Oh, Mother, I never knew how much like heaven this world could be, when two people love and live for one another!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd that\u2019s our cool, reserved, and worldly Amy! Truly, love does work miracles. How very, very happy they must be!\u201d and Jo laid the rustling sheets together with a careful hand, as one might shut the covers of a lovely romance, which holds the reader fast till the end comes, and he finds himself alone in the workaday world again.\r\n\r\nBy-and-by Jo roamed away upstairs, for it was rainy, and she could not walk. A restless spirit possessed her, and the old feeling came again, not bitter as it once was, but a sorrowfully patient wonder why one sister should have all she asked, the other nothing. It was not true, she knew that and tried to put it away, but the natural craving for affection was strong, and Amy\u2019s happiness woke the hungry longing for someone to \u2018love with heart and soul, and cling to while God let them be together\u2019. Up in the garret, where Jo\u2019s unquiet wanderings ended stood four little wooden chests in a row, each marked with its owners name, and each filled with relics of the childhood and girlhood ended now for all. Jo glanced into them, and when she came to her own, leaned her chin on the edge, and stared absently at the chaotic collection, till a bundle of old exercise books caught her eye. She drew them out, turned them over, and relived that pleasant winter at kind Mrs. Kirke\u2019s. She had smiled at first, then she looked thoughtful, next sad, and when she came to a little message written in the Professor\u2019s hand, her lips began to tremble, the books slid out of her lap, and she sat looking at the friendly words, as they took a new meaning, and touched a tender spot in her heart.\r\n\r\n\u201cWait for me, my friend. I may be a little late, but I shall surely come.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, if he only would! So kind, so good, so patient with me always, my dear old Fritz. I didn\u2019t value him half enough when I had him, but now how I should love to see him, for everyone seems going away from me, and I\u2019m all alone.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd holding the little paper fast, as if it were a promise yet to be fulfilled, Jo laid her head down on a comfortable rag bag, and cried, as if in opposition to the rain pattering on the roof.\r\n\r\nWas it all self-pity, loneliness, or low spirits? Or was it the waking up of a sentiment which had bided its time as patiently as its inspirer? Who shall say?\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-THREE\r\nSURPRISES\r\n\r\nJo was alone in the twilight, lying on the old sofa, looking at the fire, and thinking. It was her favorite way of spending the hour of dusk. No one disturbed her, and she used to lie there on Beth\u2019s little red pillow, planning stories, dreaming dreams, or thinking tender thoughts of the sister who never seemed far away. Her face looked tired, grave, and rather sad, for tomorrow was her birthday, and she was thinking how fast the years went by, how old she was getting, and how little she seemed to have accomplished. Almost twenty-five, and nothing to show for it. Jo was mistaken in that. There was a good deal to show, and by-and-by she saw, and was grateful for it.\r\n\r\n\u201cAn old maid, that\u2019s what I\u2019m to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps, when, like poor Johnson, I\u2019m old and can\u2019t enjoy it, solitary, and can\u2019t share it, independent, and don\u2019t need it. Well, I needn\u2019t be a sour saint nor a selfish sinner, and, I dare say, old maids are very comfortable when they get used to it, but...\u201d and there Jo sighed, as if the prospect was not inviting.\r\n\r\nIt seldom is, at first, and thirty seems the end of all things to five-and-twenty. But it\u2019s not as bad as it looks, and one can get on quite happily if one has something in one\u2019s self to fall back upon. At twenty-five, girls begin to talk about being old maids, but secretly resolve that they never will be. At thirty they say nothing about it, but quietly accept the fact, and if sensible, console themselves by remembering that they have twenty more useful, happy years, in which they may be learning to grow old gracefully. Don\u2019t laugh at the spinsters, dear girls, for often very tender, tragic romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns, and many silent sacrifices of youth, health, ambition, love itself, make the faded faces beautiful in God\u2019s sight. Even the sad, sour sisters should be kindly dealt with, because they have missed the sweetest part of life, if for no other reason. And looking at them with compassion, not contempt, girls in their bloom should remember that they too may miss the blossom time. That rosy cheeks don\u2019t last forever, that silver threads will come in the bonnie brown hair, and that, by-and-by, kindness and respect will be as sweet as love and admiration now.\r\n\r\nGentlemen, which means boys, be courteous to the old maids, no matter how poor and plain and prim, for the only chivalry worth having is that which is the readiest to pay deference to the old, protect the feeble, and serve womankind, regardless of rank, age, or color. Just recollect the good aunts who have not only lectured and fussed, but nursed and petted, too often without thanks, the scrapes they have helped you out of, the tips they have given you from their small store, the stitches the patient old fingers have set for you, the steps the willing old feet have taken, and gratefully pay the dear old ladies the little attentions that women love to receive as long as they live. The bright-eyed girls are quick to see such traits, and will like you all the better for them, and if death, almost the only power that can part mother and son, should rob you of yours, you will be sure to find a tender welcome and maternal cherishing from some Aunt Priscilla, who has kept the warmest corner of her lonely old heart for \u2018the best nevvy in the world\u2019.\r\n\r\nJo must have fallen asleep (as I dare say my reader has during this little homily), for suddenly Laurie\u2019s ghost seemed to stand before her, a substantial, lifelike ghost, leaning over her with the very look he used to wear when he felt a good deal and didn\u2019t like to show it. But, like Jenny in the ballad...\r\n\r\n\u201cShe could not think it he,\u201d\r\n\r\nand lay staring up at him in startled silence, till he stooped and kissed her. Then she knew him, and flew up, crying joyfully...\r\n\r\n\u201cOh my Teddy! Oh my Teddy!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDear Jo, you are glad to see me, then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGlad! My blessed boy, words can\u2019t express my gladness. Where\u2019s Amy?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYour mother has got her down at Meg\u2019s. We stopped there by the way, and there was no getting my wife out of their clutches.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYour what?\u201d cried Jo, for Laurie uttered those two words with an unconscious pride and satisfaction which betrayed him.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, the dickens! Now I\u2019ve done it,\u201d and he looked so guilty that Jo was down on him like a flash.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ve gone and got married!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, please, but I never will again,\u201d and he went down upon his knees, with a penitent clasping of hands, and a face full of mischief, mirth, and triumph.\r\n\r\n\u201cActually married?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cVery much so, thank you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMercy on us. What dreadful thing will you do next?\u201d and Jo fell into her seat with a gasp.\r\n\r\n\u201cA characteristic, but not exactly complimentary, congratulation,\u201d returned Laurie, still in an abject attitude, but beaming with satisfaction.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat can you expect, when you take one\u2019s breath away, creeping in like a burglar, and letting cats out of bags like that? Get up, you ridiculous boy, and tell me all about it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a word, unless you let me come in my old place, and promise not to barricade.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo laughed at that as she had not done for many a long day, and patted the sofa invitingly, as she said in a cordial tone, \u201cThe old pillow is up garret, and we don\u2019t need it now. So, come and \u2019fess, Teddy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow good it sounds to hear you say \u2018Teddy\u2019! No one ever calls me that but you,\u201d and Laurie sat down with an air of great content.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat does Amy call you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy lord.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s like her. Well, you look it,\u201d and Jo\u2019s eye plainly betrayed that she found her boy comelier than ever.\r\n\r\nThe pillow was gone, but there was a barricade, nevertheless, a natural one, raised by time, absence, and change of heart. Both felt it, and for a minute looked at one another as if that invisible barrier cast a little shadow over them. It was gone directly however, for Laurie said, with a vain attempt at dignity...\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t I look like a married man and the head of a family?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot a bit, and you never will. You\u2019ve grown bigger and bonnier, but you are the same scapegrace as ever.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow really, Jo, you ought to treat me with more respect,\u201d began Laurie, who enjoyed it all immensely.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow can I, when the mere idea of you, married and settled, is so irresistibly funny that I can\u2019t keep sober!\u201d answered Jo, smiling all over her face, so infectiously that they had another laugh, and then settled down for a good talk, quite in the pleasant old fashion.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s no use your going out in the cold to get Amy, for they are all coming up presently. I couldn\u2019t wait. I wanted to be the one to tell you the grand surprise, and have \u2018first skim\u2019 as we used to say when we squabbled about the cream.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course you did, and spoiled your story by beginning at the wrong end. Now, start right, and tell me how it all happened. I\u2019m pining to know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, I did it to please Amy,\u201d began Laurie, with a twinkle that made Jo exclaim...\r\n\r\n\u201cFib number one. Amy did it to please you. Go on, and tell the truth, if you can, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow she\u2019s beginning to marm it. Isn\u2019t it jolly to hear her?\u201d said Laurie to the fire, and the fire glowed and sparkled as if it quite agreed. \u201cIt\u2019s all the same, you know, she and I being one. We planned to come home with the Carrols, a month or more ago, but they suddenly changed their minds, and decided to pass another winter in Paris. But Grandpa wanted to come home. He went to please me, and I couldn\u2019t let him go alone, neither could I leave Amy, and Mrs. Carrol had got English notions about chaperons and such nonsense, and wouldn\u2019t let Amy come with us. So I just settled the difficulty by saying, \u2018Let\u2019s be married, and then we can do as we like\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course you did. You always have things to suit you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot always,\u201d and something in Laurie\u2019s voice made Jo say hastily...\r\n\r\n\u201cHow did you ever get Aunt to agree?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was hard work, but between us, we talked her over, for we had heaps of good reasons on our side. There wasn\u2019t time to write and ask leave, but you all liked it, had consented to it by-and-by, and it was only \u2018taking time by the fetlock\u2019, as my wife says.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAren\u2019t we proud of those two words, and don\u2019t we like to say them?\u201d interrupted Jo, addressing the fire in her turn, and watching with delight the happy light it seemed to kindle in the eyes that had been so tragically gloomy when she saw them last.\r\n\r\n\u201cA trifle, perhaps, she\u2019s such a captivating little woman I can\u2019t help being proud of her. Well, then Uncle and Aunt were there to play propriety. We were so absorbed in one another we were of no mortal use apart, and that charming arrangement would make everything easy all round, so we did it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen, where, how?\u201d asked Jo, in a fever of feminine interest and curiosity, for she could not realize it a particle.\r\n\r\n\u201cSix weeks ago, at the American consul\u2019s, in Paris, a very quiet wedding of course, for even in our happiness we didn\u2019t forget dear little Beth.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo put her hand in his as he said that, and Laurie gently smoothed the little red pillow, which he remembered well.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy didn\u2019t you let us know afterward?\u201d asked Jo, in a quieter tone, when they had sat quite still a minute.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe wanted to surprise you. We thought we were coming directly home, at first, but the dear old gentleman, as soon as we were married, found he couldn\u2019t be ready under a month, at least, and sent us off to spend our honeymoon wherever we liked. Amy had once called Valrosa a regular honeymoon home, so we went there, and were as happy as people are but once in their lives. My faith! Wasn\u2019t it love among the roses!\u201d\r\n\r\nLaurie seemed to forget Jo for a minute, and Jo was glad of it, for the fact that he told her these things so freely and so naturally assured her that he had quite forgiven and forgotten. She tried to draw away her hand, but as if he guessed the thought that prompted the half-involuntary impulse, Laurie held it fast, and said, with a manly gravity she had never seen in him before...\r\n\r\n\u201cJo, dear, I want to say one thing, and then we\u2019ll put it by forever. As I told you in my letter when I wrote that Amy had been so kind to me, I never shall stop loving you, but the love is altered, and I have learned to see that it is better as it is. Amy and you changed places in my heart, that\u2019s all. I think it was meant to be so, and would have come about naturally, if I had waited, as you tried to make me, but I never could be patient, and so I got a heartache. I was a boy then, headstrong and violent, and it took a hard lesson to show me my mistake. For it was one, Jo, as you said, and I found it out, after making a fool of myself. Upon my word, I was so tumbled up in my mind, at one time, that I didn\u2019t know which I loved best, you or Amy, and tried to love you both alike. But I couldn\u2019t, and when I saw her in Switzerland, everything seemed to clear up all at once. You both got into your right places, and I felt sure that it was well off with the old love before it was on with the new, that I could honestly share my heart between sister Jo and wife Amy, and love them dearly. Will you believe it, and go back to the happy old times when we first knew one another?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll believe it, with all my heart, but, Teddy, we never can be boy and girl again. The happy old times can\u2019t come back, and we mustn\u2019t expect it. We are man and woman now, with sober work to do, for playtime is over, and we must give up frolicking. I\u2019m sure you feel this. I see the change in you, and you\u2019ll find it in me. I shall miss my boy, but I shall love the man as much, and admire him more, because he means to be what I hoped he would. We can\u2019t be little playmates any longer, but we will be brother and sister, to love and help one another all our lives, won\u2019t we, Laurie?\u201d\r\n\r\nHe did not say a word, but took the hand she offered him, and laid his face down on it for a minute, feeling that out of the grave of a boyish passion, there had risen a beautiful, strong friendship to bless them both. Presently Jo said cheerfully, for she didn\u2019t want the coming home to be a sad one, \u201cI can\u2019t make it true that you children are really married and going to set up housekeeping. Why, it seems only yesterday that I was buttoning Amy\u2019s pinafore, and pulling your hair when you teased. Mercy me, how time does fly!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAs one of the children is older than yourself, you needn\u2019t talk so like a grandma. I flatter myself I\u2019m a \u2018gentleman growed\u2019 as Peggotty said of David, and when you see Amy, you\u2019ll find her rather a precocious infant,\u201d said Laurie, looking amused at her maternal air.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou may be a little older in years, but I\u2019m ever so much older in feeling, Teddy. Women always are, and this last year has been such a hard one that I feel forty.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor Jo! We left you to bear it alone, while we went pleasuring. You are older. Here\u2019s a line, and there\u2019s another. Unless you smile, your eyes look sad, and when I touched the cushion, just now, I found a tear on it. You\u2019ve had a great deal to bear, and had to bear it all alone. What a selfish beast I\u2019ve been!\u201d and Laurie pulled his own hair, with a remorseful look.\r\n\r\nBut Jo only turned over the traitorous pillow, and answered, in a tone which she tried to make more cheerful, \u201cNo, I had Father and Mother to help me, and the dear babies to comfort me, and the thought that you and Amy were safe and happy, to make the troubles here easier to bear. I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it\u2019s good for me, and...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou never shall be again,\u201d broke in Laurie, putting his arm about her, as if to fence out every human ill. \u201cAmy and I can\u2019t get on without you, so you must come and teach \u2018the children\u2019 to keep house, and go halves in everything, just as we used to do, and let us pet you, and all be blissfully happy and friendly together.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf I shouldn\u2019t be in the way, it would be very pleasant. I begin to feel quite young already, for somehow all my troubles seemed to fly away when you came. You always were a comfort, Teddy,\u201d and Jo leaned her head on his shoulder, just as she did years ago, when Beth lay ill and Laurie told her to hold on to him.\r\n\r\nHe looked down at her, wondering if she remembered the time, but Jo was smiling to herself, as if in truth her troubles had all vanished at his coming.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou are the same Jo still, dropping tears about one minute, and laughing the next. You look a little wicked now. What is it, Grandma?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI was wondering how you and Amy get on together.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLike angels!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, of course, but which rules?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t mind telling you that she does now, at least I let her think so, it pleases her, you know. By-and-by we shall take turns, for marriage, they say, halves one\u2019s rights and doubles one\u2019s duties.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019ll go on as you begin, and Amy will rule you all the days of your life.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, she does it so imperceptibly that I don\u2019t think I shall mind much. She is the sort of woman who knows how to rule well. In fact, I rather like it, for she winds one round her finger as softly and prettily as a skein of silk, and makes you feel as if she was doing you a favor all the while.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat ever I should live to see you a henpecked husband and enjoying it!\u201d cried Jo, with uplifted hands.\r\n\r\nIt was good to see Laurie square his shoulders, and smile with masculine scorn at that insinuation, as he replied, with his \u201chigh and mighty\u201d air, \u201cAmy is too well-bred for that, and I am not the sort of man to submit to it. My wife and I respect ourselves and one another too much ever to tyrannize or quarrel.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo liked that, and thought the new dignity very becoming, but the boy seemed changing very fast into the man, and regret mingled with her pleasure.\r\n\r\n\u201cI am sure of that. Amy and you never did quarrel as we used to. She is the sun and I the wind, in the fable, and the sun managed the man best, you remember.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShe can blow him up as well as shine on him,\u201d laughed Laurie. \u201cSuch a lecture as I got at Nice! I give you my word it was a deal worse than any of your scoldings, a regular rouser. I\u2019ll tell you all about it sometime, she never will, because after telling me that she despised and was ashamed of me, she lost her heart to the despicable party and married the good-for-nothing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat baseness! Well, if she abuses you, come to me, and I\u2019ll defend you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI look as if I needed it, don\u2019t I?\u201d said Laurie, getting up and striking an attitude which suddenly changed from the imposing to the rapturous, as Amy\u2019s voice was heard calling, \u201cWhere is she? Where\u2019s my dear old Jo?\u201d\r\n\r\nIn trooped the whole family, and everyone was hugged and kissed all over again, and after several vain attempts, the three wanderers were set down to be looked at and exulted over. Mr. Laurence, hale and hearty as ever, was quite as much improved as the others by his foreign tour, for the crustiness seemed to be nearly gone, and the old-fashioned courtliness had received a polish which made it kindlier than ever. It was good to see him beam at \u2018my children\u2019, as he called the young pair. It was better still to see Amy pay him the daughterly duty and affection which completely won his old heart, and best of all, to watch Laurie revolve about the two, as if never tired of enjoying the pretty picture they made.\r\n\r\nThe minute she put her eyes upon Amy, Meg became conscious that her own dress hadn\u2019t a Parisian air, that young Mrs. Moffat would be entirely eclipsed by young Mrs. Laurence, and that \u2018her ladyship\u2019 was altogether a most elegant and graceful woman. Jo thought, as she watched the pair, \u201cHow well they look together! I was right, and Laurie has found the beautiful, accomplished girl who will become his home better than clumsy old Jo, and be a pride, not a torment to him.\u201d Mrs. March and her husband smiled and nodded at each other with happy faces, for they saw that their youngest had done well, not only in worldly things, but the better wealth of love, confidence, and happiness.\r\n\r\nFor Amy\u2019s face was full of the soft brightness which betokens a peaceful heart, her voice had a new tenderness in it, and the cool, prim carriage was changed to a gentle dignity, both womanly and winning. No little affectations marred it, and the cordial sweetness of her manner was more charming than the new beauty or the old grace, for it stamped her at once with the unmistakable sign of the true gentlewoman she had hoped to become.\r\n\r\n\u201cLove has done much for our little girl,\u201d said her mother softly.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe has had a good example before her all her life, my dear,\u201d Mr. March whispered back, with a loving look at the worn face and gray head beside him.\r\n\r\nDaisy found it impossible to keep her eyes off her \u2018pitty aunty\u2019, but attached herself like a lap dog to the wonderful chatelaine full of delightful charms. Demi paused to consider the new relationship before he compromised himself by the rash acceptance of a bribe, which took the tempting form of a family of wooden bears from Berne. A flank movement produced an unconditional surrender, however, for Laurie knew where to have him.\r\n\r\n\u201cYoung man, when I first had the honor of making your acquaintance you hit me in the face. Now I demand the satisfaction of a gentleman,\u201d and with that the tall uncle proceeded to toss and tousle the small nephew in a way that damaged his philosophical dignity as much as it delighted his boyish soul.\r\n\r\n\u201cBlest if she ain\u2019t in silk from head to foot; ain\u2019t it a relishin\u2019 sight to see her settin\u2019 there as fine as a fiddle, and hear folks calling little Amy \u2018Mis. Laurence!\u2019\u201d muttered old Hannah, who could not resist frequent \u201cpeeks\u201d through the slide as she set the table in a most decidedly promiscuous manner.\r\n\r\nMercy on us, how they did talk! first one, then the other, then all burst out together\u2014trying to tell the history of three years in half an hour. It was fortunate that tea was at hand, to produce a lull and provide refreshment\u2014for they would have been hoarse and faint if they had gone on much longer. Such a happy procession as filed away into the little dining room! Mr. March proudly escorted Mrs. Laurence. Mrs. March as proudly leaned on the arm of \u2018my son\u2019. The old gentleman took Jo, with a whispered, \u201cYou must be my girl now,\u201d and a glance at the empty corner by the fire, that made Jo whisper back, \u201cI\u2019ll try to fill her place, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe twins pranced behind, feeling that the millennium was at hand, for everyone was so busy with the newcomers that they were left to revel at their own sweet will, and you may be sure they made the most of the opportunity. Didn\u2019t they steal sips of tea, stuff gingerbread ad libitum, get a hot biscuit apiece, and as a crowning trespass, didn\u2019t they each whisk a captivating little tart into their tiny pockets, there to stick and crumble treacherously, teaching them that both human nature and a pastry are frail? Burdened with the guilty consciousness of the sequestered tarts, and fearing that Dodo\u2019s sharp eyes would pierce the thin disguise of cambric and merino which hid their booty, the little sinners attached themselves to \u2018Dranpa\u2019, who hadn\u2019t his spectacles on. Amy, who was handed about like refreshments, returned to the parlor on Father Laurence\u2019s arm. The others paired off as before, and this arrangement left Jo companionless. She did not mind it at the minute, for she lingered to answer Hannah\u2019s eager inquiry.\r\n\r\n\u201cWill Miss Amy ride in her coop (coupe), and use all them lovely silver dishes that\u2019s stored away over yander?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShouldn\u2019t wonder if she drove six white horses, ate off gold plate, and wore diamonds and point lace every day. Teddy thinks nothing too good for her,\u201d returned Jo with infinite satisfaction.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo more there is! Will you have hash or fishballs for breakfast?\u201d asked Hannah, who wisely mingled poetry and prose.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t care,\u201d and Jo shut the door, feeling that food was an uncongenial topic just then. She stood a minute looking at the party vanishing above, and as Demi\u2019s short plaid legs toiled up the last stair, a sudden sense of loneliness came over her so strongly that she looked about her with dim eyes, as if to find something to lean upon, for even Teddy had deserted her. If she had known what birthday gift was coming every minute nearer and nearer, she would not have said to herself, \u201cI\u2019ll weep a little weep when I go to bed. It won\u2019t do to be dismal now.\u201d Then she drew her hand over her eyes, for one of her boyish habits was never to know where her handkerchief was, and had just managed to call up a smile when there came a knock at the porch door.\r\n\r\nShe opened with hospitable haste, and started as if another ghost had come to surprise her, for there stood a tall bearded gentleman, beaming on her from the darkness like a midnight sun.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Mr. Bhaer, I am so glad to see you!\u201d cried Jo, with a clutch, as if she feared the night would swallow him up before she could get him in.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd I to see Miss Marsch, but no, you haf a party,\u201d and the Professor paused as the sound of voices and the tap of dancing feet came down to them.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, we haven\u2019t, only the family. My sister and friends have just come home, and we are all very happy. Come in, and make one of us.\u201d\r\n\r\nThough a very social man, I think Mr. Bhaer would have gone decorously away, and come again another day, but how could he, when Jo shut the door behind him, and bereft him of his hat? Perhaps her face had something to do with it, for she forgot to hide her joy at seeing him, and showed it with a frankness that proved irresistible to the solitary man, whose welcome far exceeded his boldest hopes.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf I shall not be Monsieur de Trop, I will so gladly see them all. You haf been ill, my friend?\u201d\r\n\r\nHe put the question abruptly, for, as Jo hung up his coat, the light fell on her face, and he saw a change in it.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot ill, but tired and sorrowful. We have had trouble since I saw you last.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAh, yes, I know. My heart was sore for you when I heard that,\u201d and he shook hands again, with such a sympathetic face that Jo felt as if no comfort could equal the look of the kind eyes, the grasp of the big, warm hand.\r\n\r\n\u201cFather, Mother, this is my friend, Professor Bhaer,\u201d she said, with a face and tone of such irrepressible pride and pleasure that she might as well have blown a trumpet and opened the door with a flourish.\r\n\r\nIf the stranger had any doubts about his reception, they were set at rest in a minute by the cordial welcome he received. Everyone greeted him kindly, for Jo\u2019s sake at first, but very soon they liked him for his own. They could not help it, for he carried the talisman that opens all hearts, and these simple people warmed to him at once, feeling even the more friendly because he was poor. For poverty enriches those who live above it, and is a sure passport to truly hospitable spirits. Mr. Bhaer sat looking about him with the air of a traveler who knocks at a strange door, and when it opens, finds himself at home. The children went to him like bees to a honeypot, and establishing themselves on each knee, proceeded to captivate him by rifling his pockets, pulling his beard, and investigating his watch, with juvenile audacity. The women telegraphed their approval to one another, and Mr. March, feeling that he had got a kindred spirit, opened his choicest stores for his guest\u2019s benefit, while silent John listened and enjoyed the talk, but said not a word, and Mr. Laurence found it impossible to go to sleep.\r\n\r\nIf Jo had not been otherwise engaged, Laurie\u2019s behavior would have amused her, for a faint twinge, not of jealousy, but something like suspicion, caused that gentleman to stand aloof at first, and observe the newcomer with brotherly circumspection. But it did not last long. He got interested in spite of himself, and before he knew it, was drawn into the circle. For Mr. Bhaer talked well in this genial atmosphere, and did himself justice. He seldom spoke to Laurie, but he looked at him often, and a shadow would pass across his face, as if regretting his own lost youth, as he watched the young man in his prime. Then his eyes would turn to Jo so wistfully that she would have surely answered the mute inquiry if she had seen it. But Jo had her own eyes to take care of, and feeling that they could not be trusted, she prudently kept them on the little sock she was knitting, like a model maiden aunt.\r\n\r\nA stealthy glance now and then refreshed her like sips of fresh water after a dusty walk, for the sidelong peeps showed her several propitious omens. Mr. Bhaer\u2019s face had lost the absent-minded expression, and looked all alive with interest in the present moment, actually young and handsome, she thought, forgetting to compare him with Laurie, as she usually did strange men, to their great detriment. Then he seemed quite inspired, though the burial customs of the ancients, to which the conversation had strayed, might not be considered an exhilarating topic. Jo quite glowed with triumph when Teddy got quenched in an argument, and thought to herself, as she watched her father\u2019s absorbed face, \u201cHow he would enjoy having such a man as my Professor to talk with every day!\u201d Lastly, Mr. Bhaer was dressed in a new suit of black, which made him look more like a gentleman than ever. His bushy hair had been cut and smoothly brushed, but didn\u2019t stay in order long, for in exciting moments, he rumpled it up in the droll way he used to do, and Jo liked it rampantly erect better than flat, because she thought it gave his fine forehead a Jove-like aspect. Poor Jo, how she did glorify that plain man, as she sat knitting away so quietly, yet letting nothing escape her, not even the fact that Mr. Bhaer actually had gold sleeve-buttons in his immaculate wristbands.\r\n\r\n\u201cDear old fellow! He couldn\u2019t have got himself up with more care if he\u2019d been going a-wooing,\u201d said Jo to herself, and then a sudden thought born of the words made her blush so dreadfully that she had to drop her ball, and go down after it to hide her face.\r\n\r\nThe maneuver did not succeed as well as she expected, however, for though just in the act of setting fire to a funeral pyre, the Professor dropped his torch, metaphorically speaking, and made a dive after the little blue ball. Of course they bumped their heads smartly together, saw stars, and both came up flushed and laughing, without the ball, to resume their seats, wishing they had not left them.\r\n\r\nNobody knew where the evening went to, for Hannah skillfully abstracted the babies at an early hour, nodding like two rosy poppies, and Mr. Laurence went home to rest. The others sat round the fire, talking away, utterly regardless of the lapse of time, till Meg, whose maternal mind was impressed with a firm conviction that Daisy had tumbled out of bed, and Demi set his nightgown afire studying the structure of matches, made a move to go.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe must have our sing, in the good old way, for we are all together again once more,\u201d said Jo, feeling that a good shout would be a safe and pleasant vent for the jubilant emotions of her soul.\r\n\r\nThey were not all there. But no one found the words thoughtless or untrue, for Beth still seemed among them, a peaceful presence, invisible, but dearer than ever, since death could not break the household league that love made dissoluble. The little chair stood in its old place. The tidy basket, with the bit of work she left unfinished when the needle grew \u2018so heavy\u2019, was still on its accustomed shelf. The beloved instrument, seldom touched now had not been moved, and above it Beth\u2019s face, serene and smiling, as in the early days, looked down upon them, seeming to say, \u201cBe happy. I am here.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPlay something, Amy. Let them hear how much you have improved,\u201d said Laurie, with pardonable pride in his promising pupil.\r\n\r\nBut Amy whispered, with full eyes, as she twirled the faded stool, \u201cNot tonight, dear. I can\u2019t show off tonight.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut she did show something better than brilliancy or skill, for she sang Beth\u2019s songs with a tender music in her voice which the best master could not have taught, and touched the listener\u2019s hearts with a sweeter power than any other inspiration could have given her. The room was very still, when the clear voice failed suddenly at the last line of Beth\u2019s favorite hymn. It was hard to say...\r\n\r\nEarth hath no sorrow that heaven cannot heal;\r\n\r\nand Amy leaned against her husband, who stood behind her, feeling that her welcome home was not quite perfect without Beth\u2019s kiss.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, we must finish with Mignon\u2019s song, for Mr. Bhaer sings that,\u201d said Jo, before the pause grew painful. And Mr. Bhaer cleared his throat with a gratified \u201cHem!\u201d as he stepped into the corner where Jo stood, saying...\r\n\r\n\u201cYou will sing with me? We go excellently well together.\u201d\r\n\r\nA pleasing fiction, by the way, for Jo had no more idea of music than a grasshopper. But she would have consented if he had proposed to sing a whole opera, and warbled away, blissfully regardless of time and tune. It didn\u2019t much matter, for Mr. Bhaer sang like a true German, heartily and well, and Jo soon subsided into a subdued hum, that she might listen to the mellow voice that seemed to sing for her alone.\r\n\r\nKnow\u2019st thou the land where the citron blooms,\r\n\r\nused to be the Professor\u2019s favorite line, for \u2018das land\u2019 meant Germany to him, but now he seemed to dwell, with peculiar warmth and melody, upon the words...\r\n\r\nThere, oh there, might I with thee,\r\nO, my beloved, go\r\n\r\nand one listener was so thrilled by the tender invitation that she longed to say she did know the land, and would joyfully depart thither whenever he liked.\r\n\r\nThe song was considered a great success, and the singer retired covered with laurels. But a few minutes afterward, he forgot his manners entirely, and stared at Amy putting on her bonnet, for she had been introduced simply as \u2018my sister\u2019, and no one had called her by her new name since he came. He forgot himself still further when Laurie said, in his most gracious manner, at parting...\r\n\r\n\u201cMy wife and I are very glad to meet you, sir. Please remember that there is always a welcome waiting for you over the way.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen the Professor thanked him so heartily, and looked so suddenly illuminated with satisfaction, that Laurie thought him the most delightfully demonstrative old fellow he ever met.\r\n\r\n\u201cI too shall go, but I shall gladly come again, if you will gif me leave, dear madame, for a little business in the city will keep me here some days.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe spoke to Mrs. March, but he looked at Jo, and the mother\u2019s voice gave as cordial an assent as did the daughter\u2019s eyes, for Mrs. March was not so blind to her children\u2019s interest as Mrs. Moffat supposed.\r\n\r\n\u201cI suspect that is a wise man,\u201d remarked Mr. March, with placid satisfaction, from the hearthrug, after the last guest had gone.\r\n\r\n\u201cI know he is a good one,\u201d added Mrs. March, with decided approval, as she wound up the clock.\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought you\u2019d like him,\u201d was all Jo said, as she slipped away to her bed.\r\n\r\nShe wondered what the business was that brought Mr. Bhaer to the city, and finally decided that he had been appointed to some great honor, somewhere, but had been too modest to mention the fact. If she had seen his face when, safe in his own room, he looked at the picture of a severe and rigid young lady, with a good deal of hair, who appeared to be gazing darkly into futurity, it might have thrown some light upon the subject, especially when he turned off the gas, and kissed the picture in the dark.\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-FOUR\r\nMY LORD AND LADY\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease, Madam Mother, could you lend me my wife for half an hour? The luggage has come, and I\u2019ve been making hay of Amy\u2019s Paris finery, trying to find some things I want,\u201d said Laurie, coming in the next day to find Mrs. Laurence sitting in her mother\u2019s lap, as if being made \u2018the baby\u2019 again.\r\n\r\n\u201cCertainly. Go, dear, I forgot that you have any home but this,\u201d and Mrs. March pressed the white hand that wore the wedding ring, as if asking pardon for her maternal covetousness.\r\n\r\n\u201cI shouldn\u2019t have come over if I could have helped it, but I can\u2019t get on without my little woman any more than a...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWeathercock can without the wind,\u201d suggested Jo, as he paused for a simile. Jo had grown quite her own saucy self again since Teddy came home.\r\n\r\n\u201cExactly, for Amy keeps me pointing due west most of the time, with only an occasional whiffle round to the south, and I haven\u2019t had an easterly spell since I was married. Don\u2019t know anything about the north, but am altogether salubrious and balmy, hey, my lady?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLovely weather so far. I don\u2019t know how long it will last, but I\u2019m not afraid of storms, for I\u2019m learning how to sail my ship. Come home, dear, and I\u2019ll find your bootjack. I suppose that\u2019s what you are rummaging after among my things. Men are so helpless, Mother,\u201d said Amy, with a matronly air, which delighted her husband.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat are you going to do with yourselves after you get settled?\u201d asked Jo, buttoning Amy\u2019s cloak as she used to button her pinafores.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe have our plans. We don\u2019t mean to say much about them yet, because we are such very new brooms, but we don\u2019t intend to be idle. I\u2019m going into business with a devotion that shall delight Grandfather, and prove to him that I\u2019m not spoiled. I need something of the sort to keep me steady. I\u2019m tired of dawdling, and mean to work like a man.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd Amy, what is she going to do?\u201d asked Mrs. March, well pleased at Laurie\u2019s decision and the energy with which he spoke.\r\n\r\n\u201cAfter doing the civil all round, and airing our best bonnet, we shall astonish you by the elegant hospitalities of our mansion, the brilliant society we shall draw about us, and the beneficial influence we shall exert over the world at large. That\u2019s about it, isn\u2019t it, Madame Recamier?\u201d asked Laurie with a quizzical look at Amy.\r\n\r\n\u201cTime will show. Come away, Impertinence, and don\u2019t shock my family by calling me names before their faces,\u201d answered Amy, resolving that there should be a home with a good wife in it before she set up a salon as a queen of society.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow happy those children seem together!\u201d observed Mr. March, finding it difficult to become absorbed in his Aristotle after the young couple had gone.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, and I think it will last,\u201d added Mrs. March, with the restful expression of a pilot who has brought a ship safely into port.\r\n\r\n\u201cI know it will. Happy Amy!\u201d and Jo sighed, then smiled brightly as Professor Bhaer opened the gate with an impatient push.\r\n\r\nLater in the evening, when his mind had been set at rest about the bootjack, Laurie said suddenly to his wife, \u201cMrs. Laurence.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy Lord!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat man intends to marry our Jo!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hope so, don\u2019t you, dear?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, my love, I consider him a trump, in the fullest sense of that expressive word, but I do wish he was a little younger and a good deal richer.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, Laurie, don\u2019t be too fastidious and worldly-minded. If they love one another it doesn\u2019t matter a particle how old they are nor how poor. Women never should marry for money...\u201d Amy caught herself up short as the words escaped her, and looked at her husband, who replied, with malicious gravity...\r\n\r\n\u201cCertainly not, though you do hear charming girls say that they intend to do it sometimes. If my memory serves me, you once thought it your duty to make a rich match. That accounts, perhaps, for your marrying a good-for-nothing like me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, my dearest boy, don\u2019t, don\u2019t say that! I forgot you were rich when I said \u2018Yes\u2019. I\u2019d have married you if you hadn\u2019t a penny, and I sometimes wish you were poor that I might show how much I love you.\u201d And Amy, who was very dignified in public and very fond in private, gave convincing proofs of the truth of her words.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t really think I am such a mercenary creature as I tried to be once, do you? It would break my heart if you didn\u2019t believe that I\u2019d gladly pull in the same boat with you, even if you had to get your living by rowing on the lake.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAm I an idiot and a brute? How could I think so, when you refused a richer man for me, and won\u2019t let me give you half I want to now, when I have the right? Girls do it every day, poor things, and are taught to think it is their only salvation, but you had better lessons, and though I trembled for you at one time, I was not disappointed, for the daughter was true to the mother\u2019s teaching. I told Mamma so yesterday, and she looked as glad and grateful as if I\u2019d given her a check for a million, to be spent in charity. You are not listening to my moral remarks, Mrs. Laurence,\u201d and Laurie paused, for Amy\u2019s eyes had an absent look, though fixed upon his face.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I am, and admiring the mole in your chin at the same time. I don\u2019t wish to make you vain, but I must confess that I\u2019m prouder of my handsome husband than of all his money. Don\u2019t laugh, but your nose is such a comfort to me,\u201d and Amy softly caressed the well-cut feature with artistic satisfaction.\r\n\r\nLaurie had received many compliments in his life, but never one that suited him better, as he plainly showed though he did laugh at his wife\u2019s peculiar taste, while she said slowly, \u201cMay I ask you a question, dear?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOf course, you may.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShall you care if Jo does marry Mr. Bhaer?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, that\u2019s the trouble is it? I thought there was something in the dimple that didn\u2019t quite suit you. Not being a dog in the manger, but the happiest fellow alive, I assure you I can dance at Jo\u2019s wedding with a heart as light as my heels. Do you doubt it, my darling?\u201d\r\n\r\nAmy looked up at him, and was satisfied. Her little jealous fear vanished forever, and she thanked him, with a face full of love and confidence.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish we could do something for that capital old Professor. Couldn\u2019t we invent a rich relation, who shall obligingly die out there in Germany, and leave him a tidy little fortune?\u201d said Laurie, when they began to pace up and down the long drawing room, arm in arm, as they were fond of doing, in memory of the chateau garden.\r\n\r\n\u201cJo would find us out, and spoil it all. She is very proud of him, just as he is, and said yesterday that she thought poverty was a beautiful thing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBless her dear heart! She won\u2019t think so when she has a literary husband, and a dozen little professors and professorins to support. We won\u2019t interfere now, but watch our chance, and do them a good turn in spite of themselves. I owe Jo for a part of my education, and she believes in people\u2019s paying their honest debts, so I\u2019ll get round her in that way.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow delightful it is to be able to help others, isn\u2019t it? That was always one of my dreams, to have the power of giving freely, and thanks to you, the dream has come true.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAh, we\u2019ll do quantities of good, won\u2019t we? There\u2019s one sort of poverty that I particularly like to help. Out-and-out beggars get taken care of, but poor gentle folks fare badly, because they won\u2019t ask, and people don\u2019t dare to offer charity. Yet there are a thousand ways of helping them, if one only knows how to do it so delicately that it does not offend. I must say, I like to serve a decayed gentleman better than a blarnerying beggar. I suppose it\u2019s wrong, but I do, though it is harder.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause it takes a gentleman to do it,\u201d added the other member of the domestic admiration society.\r\n\r\n\u201cThank you, I\u2019m afraid I don\u2019t deserve that pretty compliment. But I was going to say that while I was dawdling about abroad, I saw a good many talented young fellows making all sorts of sacrifices, and enduring real hardships, that they might realize their dreams. Splendid fellows, some of them, working like heros, poor and friendless, but so full of courage, patience, and ambition that I was ashamed of myself, and longed to give them a right good lift. Those are people whom it\u2019s a satisfaction to help, for if they\u2019ve got genius, it\u2019s an honor to be allowed to serve them, and not let it be lost or delayed for want of fuel to keep the pot boiling. If they haven\u2019t, it\u2019s a pleasure to comfort the poor souls, and keep them from despair when they find it out.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, indeed, and there\u2019s another class who can\u2019t ask, and who suffer in silence. I know something of it, for I belonged to it before you made a princess of me, as the king does the beggarmaid in the old story. Ambitious girls have a hard time, Laurie, and often have to see youth, health, and precious opportunities go by, just for want of a little help at the right minute. People have been very kind to me, and whenever I see girls struggling along, as we used to do, I want to put out my hand and help them, as I was helped.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd so you shall, like an angel as you are!\u201d cried Laurie, resolving, with a glow of philanthropic zeal, to found and endow an institution for the express benefit of young women with artistic tendencies. \u201cRich people have no right to sit down and enjoy themselves, or let their money accumulate for others to waste. It\u2019s not half so sensible to leave legacies when one dies as it is to use the money wisely while alive, and enjoy making one\u2019s fellow creatures happy with it. We\u2019ll have a good time ourselves, and add an extra relish to our own pleasure by giving other people a generous taste. Will you be a little Dorcas, going about emptying a big basket of comforts, and filling it up with good deeds?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWith all my heart, if you will be a brave St. Martin, stopping as you ride gallantly through the world to share your cloak with the beggar.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a bargain, and we shall get the best of it!\u201d\r\n\r\nSo the young pair shook hands upon it, and then paced happily on again, feeling that their pleasant home was more homelike because they hoped to brighten other homes, believing that their own feet would walk more uprightly along the flowery path before them, if they smoothed rough ways for other feet, and feeling that their hearts were more closely knit together by a love which could tenderly remember those less blest than they.\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-FIVE\r\nDAISY AND DEMI\r\n\r\nI cannot feel that I have done my duty as humble historian of the March family, without devoting at least one chapter to the two most precious and important members of it. Daisy and Demi had now arrived at years of discretion, for in this fast age babies of three or four assert their rights, and get them, too, which is more than many of their elders do. If there ever were a pair of twins in danger of being utterly spoiled by adoration, it was these prattling Brookes. Of course they were the most remarkable children ever born, as will be shown when I mention that they walked at eight months, talked fluently at twelve months, and at two years they took their places at table, and behaved with a propriety which charmed all beholders. At three, Daisy demanded a \u2018needler\u2019, and actually made a bag with four stitches in it. She likewise set up housekeeping in the sideboard, and managed a microscopic cooking stove with a skill that brought tears of pride to Hannah\u2019s eyes, while Demi learned his letters with his grandfather, who invented a new mode of teaching the alphabet by forming letters with his arms and legs, thus uniting gymnastics for head and heels. The boy early developed a mechanical genius which delighted his father and distracted his mother, for he tried to imitate every machine he saw, and kept the nursery in a chaotic condition, with his \u2018sewinsheen\u2019, a mysterious structure of string, chairs, clothespins, and spools, for wheels to go \u2018wound and wound\u2019. Also a basket hung over the back of a chair, in which he vainly tried to hoist his too confiding sister, who, with feminine devotion, allowed her little head to be bumped till rescued, when the young inventor indignantly remarked, \u201cWhy, Marmar, dat\u2019s my lellywaiter, and me\u2019s trying to pull her up.\u201d\r\n\r\nThough utterly unlike in character, the twins got on remarkably well together, and seldom quarreled more than thrice a day. Of course, Demi tyrannized over Daisy, and gallantly defended her from every other aggressor, while Daisy made a galley slave of herself, and adored her brother as the one perfect being in the world. A rosy, chubby, sunshiny little soul was Daisy, who found her way to everybody\u2019s heart, and nestled there. One of the captivating children, who seem made to be kissed and cuddled, adorned and adored like little goddesses, and produced for general approval on all festive occasions. Her small virtues were so sweet that she would have been quite angelic if a few small naughtinesses had not kept her delightfully human. It was all fair weather in her world, and every morning she scrambled up to the window in her little nightgown to look out, and say, no matter whether it rained or shone, \u201cOh, pitty day, oh, pitty day!\u201d Everyone was a friend, and she offered kisses to a stranger so confidingly that the most inveterate bachelor relented, and baby-lovers became faithful worshipers.\r\n\r\n\u201cMe loves evvybody,\u201d she once said, opening her arms, with her spoon in one hand, and her mug in the other, as if eager to embrace and nourish the whole world.\r\n\r\nAs she grew, her mother began to feel that the Dovecote would be blessed by the presence of an inmate as serene and loving as that which had helped to make the old house home, and to pray that she might be spared a loss like that which had lately taught them how long they had entertained an angel unawares. Her grandfather often called her \u2018Beth\u2019, and her grandmother watched over her with untiring devotion, as if trying to atone for some past mistake, which no eye but her own could see.\r\n\r\nDemi, like a true Yankee, was of an inquiring turn, wanting to know everything, and often getting much disturbed because he could not get satisfactory answers to his perpetual \u201cWhat for?\u201d\r\n\r\nHe also possessed a philosophic bent, to the great delight of his grandfather, who used to hold Socratic conversations with him, in which the precocious pupil occasionally posed his teacher, to the undisguised satisfaction of the womenfolk.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat makes my legs go, Dranpa?\u201d asked the young philosopher, surveying those active portions of his frame with a meditative air, while resting after a go-to-bed frolic one night.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s your little mind, Demi,\u201d replied the sage, stroking the yellow head respectfully.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat is a little mine?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is something which makes your body move, as the spring made the wheels go in my watch when I showed it to you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOpen me. I want to see it go wound.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t do that any more than you could open the watch. God winds you up, and you go till He stops you.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDoes I?\u201d and Demi\u2019s brown eyes grew big and bright as he took in the new thought. \u201cIs I wounded up like the watch?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, but I can\u2019t show you how, for it is done when we don\u2019t see.\u201d\r\n\r\nDemi felt his back, as if expecting to find it like that of the watch, and then gravely remarked, \u201cI dess Dod does it when I\u2019s asleep.\u201d\r\n\r\nA careful explanation followed, to which he listened so attentively that his anxious grandmother said, \u201cMy dear, do you think it wise to talk about such things to that baby? He\u2019s getting great bumps over his eyes, and learning to ask the most unanswerable questions.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf he is old enough to ask the question he is old enough to receive true answers. I am not putting the thoughts into his head, but helping him unfold those already there. These children are wiser than we are, and I have no doubt the boy understands every word I have said to him. Now, Demi, tell me where you keep your mind.\u201d\r\n\r\nIf the boy had replied like Alcibiades, \u201cBy the gods, Socrates, I cannot tell,\u201d his grandfather would not have been surprised, but when, after standing a moment on one leg, like a meditative young stork, he answered, in a tone of calm conviction, \u201cIn my little belly,\u201d the old gentleman could only join in Grandma\u2019s laugh, and dismiss the class in metaphysics.\r\n\r\nThere might have been cause for maternal anxiety, if Demi had not given convincing proofs that he was a true boy, as well as a budding philosopher, for often, after a discussion which caused Hannah to prophesy, with ominous nods, \u201cThat child ain\u2019t long for this world,\u201d he would turn about and set her fears at rest by some of the pranks with which dear, dirty, naughty little rascals distract and delight their parent\u2019s souls.\r\n\r\nMeg made many moral rules, and tried to keep them, but what mother was ever proof against the winning wiles, the ingenious evasions, or the tranquil audacity of the miniature men and women who so early show themselves accomplished Artful Dodgers?\r\n\r\n\u201cNo more raisins, Demi. They\u2019ll make you sick,\u201d says Mamma to the young person who offers his services in the kitchen with unfailing regularity on plum-pudding day.\r\n\r\n\u201cMe likes to be sick.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t want to have you, so run away and help Daisy make patty cakes.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe reluctantly departs, but his wrongs weigh upon his spirit, and by-and-by when an opportunity comes to redress them, he outwits Mamma by a shrewd bargain.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow you have been good children, and I\u2019ll play anything you like,\u201d says Meg, as she leads her assistant cooks upstairs, when the pudding is safely bouncing in the pot.\r\n\r\n\u201cTruly, Marmar?\u201d asks Demi, with a brilliant idea in his well-powdered head.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, truly. Anything you say,\u201d replies the shortsighted parent, preparing herself to sing, \u201cThe Three Little Kittens\u201d half a dozen times over, or to take her family to \u201cBuy a penny bun,\u201d regardless of wind or limb. But Demi corners her by the cool reply...\r\n\r\n\u201cThen we\u2019ll go and eat up all the raisins.\u201d\r\n\r\nAunt Dodo was chief playmate and confidante of both children, and the trio turned the little house topsy-turvy. Aunt Amy was as yet only a name to them, Aunt Beth soon faded into a pleasantly vague memory, but Aunt Dodo was a living reality, and they made the most of her, for which compliment she was deeply grateful. But when Mr. Bhaer came, Jo neglected her playfellows, and dismay and desolation fell upon their little souls. Daisy, who was fond of going about peddling kisses, lost her best customer and became bankrupt. Demi, with infantile penetration, soon discovered that Dodo like to play with \u2018the bear-man\u2019 better than she did him, but though hurt, he concealed his anguish, for he hadn\u2019t the heart to insult a rival who kept a mine of chocolate drops in his waistcoat pocket, and a watch that could be taken out of its case and freely shaken by ardent admirers.\r\n\r\nSome persons might have considered these pleasing liberties as bribes, but Demi didn\u2019t see it in that light, and continued to patronize the \u2018the bear-man\u2019 with pensive affability, while Daisy bestowed her small affections upon him at the third call, and considered his shoulder her throne, his arm her refuge, his gifts treasures surpassing worth.\r\n\r\nGentlemen are sometimes seized with sudden fits of admiration for the young relatives of ladies whom they honor with their regard, but this counterfeit philoprogenitiveness sits uneasily upon them, and does not deceive anybody a particle. Mr. Bhaer\u2019s devotion was sincere, however likewise effective\u2014for honesty is the best policy in love as in law. He was one of the men who are at home with children, and looked particularly well when little faces made a pleasant contrast with his manly one. His business, whatever it was, detained him from day to day, but evening seldom failed to bring him out to see\u2014well, he always asked for Mr. March, so I suppose he was the attraction. The excellent papa labored under the delusion that he was, and reveled in long discussions with the kindred spirit, till a chance remark of his more observing grandson suddenly enlightened him.\r\n\r\nMr. Bhaer came in one evening to pause on the threshold of the study, astonished by the spectacle that met his eye. Prone upon the floor lay Mr. March, with his respectable legs in the air, and beside him, likewise prone, was Demi, trying to imitate the attitude with his own short, scarlet-stockinged legs, both grovelers so seriously absorbed that they were unconscious of spectators, till Mr. Bhaer laughed his sonorous laugh, and Jo cried out, with a scandalized face...\r\n\r\n\u201cFather, Father, here\u2019s the Professor!\u201d\r\n\r\nDown went the black legs and up came the gray head, as the preceptor said, with undisturbed dignity, \u201cGood evening, Mr. Bhaer. Excuse me for a moment. We are just finishing our lesson. Now, Demi, make the letter and tell its name.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI knows him!\u201d and, after a few convulsive efforts, the red legs took the shape of a pair of compasses, and the intelligent pupil triumphantly shouted, \u201cIt\u2019s a We, Dranpa, it\u2019s a We!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s a born Weller,\u201d laughed Jo, as her parent gathered himself up, and her nephew tried to stand on his head, as the only mode of expressing his satisfaction that school was over.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat have you been at today, bubchen?\u201d asked Mr. Bhaer, picking up the gymnast.\r\n\r\n\u201cMe went to see little Mary.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd what did you there?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI kissed her,\u201d began Demi, with artless frankness.\r\n\r\n\u201cPrut! Thou beginnest early. What did the little Mary say to that?\u201d asked Mr. Bhaer, continuing to confess the young sinner, who stood upon the knee, exploring the waistcoat pocket.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, she liked it, and she kissed me, and I liked it. Don\u2019t little boys like little girls?\u201d asked Demi, with his mouth full, and an air of bland satisfaction.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou precocious chick! Who put that into your head?\u201d said Jo, enjoying the innocent revelation as much as the Professor.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2019Tisn\u2019t in mine head, it\u2019s in mine mouf,\u201d answered literal Demi, putting out his tongue, with a chocolate drop on it, thinking she alluded to confectionery, not ideas.\r\n\r\n\u201cThou shouldst save some for the little friend. Sweets to the sweet, mannling,\u201d and Mr. Bhaer offered Jo some, with a look that made her wonder if chocolate was not the nectar drunk by the gods. Demi also saw the smile, was impressed by it, and artlessy inquired. ..\r\n\r\n\u201cDo great boys like great girls, to, \u2019Fessor?\u201d\r\n\r\nLike young Washington, Mr. Bhaer \u2018couldn\u2019t tell a lie\u2019, so he gave the somewhat vague reply that he believed they did sometimes, in a tone that made Mr. March put down his clothesbrush, glance at Jo\u2019s retiring face, and then sink into his chair, looking as if the \u2018precocious chick\u2019 had put an idea into his head that was both sweet and sour.\r\n\r\nWhy Dodo, when she caught him in the china closet half an hour afterward, nearly squeezed the breath out of his little body with a tender embrace, instead of shaking him for being there, and why she followed up this novel performance by the unexpected gift of a big slice of bread and jelly, remained one of the problems over which Demi puzzled his small wits, and was forced to leave unsolved forever.\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-SIX\r\nUNDER THE UMBRELLA\r\n\r\nWhile Laurie and Amy were taking conjugal strolls over velvet carpets, as they set their house in order, and planned a blissful future, Mr. Bhaer and Jo were enjoying promenades of a different sort, along muddy roads and sodden fields.\r\n\r\n\u201cI always do take a walk toward evening, and I don\u2019t know why I should give it up, just because I happen to meet the Professor on his way out,\u201d said Jo to herself, after two or three encounters, for though there were two paths to Meg\u2019s whichever one she took she was sure to meet him, either going or returning. He was always walking rapidly, and never seemed to see her until quite close, when he would look as if his short-sighted eyes had failed to recognize the approaching lady till that moment. Then, if she was going to Meg\u2019s he always had something for the babies. If her face was turned homeward, he had merely strolled down to see the river, and was just returning, unless they were tired of his frequent calls.\r\n\r\nUnder the circumstances, what could Jo do but greet him civilly, and invite him in? If she was tired of his visits, she concealed her weariness with perfect skill, and took care that there should be coffee for supper, \u201cas Friedrich\u2014I mean Mr. Bhaer\u2014doesn\u2019t like tea.\u201d\r\n\r\nBy the second week, everyone knew perfectly well what was going on, yet everyone tried to look as if they were stone-blind to the changes in Jo\u2019s face. They never asked why she sang about her work, did up her hair three times a day, and got so blooming with her evening exercise. And no one seemed to have the slightest suspicion that Professor Bhaer, while talking philosophy with the father, was giving the daughter lessons in love.\r\n\r\nJo couldn\u2019t even lose her heart in a decorous manner, but sternly tried to quench her feelings, and failing to do so, led a somewhat agitated life. She was mortally afraid of being laughed at for surrendering, after her many and vehement declarations of independence. Laurie was her especial dread, but thanks to the new manager, he behaved with praiseworthy propriety, never called Mr. Bhaer \u2018a capital old fellow\u2019 in public, never alluded, in the remotest manner, to Jo\u2019s improved appearance, or expressed the least surprise at seeing the Professor\u2019s hat on the Marches\u2019 table nearly every evening. But he exulted in private and longed for the time to come when he could give Jo a piece of plate, with a bear and a ragged staff on it as an appropriate coat of arms.\r\n\r\nFor a fortnight, the Professor came and went with lover-like regularity. Then he stayed away for three whole days, and made no sign, a proceeding which caused everybody to look sober, and Jo to become pensive, at first, and then\u2014alas for romance\u2014very cross.\r\n\r\n\u201cDisgusted, I dare say, and gone home as suddenly as he came. It\u2019s nothing to me, of course, but I should think he would have come and bid us goodbye like a gentleman,\u201d she said to herself, with a despairing look at the gate, as she put on her things for the customary walk one dull afternoon.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou\u2019d better take the little umbrella, dear. It looks like rain,\u201d said her mother, observing that she had on her new bonnet, but not alluding to the fact.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Marmee, do you want anything in town? I\u2019ve got to run in and get some paper,\u201d returned Jo, pulling out the bow under her chin before the glass as an excuse for not looking at her mother.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I want some twilled silesia, a paper of number nine needles, and two yards of narrow lavender ribbon. Have you got your thick boots on, and something warm under your cloak?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI believe so,\u201d answered Jo absently.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you happen to meet Mr. Bhaer, bring him home to tea. I quite long to see the dear man,\u201d added Mrs. March.\r\n\r\nJo heard that, but made no answer, except to kiss her mother, and walk rapidly away, thinking with a glow of gratitude, in spite of her heartache, \u201cHow good she is to me! What do girls do who haven\u2019t any mothers to help them through their troubles?\u201d\r\n\r\nThe dry-goods stores were not down among the counting-houses, banks, and wholesale warerooms, where gentlemen most do congregate, but Jo found herself in that part of the city before she did a single errand, loitering along as if waiting for someone, examining engineering instruments in one window and samples of wool in another, with most unfeminine interest, tumbling over barrels, being half-smothered by descending bales, and hustled unceremoniously by busy men who looked as if they wondered \u2018how the deuce she got there\u2019. A drop of rain on her cheek recalled her thoughts from baffled hopes to ruined ribbons. For the drops continued to fall, and being a woman as well as a lover, she felt that, though it was too late to save her heart, she might her bonnet. Now she remembered the little umbrella, which she had forgotten to take in her hurry to be off, but regret was unavailing, and nothing could be done but borrow one or submit to a drenching. She looked up at the lowering sky, down at the crimson bow already flecked with black, forward along the muddy street, then one long, lingering look behind, at a certain grimy warehouse, with \u2018Hoffmann, Swartz, & Co.\u2019 over the door, and said to herself, with a sternly reproachful air...\r\n\r\n\u201cIt serves me right! what business had I to put on all my best things and come philandering down here, hoping to see the Professor? Jo, I\u2019m ashamed of you! No, you shall not go there to borrow an umbrella, or find out where he is, from his friends. You shall trudge away, and do your errands in the rain, and if you catch your death and ruin your bonnet, it\u2019s no more than you deserve. Now then!\u201d\r\n\r\nWith that she rushed across the street so impetuously that she narrowly escaped annihilation from a passing truck, and precipitated herself into the arms of a stately old gentleman, who said, \u201cI beg pardon, ma\u2019am,\u201d and looked mortally offended. Somewhat daunted, Jo righted herself, spread her handkerchief over the devoted ribbons, and putting temptation behind her, hurried on, with increasing dampness about the ankles, and much clashing of umbrellas overhead. The fact that a somewhat dilapidated blue one remained stationary above the unprotected bonnet attracted her attention, and looking up, she saw Mr. Bhaer looking down.\r\n\r\n\u201cI feel to know the strong-minded lady who goes so bravely under many horse noses, and so fast through much mud. What do you down here, my friend?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m shopping.\u201d\r\n\r\nMr. Bhaer smiled, as he glanced from the pickle factory on one side to the wholesale hide and leather concern on the other, but he only said politely, \u201cYou haf no umbrella. May I go also, and take for you the bundles?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, thank you.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo\u2019s cheeks were as red as her ribbon, and she wondered what he thought of her, but she didn\u2019t care, for in a minute she found herself walking away arm in arm with her Professor, feeling as if the sun had suddenly burst out with uncommon brilliancy, that the world was all right again, and that one thoroughly happy woman was paddling through the wet that day.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe thought you had gone,\u201d said Jo hastily, for she knew he was looking at her. Her bonnet wasn\u2019t big enough to hide her face, and she feared he might think the joy it betrayed unmaidenly.\r\n\r\n\u201cDid you believe that I should go with no farewell to those who haf been so heavenly kind to me?\u201d he asked so reproachfully that she felt as if she had insulted him by the suggestion, and answered heartily...\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I didn\u2019t. I knew you were busy about your own affairs, but we rather missed you, Father and Mother especially.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m always glad to see you, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn her anxiety to keep her voice quite calm, Jo made it rather cool, and the frosty little monosyllable at the end seemed to chill the Professor, for his smile vanished, as he said gravely...\r\n\r\n\u201cI thank you, and come one more time before I go.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYou are going, then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI haf no longer any business here, it is done.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSuccessfully, I hope?\u201d said Jo, for the bitterness of disappointment was in that short reply of his.\r\n\r\n\u201cI ought to think so, for I haf a way opened to me by which I can make my bread and gif my Junglings much help.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTell me, please! I like to know all about the\u2014the boys,\u201d said Jo eagerly.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat is so kind, I gladly tell you. My friends find for me a place in a college, where I teach as at home, and earn enough to make the way smooth for Franz and Emil. For this I should be grateful, should I not?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIndeed you should. How splendid it will be to have you doing what you like, and be able to see you often, and the boys!\u201d cried Jo, clinging to the lads as an excuse for the satisfaction she could not help betraying.\r\n\r\n\u201cAh! But we shall not meet often, I fear, this place is at the West.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo far away!\u201d and Jo left her skirts to their fate, as if it didn\u2019t matter now what became of her clothes or herself.\r\n\r\nMr. Bhaer could read several languages, but he had not learned to read women yet. He flattered himself that he knew Jo pretty well, and was, therefore, much amazed by the contradictions of voice, face, and manner, which she showed him in rapid succession that day, for she was in half a dozen different moods in the course of half an hour. When she met him she looked surprised, though it was impossible to help suspecting that she had come for that express purpose. When he offered her his arm, she took it with a look that filled him with delight, but when he asked if she missed him, she gave such a chilly, formal reply that despair fell upon him. On learning his good fortune she almost clapped her hands. Was the joy all for the boys? Then on hearing his destination, she said, \u201cSo far away!\u201d in a tone of despair that lifted him on to a pinnacle of hope, but the next minute she tumbled him down again by observing, like one entirely absorbed in the matter...\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s the place for my errands. Will you come in? It won\u2019t take long.\u201d\r\n\r\nJo rather prided herself upon her shopping capabilities, and particularly wished to impress her escort with the neatness and dispatch with which she would accomplish the business. But owing to the flutter she was in, everything went amiss. She upset the tray of needles, forgot the silesia was to be \u2018twilled\u2019 till it was cut off, gave the wrong change, and covered herself with confusion by asking for lavender ribbon at the calico counter. Mr. Bhaer stood by, watching her blush and blunder, and as he watched, his own bewilderment seemed to subside, for he was beginning to see that on some occasions, women, like dreams, go by contraries.\r\n\r\nWhen they came out, he put the parcel under his arm with a more cheerful aspect, and splashed through the puddles as if he rather enjoyed it on the whole.\r\n\r\n\u201cShould we no do a little what you call shopping for the babies, and haf a farewell feast tonight if I go for my last call at your so pleasant home?\u201d he asked, stopping before a window full of fruit and flowers.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat will we buy?\u201d asked Jo, ignoring the latter part of his speech, and sniffing the mingled odors with an affectation of delight as they went in.\r\n\r\n\u201cMay they haf oranges and figs?\u201d asked Mr. Bhaer, with a paternal air.\r\n\r\n\u201cThey eat them when they can get them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you care for nuts?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLike a squirrel.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHamburg grapes. Yes, we shall drink to the Fatherland in those?\u201d\r\n\r\nJo frowned upon that piece of extravagance, and asked why he didn\u2019t buy a frail of dates, a cask of raisins, and a bag of almonds, and be done with it? Whereat Mr. Bhaer confiscated her purse, produced his own, and finished the marketing by buying several pounds of grapes, a pot of rosy daisies, and a pretty jar of honey, to be regarded in the light of a demijohn. Then distorting his pockets with knobby bundles, and giving her the flowers to hold, he put up the old umbrella, and they traveled on again.\r\n\r\n\u201cMiss Marsch, I haf a great favor to ask of you,\u201d began the Professor, after a moist promenade of half a block.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, sir?\u201d and Jo\u2019s heart began to beat so hard she was afraid he would hear it.\r\n\r\n\u201cI am bold to say it in spite of the rain, because so short a time remains to me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, sir,\u201d and Jo nearly crushed the small flowerpot with the sudden squeeze she gave it.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish to get a little dress for my Tina, and I am too stupid to go alone. Will you kindly gif me a word of taste and help?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, sir,\u201d and Jo felt as calm and cool all of a sudden as if she had stepped into a refrigerator.\r\n\r\n\u201cPerhaps also a shawl for Tina\u2019s mother, she is so poor and sick, and the husband is such a care. Yes, yes, a thick, warm shawl would be a friendly thing to take the little mother.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll do it with pleasure, Mr. Bhaer.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m going very fast, and he\u2019s getting dearer every minute,\u201d added Jo to herself, then with a mental shake she entered into the business with an energy that was pleasant to behold.\r\n\r\nMr. Bhaer left it all to her, so she chose a pretty gown for Tina, and then ordered out the shawls. The clerk, being a married man, condescended to take an interest in the couple, who appeared to be shopping for their family.\r\n\r\n\u201cYour lady may prefer this. It\u2019s a superior article, a most desirable color, quite chaste and genteel,\u201d he said, shaking out a comfortable gray shawl, and throwing it over Jo\u2019s shoulders.\r\n\r\n\u201cDoes this suit you, Mr. Bhaer?\u201d she asked, turning her back to him, and feeling deeply grateful for the chance of hiding her face.\r\n\r\n\u201cExcellently well, we will haf it,\u201d answered the Professor, smiling to himself as he paid for it, while Jo continued to rummage the counters like a confirmed bargain-hunter.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow shall we go home?\u201d he asked, as if the words were very pleasant to him.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, it\u2019s late, and I\u2019m so tired.\u201d Jo\u2019s voice was more pathetic than she knew. For now the sun seemed to have gone in as suddenly as it came out, and the world grew muddy and miserable again, and for the first time she discovered that her feet were cold, her head ached, and that her heart was colder than the former, fuller of pain than the latter. Mr. Bhaer was going away, he only cared for her as a friend, it was all a mistake, and the sooner it was over the better. With this idea in her head, she hailed an approaching omnibus with such a hasty gesture that the daisies flew out of the pot and were badly damaged.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis is not our omniboos,\u201d said the Professor, waving the loaded vehicle away, and stopping to pick up the poor little flowers.\r\n\r\n\u201cI beg your pardon. I didn\u2019t see the name distinctly. Never mind, I can walk. I\u2019m used to plodding in the mud,\u201d returned Jo, winking hard, because she would have died rather than openly wipe her eyes.\r\n\r\nMr. Bhaer saw the drops on her cheeks, though she turned her head away. The sight seemed to touch him very much, for suddenly stooping down, he asked in a tone that meant a great deal, \u201cHeart\u2019s dearest, why do you cry?\u201d\r\n\r\nNow, if Jo had not been new to this sort of thing she would have said she wasn\u2019t crying, had a cold in her head, or told any other feminine fib proper to the occasion. Instead of which, that undignified creature answered, with an irrepressible sob, \u201cBecause you are going away.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAch, mein Gott, that is so good!\u201d cried Mr. Bhaer, managing to clasp his hands in spite of the umbrella and the bundles, \u201cJo, I haf nothing but much love to gif you. I came to see if you could care for it, and I waited to be sure that I was something more than a friend. Am I? Can you make a little place in your heart for old Fritz?\u201d he added, all in one breath.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, yes!\u201d said Jo, and he was quite satisfied, for she folded both hands over his arm, and looked up at him with an expression that plainly showed how happy she would be to walk through life beside him, even though she had no better shelter than the old umbrella, if he carried it.\r\n\r\nIt was certainly proposing under difficulties, for even if he had desired to do so, Mr. Bhaer could not go down upon his knees, on account of the mud. Neither could he offer Jo his hand, except figuratively, for both were full. Much less could he indulge in tender remonstrations in the open street, though he was near it. So the only way in which he could express his rapture was to look at her, with an expression which glorified his face to such a degree that there actually seemed to be little rainbows in the drops that sparkled on his beard. If he had not loved Jo very much, I don\u2019t think he could have done it then, for she looked far from lovely, with her skirts in a deplorable state, her rubber boots splashed to the ankle, and her bonnet a ruin. Fortunately, Mr. Bhaer considered her the most beautiful woman living, and she found him more \u201cJove-like\u201d than ever, though his hatbrim was quite limp with the little rills trickling thence upon his shoulders (for he held the umbrella all over Jo), and every finger of his gloves needed mending.\r\n\r\nPassers-by probably thought them a pair of harmless lunatics, for they entirely forgot to hail a bus, and strolled leisurely along, oblivious of deepening dusk and fog. Little they cared what anybody thought, for they were enjoying the happy hour that seldom comes but once in any life, the magical moment which bestows youth on the old, beauty on the plain, wealth on the poor, and gives human hearts a foretaste of heaven. The Professor looked as if he had conquered a kingdom, and the world had nothing more to offer him in the way of bliss. While Jo trudged beside him, feeling as if her place had always been there, and wondering how she ever could have chosen any other lot. Of course, she was the first to speak\u2014intelligibly, I mean, for the emotional remarks which followed her impetuous \u201cOh, yes!\u201d were not of a coherent or reportable character.\r\n\r\n\u201cFriedrich, why didn\u2019t you...\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAh, heaven, she gifs me the name that no one speaks since Minna died!\u201d cried the Professor, pausing in a puddle to regard her with grateful delight.\r\n\r\n\u201cI always call you so to myself\u2014I forgot, but I won\u2019t unless you like it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLike it? It is more sweet to me than I can tell. Say \u2018thou\u2019, also, and I shall say your language is almost as beautiful as mine.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIsn\u2019t \u2018thou\u2019 a little sentimental?\u201d asked Jo, privately thinking it a lovely monosyllable.\r\n\r\n\u201cSentimental? Yes. Thank Gott, we Germans believe in sentiment, and keep ourselves young mit it. Your English \u2018you\u2019 is so cold, say \u2018thou\u2019, heart\u2019s dearest, it means so much to me,\u201d pleaded Mr. Bhaer, more like a romantic student than a grave professor.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, why didn\u2019t thou tell me all this sooner?\u201d asked Jo bashfully.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow I shall haf to show thee all my heart, and I so gladly will, because thou must take care of it hereafter. See, then, my Jo\u2014ah, the dear, funny little name\u2014I had a wish to tell something the day I said goodbye in New York, but I thought the handsome friend was betrothed to thee, and so I spoke not. Wouldst thou have said \u2018Yes\u2019, then, if I had spoken?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know. I\u2019m afraid not, for I didn\u2019t have any heart just then.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPrut! That I do not believe. It was asleep till the fairy prince came through the wood, and waked it up. Ah, well, \u2018Die erste Liebe ist die beste\u2019, but that I should not expect.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, the first love is the best, but be so contented, for I never had another. Teddy was only a boy, and soon got over his little fancy,\u201d said Jo, anxious to correct the Professor\u2019s mistake.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood! Then I shall rest happy, and be sure that thou givest me all. I haf waited so long, I am grown selfish, as thou wilt find, Professorin.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI like that,\u201d cried Jo, delighted with her new name. \u201cNow tell me what brought you, at last, just when I wanted you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThis,\u201d and Mr. Bhaer took a little worn paper out of his waistcoat pocket.\r\n\r\nJo unfolded it, and looked much abashed, for it was one of her own contributions to a paper that paid for poetry, which accounted for her sending it an occasional attempt.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow could that bring you?\u201d she asked, wondering what he meant.\r\n\r\n\u201cI found it by chance. I knew it by the names and the initials, and in it there was one little verse that seemed to call me. Read and find him. I will see that you go not in the wet.\u201d\r\n\r\nIN THE GARRET\r\n\r\nFour little chests all in a row,\r\nDim with dust, and worn by time,\r\nAll fashioned and filled, long ago,\r\nBy children now in their prime.\r\nFour little keys hung side by side,\r\nWith faded ribbons, brave and gay\r\nWhen fastened there, with childish pride,\r\nLong ago, on a rainy day.\r\nFour little names, one on each lid,\r\nCarved out by a boyish hand,\r\nAnd underneath there lieth hid\r\nHistories of the happy band\r\nOnce playing here, and pausing oft\r\nTo hear the sweet refrain,\r\nThat came and went on the roof aloft,\r\nIn the falling summer rain.\r\n\r\n\u201cMeg\u201d on the first lid, smooth and fair.\r\nI look in with loving eyes,\r\nFor folded here, with well-known care,\r\nA goodly gathering lies,\r\nThe record of a peaceful life\u2014\r\nGifts to gentle child and girl,\r\nA bridal gown, lines to a wife,\r\nA tiny shoe, a baby curl.\r\nNo toys in this first chest remain,\r\nFor all are carried away,\r\nIn their old age, to join again\r\nIn another small Meg\u2019s play.\r\nAh, happy mother! Well I know\r\nYou hear, like a sweet refrain,\r\nLullabies ever soft and low\r\nIn the falling summer rain.\r\n\r\n\u201cJo\u201d on the next lid, scratched and worn,\r\nAnd within a motley store\r\nOf headless dolls, of schoolbooks torn,\r\nBirds and beasts that speak no more,\r\nSpoils brought home from the fairy ground\r\nOnly trod by youthful feet,\r\nDreams of a future never found,\r\nMemories of a past still sweet,\r\nHalf-writ poems, stories wild,\r\nApril letters, warm and cold,\r\nDiaries of a wilful child,\r\nHints of a woman early old,\r\nA woman in a lonely home,\r\nHearing, like a sad refrain\u2014\r\n\u201cBe worthy, love, and love will come,\u201d\r\nIn the falling summer rain.\r\n\r\nMy Beth! the dust is always swept\r\nFrom the lid that bears your name,\r\nAs if by loving eyes that wept,\r\nBy careful hands that often came.\r\nDeath canonized for us one saint,\r\nEver less human than divine,\r\nAnd still we lay, with tender plaint,\r\nRelics in this household shrine\u2014\r\nThe silver bell, so seldom rung,\r\nThe little cap which last she wore,\r\nThe fair, dead Catherine that hung\r\nBy angels borne above her door.\r\nThe songs she sang, without lament,\r\nIn her prison-house of pain,\r\nForever are they sweetly blent\r\nWith the falling summer rain.\r\n\r\nUpon the last lid\u2019s polished field\u2014\r\nLegend now both fair and true\r\nA gallant knight bears on his shield,\r\n\u201cAmy\u201d in letters gold and blue.\r\nWithin lie snoods that bound her hair,\r\nSlippers that have danced their last,\r\nFaded flowers laid by with care,\r\nFans whose airy toils are past,\r\nGay valentines, all ardent flames,\r\nTrifles that have borne their part\r\nIn girlish hopes and fears and shames,\r\nThe record of a maiden heart\r\nNow learning fairer, truer spells,\r\nHearing, like a blithe refrain,\r\nThe silver sound of bridal bells\r\nIn the falling summer rain.\r\n\r\nFour little chests all in a row,\r\nDim with dust, and worn by time,\r\nFour women, taught by weal and woe\r\nTo love and labor in their prime.\r\nFour sisters, parted for an hour,\r\nNone lost, one only gone before,\r\nMade by love\u2019s immortal power,\r\nNearest and dearest evermore.\r\nOh, when these hidden stores of ours\r\nLie open to the Father\u2019s sight,\r\nMay they be rich in golden hours,\r\nDeeds that show fairer for the light,\r\nLives whose brave music long shall ring,\r\nLike a spirit-stirring strain,\r\nSouls that shall gladly soar and sing\r\nIn the long sunshine after rain.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s very bad poetry, but I felt it when I wrote it, one day when I was very lonely, and had a good cry on a rag bag. I never thought it would go where it could tell tales,\u201d said Jo, tearing up the verses the Professor had treasured so long.\r\n\r\n\u201cLet it go, it has done its duty, and I will haf a fresh one when I read all the brown book in which she keeps her little secrets,\u201d said Mr. Bhaer with a smile as he watched the fragments fly away on the wind. \u201cYes,\u201d he added earnestly, \u201cI read that, and I think to myself, She has a sorrow, she is lonely, she would find comfort in true love. I haf a heart full, full for her. Shall I not go and say, \u2018If this is not too poor a thing to gif for what I shall hope to receive, take it in Gott\u2019s name?\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd so you came to find that it was not too poor, but the one precious thing I needed,\u201d whispered Jo.\r\n\r\n\u201cI had no courage to think that at first, heavenly kind as was your welcome to me. But soon I began to hope, and then I said, \u2018I will haf her if I die for it,\u2019 and so I will!\u201d cried Mr. Bhaer, with a defiant nod, as if the walls of mist closing round them were barriers which he was to surmount or valiantly knock down.\r\n\r\nJo thought that was splendid, and resolved to be worthy of her knight, though he did not come prancing on a charger in gorgeous array.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat made you stay away so long?\u201d she asked presently, finding it so pleasant to ask confidential questions and get delightful answers that she could not keep silent.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was not easy, but I could not find the heart to take you from that so happy home until I could haf a prospect of one to gif you, after much time, perhaps, and hard work. How could I ask you to gif up so much for a poor old fellow, who has no fortune but a little learning?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m glad you are poor. I couldn\u2019t bear a rich husband,\u201d said Jo decidedly, adding in a softer tone, \u201cDon\u2019t fear poverty. I\u2019ve known it long enough to lose my dread and be happy working for those I love, and don\u2019t call yourself old\u2014forty is the prime of life. I couldn\u2019t help loving you if you were seventy!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe Professor found that so touching that he would have been glad of his handkerchief, if he could have got at it. As he couldn\u2019t, Jo wiped his eyes for him, and said, laughing, as she took away a bundle or two...\r\n\r\n\u201cI may be strong-minded, but no one can say I\u2019m out of my sphere now, for woman\u2019s special mission is supposed to be drying tears and bearing burdens. I\u2019m to carry my share, Friedrich, and help to earn the home. Make up your mind to that, or I\u2019ll never go,\u201d she added resolutely, as he tried to reclaim his load.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe shall see. Haf you patience to wait a long time, Jo? I must go away and do my work alone. I must help my boys first, because, even for you, I may not break my word to Minna. Can you forgif that, and be happy while we hope and wait?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I know I can, for we love one another, and that makes all the rest easy to bear. I have my duty, also, and my work. I couldn\u2019t enjoy myself if I neglected them even for you, so there\u2019s no need of hurry or impatience. You can do your part out West, I can do mine here, and both be happy hoping for the best, and leaving the future to be as God wills.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAh! Thou gifest me such hope and courage, and I haf nothing to gif back but a full heart and these empty hands,\u201d cried the Professor, quite overcome.\r\n\r\nJo never, never would learn to be proper, for when he said that as they stood upon the steps, she just put both hands into his, whispering tenderly, \u201cNot empty now,\u201d and stooping down, kissed her Friedrich under the umbrella. It was dreadful, but she would have done it if the flock of draggle-tailed sparrows on the hedge had been human beings, for she was very far gone indeed, and quite regardless of everything but her own happiness. Though it came in such a very simple guise, that was the crowning moment of both their lives, when, turning from the night and storm and loneliness to the household light and warmth and peace waiting to receive them, with a glad \u201cWelcome home!\u201d Jo led her lover in, and shut the door.\r\nCHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN\r\nHARVEST TIME\r\n\r\nFor a year Jo and her Professor worked and waited, hoped and loved, met occasionally, and wrote such voluminous letters that the rise in the price of paper was accounted for, Laurie said. The second year began rather soberly, for their prospects did not brighten, and Aunt March died suddenly. But when their first sorrow was over\u2014for they loved the old lady in spite of her sharp tongue\u2014they found they had cause for rejoicing, for she had left Plumfield to Jo, which made all sorts of joyful things possible.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a fine old place, and will bring a handsome sum, for of course you intend to sell it,\u201d said Laurie, as they were all talking the matter over some weeks later.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I don\u2019t,\u201d was Jo\u2019s decided answer, as she petted the fat poodle, whom she had adopted, out of respect to his former mistress.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t mean to live there?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut, my dear girl, it\u2019s an immense house, and will take a power of money to keep it in order. The garden and orchard alone need two or three men, and farming isn\u2019t in Bhaer\u2019s line, I take it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019ll try his hand at it there, if I propose it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd you expect to live on the produce of the place? Well, that sounds paradisiacal, but you\u2019ll find it desperate hard work.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe crop we are going to raise is a profitable one,\u201d and Jo laughed.\r\n\r\n\u201cOf what is this fine crop to consist, ma\u2019am?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBoys. I want to open a school for little lads\u2014a good, happy, homelike school, with me to take care of them and Fritz to teach them.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s a truly Joian plan for you! Isn\u2019t that just like her?\u201d cried Laurie, appealing to the family, who looked as much surprised as he.\r\n\r\n\u201cI like it,\u201d said Mrs. March decidedly.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo do I,\u201d added her husband, who welcomed the thought of a chance for trying the Socratic method of education on modern youth.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt will be an immense care for Jo,\u201d said Meg, stroking the head of her one all-absorbing son.\r\n\r\n\u201cJo can do it, and be happy in it. It\u2019s a splendid idea. Tell us all about it,\u201d cried Mr. Laurence, who had been longing to lend the lovers a hand, but knew that they would refuse his help.\r\n\r\n\u201cI knew you\u2019d stand by me, sir. Amy does too\u2014I see it in her eyes, though she prudently waits to turn it over in her mind before she speaks. Now, my dear people,\u201d continued Jo earnestly, \u201cjust understand that this isn\u2019t a new idea of mine, but a long cherished plan. Before my Fritz came, I used to think how, when I\u2019d made my fortune, and no one needed me at home, I\u2019d hire a big house, and pick up some poor, forlorn little lads who hadn\u2019t any mothers, and take care of them, and make life jolly for them before it was too late. I see so many going to ruin for want of help at the right minute, I love so to do anything for them, I seem to feel their wants, and sympathize with their troubles, and oh, I should so like to be a mother to them!\u201d\r\n\r\nMrs. March held out her hand to Jo, who took it, smiling, with tears in her eyes, and went on in the old enthusiastic way, which they had not seen for a long while.\r\n\r\n\u201cI told my plan to Fritz once, and he said it was just what he would like, and agreed to try it when we got rich. Bless his dear heart, he\u2019s been doing it all his life\u2014helping poor boys, I mean, not getting rich, that he\u2019ll never be. Money doesn\u2019t stay in his pocket long enough to lay up any. But now, thanks to my good old aunt, who loved me better than I ever deserved, I\u2019m rich, at least I feel so, and we can live at Plumfield perfectly well, if we have a flourishing school. It\u2019s just the place for boys, the house is big, and the furniture strong and plain. There\u2019s plenty of room for dozens inside, and splendid grounds outside. They could help in the garden and orchard. Such work is healthy, isn\u2019t it, sir? Then Fritz could train and teach in his own way, and Father will help him. I can feed and nurse and pet and scold them, and Mother will be my stand-by. I\u2019ve always longed for lots of boys, and never had enough, now I can fill the house full and revel in the little dears to my heart\u2019s content. Think what luxury\u2014 Plumfield my own, and a wilderness of boys to enjoy it with me.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs Jo waved her hands and gave a sigh of rapture, the family went off into a gale of merriment, and Mr. Laurence laughed till they thought he\u2019d have an apoplectic fit.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t see anything funny,\u201d she said gravely, when she could be heard. \u201cNothing could be more natural and proper than for my Professor to open a school, and for me to prefer to reside in my own estate.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShe is putting on airs already,\u201d said Laurie, who regarded the idea in the light of a capital joke. \u201cBut may I inquire how you intend to support the establishment? If all the pupils are little ragamuffins, I\u2019m afraid your crop won\u2019t be profitable in a worldly sense, Mrs. Bhaer.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow don\u2019t be a wet-blanket, Teddy. Of course I shall have rich pupils, also\u2014perhaps begin with such altogether. Then, when I\u2019ve got a start, I can take in a ragamuffin or two, just for a relish. Rich people\u2019s children often need care and comfort, as well as poor. I\u2019ve seen unfortunate little creatures left to servants, or backward ones pushed forward, when it\u2019s real cruelty. Some are naughty through mismanagment or neglect, and some lose their mothers. Besides, the best have to get through the hobbledehoy age, and that\u2019s the very time they need most patience and kindness. People laugh at them, and hustle them about, try to keep them out of sight, and expect them to turn all at once from pretty children into fine young men. They don\u2019t complain much\u2014plucky little souls\u2014but they feel it. I\u2019ve been through something of it, and I know all about it. I\u2019ve a special interest in such young bears, and like to show them that I see the warm, honest, well-meaning boys\u2019 hearts, in spite of the clumsy arms and legs and the topsy-turvy heads. I\u2019ve had experience, too, for haven\u2019t I brought up one boy to be a pride and honor to his family?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll testify that you tried to do it,\u201d said Laurie with a grateful look.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd I\u2019ve succeeded beyond my hopes, for here you are, a steady, sensible businessman, doing heaps of good with your money, and laying up the blessings of the poor, instead of dollars. But you are not merely a businessman, you love good and beautiful things, enjoy them yourself, and let others go halves, as you always did in the old times. I am proud of you, Teddy, for you get better every year, and everyone feels it, though you won\u2019t let them say so. Yes, and when I have my flock, I\u2019ll just point to you, and say \u2018There\u2019s your model, my lads\u2019.\u201d\r\n\r\nPoor Laurie didn\u2019t know where to look, for, man though he was, something of the old bashfulness came over him as this burst of praise made all faces turn approvingly upon him.\r\n\r\n\u201cI say, Jo, that\u2019s rather too much,\u201d he began, just in his old boyish way. \u201cYou have all done more for me than I can ever thank you for, except by doing my best not to disappoint you. You have rather cast me off lately, Jo, but I\u2019ve had the best of help, nevertheless. So, if I\u2019ve got on at all, you may thank these two for it,\u201d and he laid one hand gently on his grandfather\u2019s head, and the other on Amy\u2019s golden one, for the three were never far apart.\r\n\r\n\u201cI do think that families are the most beautiful things in all the world!\u201d burst out Jo, who was in an unusually up-lifted frame of mind just then. \u201cWhen I have one of my own, I hope it will be as happy as the three I know and love the best. If John and my Fritz were only here, it would be quite a little heaven on earth,\u201d she added more quietly. And that night when she went to her room after a blissful evening of family counsels, hopes, and plans, her heart was so full of happiness that she could only calm it by kneeling beside the empty bed always near her own, and thinking tender thoughts of Beth.\r\n\r\nIt was a very astonishing year altogether, for things seemed to happen in an unusually rapid and delightful manner. Almost before she knew where she was, Jo found herself married and settled at Plumfield. Then a family of six or seven boys sprung up like mushrooms, and flourished surprisingly, poor boys as well as rich, for Mr. Laurence was continually finding some touching case of destitution, and begging the Bhaers to take pity on the child, and he would gladly pay a trifle for its support. In this way, the sly old gentleman got round proud Jo, and furnished her with the style of boy in which she most delighted.\r\n\r\nOf course it was uphill work at first, and Jo made queer mistakes, but the wise Professor steered her safely into calmer waters, and the most rampant ragamuffin was conquered in the end. How Jo did enjoy her \u2018wilderness of boys\u2019, and how poor, dear Aunt March would have lamented had she been there to see the sacred precincts of prim, well-ordered Plumfield overrun with Toms, Dicks, and Harrys! There was a sort of poetic justice about it, after all, for the old lady had been the terror of the boys for miles around, and now the exiles feasted freely on forbidden plums, kicked up the gravel with profane boots unreproved, and played cricket in the big field where the irritable \u2018cow with a crumpled horn\u2019 used to invite rash youths to come and be tossed. It became a sort of boys\u2019 paradise, and Laurie suggested that it should be called the \u2018Bhaer-garten\u2019, as a compliment to its master and appropriate to its inhabitants.\r\n\r\nIt never was a fashionable school, and the Professor did not lay up a fortune, but it was just what Jo intended it to be\u2014\u2018a happy, homelike place for boys, who needed teaching, care, and kindness\u2019. Every room in the big house was soon full. Every little plot in the garden soon had its owner. A regular menagerie appeared in barn and shed, for pet animals were allowed. And three times a day, Jo smiled at her Fritz from the head of a long table lined on either side with rows of happy young faces, which all turned to her with affectionate eyes, confiding words, and grateful hearts, full of love for \u2018Mother Bhaer\u2019. She had boys enough now, and did not tire of them, though they were not angels, by any means, and some of them caused both Professor and Professorin much trouble and anxiety. But her faith in the good spot which exists in the heart of the naughtiest, sauciest, most tantalizing little ragamuffin gave her patience, skill, and in time success, for no mortal boy could hold out long with Father Bhaer shining on him as benevolently as the sun, and Mother Bhaer forgiving him seventy times seven. Very precious to Jo was the friendship of the lads, their penitent sniffs and whispers after wrongdoing, their droll or touching little confidences, their pleasant enthusiasms, hopes, and plans, even their misfortunes, for they only endeared them to her all the more. There were slow boys and bashful boys, feeble boys and riotous boys, boys that lisped and boys that stuttered, one or two lame ones, and a merry little quadroon, who could not be taken in elsewhere, but who was welcome to the \u2018Bhaer-garten\u2019, though some people predicted that his admission would ruin the school.\r\n\r\nYes, Jo was a very happy woman there, in spite of hard work, much anxiety, and a perpetual racket. She enjoyed it heartily and found the applause of her boys more satisfying than any praise of the world, for now she told no stories except to her flock of enthusiastic believers and admirers. As the years went on, two little lads of her own came to increase her happiness\u2014Rob, named for Grandpa, and Teddy, a happy-go-lucky baby, who seemed to have inherited his papa\u2019s sunshiny temper as well as his mother\u2019s lively spirit. How they ever grew up alive in that whirlpool of boys was a mystery to their grandma and aunts, but they flourished like dandelions in spring, and their rough nurses loved and served them well.\r\n\r\nThere were a great many holidays at Plumfield, and one of the most delightful was the yearly apple-picking. For then the Marches, Laurences, Brookes and Bhaers turned out in full force and made a day of it. Five years after Jo\u2019s wedding, one of these fruitful festivals occurred, a mellow October day, when the air was full of an exhilarating freshness which made the spirits rise and the blood dance healthily in the veins. The old orchard wore its holiday attire. Goldenrod and asters fringed the mossy walls. Grasshoppers skipped briskly in the sere grass, and crickets chirped like fairy pipers at a feast. Squirrels were busy with their small harvesting. Birds twittered their adieux from the alders in the lane, and every tree stood ready to send down its shower of red or yellow apples at the first shake. Everybody was there. Everybody laughed and sang, climbed up and tumbled down. Everybody declared that there never had been such a perfect day or such a jolly set to enjoy it, and everyone gave themselves up to the simple pleasures of the hour as freely as if there were no such things as care or sorrow in the world.\r\n\r\nMr. March strolled placidly about, quoting Tusser, Cowley, and Columella to Mr. Laurence, while enjoying...\r\n\r\nThe gentle apple\u2019s winey juice.\r\n\r\nThe Professor charged up and down the green aisles like a stout Teutonic knight, with a pole for a lance, leading on the boys, who made a hook and ladder company of themselves, and performed wonders in the way of ground and lofty tumbling. Laurie devoted himself to the little ones, rode his small daughter in a bushel-basket, took Daisy up among the bird\u2019s nests, and kept adventurous Rob from breaking his neck. Mrs. March and Meg sat among the apple piles like a pair of Pomonas, sorting the contributions that kept pouring in, while Amy with a beautiful motherly expression in her face sketched the various groups, and watched over one pale lad, who sat adoring her with his little crutch beside him.\r\n\r\nJo was in her element that day, and rushed about, with her gown pinned up, and her hat anywhere but on her head, and her baby tucked under her arm, ready for any lively adventure which might turn up. Little Teddy bore a charmed life, for nothing ever happened to him, and Jo never felt any anxiety when he was whisked up into a tree by one lad, galloped off on the back of another, or supplied with sour russets by his indulgent papa, who labored under the Germanic delusion that babies could digest anything, from pickled cabbage to buttons, nails, and their own small shoes. She knew that little Ted would turn up again in time, safe and rosy, dirty and serene, and she always received him back with a hearty welcome, for Jo loved her babies tenderly.\r\n\r\nAt four o\u2019clock a lull took place, and baskets remained empty, while the apple pickers rested and compared rents and bruises. Then Jo and Meg, with a detachment of the bigger boys, set forth the supper on the grass, for an out-of-door tea was always the crowning joy of the day. The land literally flowed with milk and honey on such occasions, for the lads were not required to sit at table, but allowed to partake of refreshment as they liked\u2014freedom being the sauce best beloved by the boyish soul. They availed themselves of the rare privilege to the fullest extent, for some tried the pleasing experiment of drinking milk while standing on their heads, others lent a charm to leapfrog by eating pie in the pauses of the game, cookies were sown broadcast over the field, and apple turnovers roosted in the trees like a new style of bird. The little girls had a private tea party, and Ted roved among the edibles at his own sweet will.\r\n\r\nWhen no one could eat any more, the Professor proposed the first regular toast, which was always drunk at such times\u2014\u201cAunt March, God bless her!\u201d A toast heartily given by the good man, who never forgot how much he owed her, and quietly drunk by the boys, who had been taught to keep her memory green.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, Grandma\u2019s sixtieth birthday! Long life to her, with three times three!\u201d\r\n\r\nThat was given with a will, as you may well believe, and the cheering once begun, it was hard to stop it. Everybody\u2019s health was proposed, from Mr. Laurence, who was considered their special patron, to the astonished guinea pig, who had strayed from its proper sphere in search of its young master. Demi, as the oldest grandchild, then presented the queen of the day with various gifts, so numerous that they were transported to the festive scene in a wheelbarrow. Funny presents, some of them, but what would have been defects to other eyes were ornaments to Grandma\u2019s\u2014for the children\u2019s gifts were all their own. Every stitch Daisy\u2019s patient little fingers had put into the handkerchiefs she hemmed was better than embroidery to Mrs. March. Demi\u2019s miracle of mechanical skill, though the cover wouldn\u2019t shut, Rob\u2019s footstool had a wiggle in its uneven legs that she declared was soothing, and no page of the costly book Amy\u2019s child gave her was so fair as that on which appeared in tipsy capitals, the words\u2014\u201cTo dear Grandma, from her little Beth.\u201d\r\n\r\nDuring the ceremony the boys had mysteriously disappeared, and when Mrs. March had tried to thank her children, and broken down, while Teddy wiped her eyes on his pinafore, the Professor suddenly began to sing. Then, from above him, voice after voice took up the words, and from tree to tree echoed the music of the unseen choir, as the boys sang with all their hearts the little song that Jo had written, Laurie set to music, and the Professor trained his lads to give with the best effect. This was something altogether new, and it proved a grand success, for Mrs. March couldn\u2019t get over her surprise, and insisted on shaking hands with every one of the featherless birds, from tall Franz and Emil to the little quadroon, who had the sweetest voice of all.\r\n\r\nAfter this, the boys dispersed for a final lark, leaving Mrs. March and her daughters under the festival tree.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t think I ever ought to call myself \u2018unlucky Jo\u2019 again, when my greatest wish has been so beautifully gratified,\u201d said Mrs. Bhaer, taking Teddy\u2019s little fist out of the milk pitcher, in which he was rapturously churning.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd yet your life is very different from the one you pictured so long ago. Do you remember our castles in the air?\u201d asked Amy, smiling as she watched Laurie and John playing cricket with the boys.\r\n\r\n\u201cDear fellows! It does my heart good to see them forget business and frolic for a day,\u201d answered Jo, who now spoke in a maternal way of all mankind. \u201cYes, I remember, but the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely, and cold to me now. I haven\u2019t given up the hope that I may write a good book yet, but I can wait, and I\u2019m sure it will be all the better for such experiences and illustrations as these,\u201d and Jo pointed from the lively lads in the distance to her father, leaning on the Professor\u2019s arm, as they walked to and fro in the sunshine, deep in one of the conversations which both enjoyed so much, and then to her mother, sitting enthroned among her daughters, with their children in her lap and at her feet, as if all found help and happiness in the face which never could grow old to them.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy castle was the most nearly realized of all. I asked for splendid things, to be sure, but in my heart I knew I should be satisfied, if I had a little home, and John, and some dear children like these. I\u2019ve got them all, thank God, and am the happiest woman in the world,\u201d and Meg laid her hand on her tall boy\u2019s head, with a face full of tender and devout content.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy castle is very different from what I planned, but I would not alter it, though, like Jo, I don\u2019t relinquish all my artistic hopes, or confine myself to helping others fulfill their dreams of beauty. I\u2019ve begun to model a figure of baby, and Laurie says it is the best thing I\u2019ve ever done. I think so, myself, and mean to do it in marble, so that, whatever happens, I may at least keep the image of my little angel.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs Amy spoke, a great tear dropped on the golden hair of the sleeping child in her arms, for her one well-beloved daughter was a frail little creature and the dread of losing her was the shadow over Amy\u2019s sunshine. This cross was doing much for both father and mother, for one love and sorrow bound them closely together. Amy\u2019s nature was growing sweeter, deeper, and more tender. Laurie was growing more serious, strong, and firm, and both were learning that beauty, youth, good fortune, even love itself, cannot keep care and pain, loss and sorrow, from the most blessed for ...\r\n\r\nInto each life some rain must fall,\r\nSome days must be dark and sad and dreary.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe is growing better, I am sure of it, my dear. Don\u2019t despond, but hope and keep happy,\u201d said Mrs. March, as tenderhearted Daisy stooped from her knee to lay her rosy cheek against her little cousin\u2019s pale one.\r\n\r\n\u201cI never ought to, while I have you to cheer me up, Marmee, and Laurie to take more than half of every burden,\u201d replied Amy warmly. \u201cHe never lets me see his anxiety, but is so sweet and patient with me, so devoted to Beth, and such a stay and comfort to me always that I can\u2019t love him enough. So, in spite of my one cross, I can say with Meg, \u2018Thank God, I\u2019m a happy woman.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s no need for me to say it, for everyone can see that I\u2019m far happier than I deserve,\u201d added Jo, glancing from her good husband to her chubby children, tumbling on the grass beside her. \u201cFritz is getting gray and stout. I\u2019m growing as thin as a shadow, and am thirty. We never shall be rich, and Plumfield may burn up any night, for that incorrigible Tommy Bangs will smoke sweet-fern cigars under the bed-clothes, though he\u2019s set himself afire three times already. But in spite of these unromantic facts, I have nothing to complain of, and never was so jolly in my life. Excuse the remark, but living among boys, I can\u2019t help using their expressions now and then.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, Jo, I think your harvest will be a good one,\u201d began Mrs. March, frightening away a big black cricket that was staring Teddy out of countenance.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot half so good as yours, Mother. Here it is, and we never can thank you enough for the patient sowing and reaping you have done,\u201d cried Jo, with the loving impetuosity which she never would outgrow.\r\n\r\n\u201cI hope there will be more wheat and fewer tares every year,\u201d said Amy softly.\r\n\r\n\u201cA large sheaf, but I know there\u2019s room in your heart for it, Marmee dear,\u201d added Meg\u2019s tender voice.\r\n\r\nTouched to the heart, Mrs. March could only stretch out her arms, as if to gather children and grandchildren to herself, and say, with face and voice full of motherly love, gratitude, and humility...\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!\u201d\r\n*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE WOMEN ***\r\nUpdated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed.\r\nCreating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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        "text": "The Project Gutenberg eBook of Moby Dick; Or the Whale, by Herman Melville",
        "text2": "The Project Gutenberg eBook of Moby Dick; Or, The Whale\r\nThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.\r\n\r\nTitle: Moby Dick; Or, The Whale\r\n\r\nAuthor: Herman Melville\r\n\r\nRelease date: July 1, 2001 [eBook #2701]\r\nMost recently updated: August 18, 2021\r\n\r\nLanguage: English\r\n\r\nCredits: Daniel Lazarus, Jonesey, and David Widger\r\n*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR, THE WHALE ***\r\nMOBY-DICK;\r\n\r\nor, THE WHALE.\r\n\r\n\r\nBy Herman Melville\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n    CONTENTS\r\n\r\n\r\n    ETYMOLOGY.\r\n\r\n    EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).\r\n\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 1. Loomings.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 6. The Street.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 12. Biographical.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 15. Chowder.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 16. The Ship.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 18. His Mark.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 20. All Astir.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 25. Postscript.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 28. Ahab.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 32. Cetology.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 37. Sunset.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 38. Dusk.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 43. Hark!\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 44. The Chart.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 46. Surmises.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 50. Ahab\u2019s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 53. The Gam.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho\u2019s Story.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 58. Brit.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 59. Squid.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 60. The Line.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 62. The Dart.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 64. Stubb\u2019s Supper.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam\u2019s Story.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over Him.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale\u2019s Head\u2014Contrasted View.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale\u2019s Head\u2014Contrasted View.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 80. The Nut.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 86. The Tail.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale\u2019s Skeleton.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale\u2019s Magnitude Diminish?\u2014Will He Perish?\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 106. Ahab\u2019s Leg.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 113. The Forge.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 119. The Candles.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 121. Midnight.\u2014The Forecastle Bulwarks.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.\u2014Thunder and Lightning.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 123. The Musket.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 124. The Needle.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 127. The Deck.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 130. The Hat.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 133. The Chase\u2014First Day.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 134. The Chase\u2014Second Day.\r\n\r\n    CHAPTER 135. The Chase.\u2014Third Day.\r\n\r\n    Epilogue\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nOriginal Transcriber\u2019s Notes:\r\n\r\nThis text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS project at Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenberg\u2019s archives. The proofreaders of this version are indebted to The University of Adelaide Library for preserving the Virginia Tech version. The resulting etext was compared with a public domain hard copy version of the text.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nETYMOLOGY.\r\n(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)\r\n\r\nThe pale Usher\u2014threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhile you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.\u201d \u2014Hackluyt.\r\n\r\n\u201cWHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. hval. This animal is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.\u201d \u2014Webster\u2019s Dictionary.\r\n\r\n\u201cWHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. Wallen; A.S. Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow.\u201d \u2014Richardson\u2019s Dictionary.\r\n\t\u05d7\u05d5, \tHebrew.\r\n\t\u03f0\u03b7\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2, \tGreek.\r\n\tCETUS, \tLatin.\r\n\tWH\u0152L, \tAnglo-Saxon.\r\n\tHVALT, \tDanish.\r\n\tWAL, \tDutch.\r\n\tHWAL, \tSwedish.\r\n\tHVALUR, \tIcelandic.\r\n\tWHALE, \tEnglish.\r\n\tBALEINE, \tFrench.\r\n\tBALLENA, \tSpanish.\r\n\tPEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, \tFegee.\r\n\tPEHEE-NUEE-NUEE, \tErromangoan.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nEXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).\r\n\r\nIt will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird\u2019s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.\r\n\r\nSo fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness\u2014Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together\u2014there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!\r\nEXTRACTS.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd God created great whales.\u201d \u2014Genesis.\r\n\r\n\u201cLeviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to be hoary.\u201d \u2014Job.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.\u201d \u2014Jonah.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein.\u201d \u2014Psalms.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword, shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.\u201d \u2014Isaiah.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster\u2019s mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch.\u201d \u2014Holland\u2019s Plutarch\u2019s Morals.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are: among which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much in length as four acres or arpens of land.\u201d \u2014Holland\u2019s Pliny.\r\n\r\n\u201cScarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the former, one was of a most monstrous size.... This came towards us, open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea before him into a foam.\u201d \u2014Tooke\u2019s Lucian. \u201cThe True History.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales, which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought some to the king.... The best whales were catched in his own country, of which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was one of six who had killed sixty in two days.\u201d \u2014Other or Other\u2019s verbal narrative taken down from his mouth by King Alfred, A.D. 890.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster\u2019s (whale\u2019s) mouth, are immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in great security, and there sleeps.\u201d \u2014MONTAIGNE. \u2014Apology for Raimond Sebond.\r\n\r\n\u201cLet us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if it is not Leviathan described by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.\u201d \u2014Rabelais.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis whale\u2019s liver was two cartloads.\u201d \u2014Stowe\u2019s Annals.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan.\u201d \u2014Lord Bacon\u2019s Version of the Psalms.\r\n\r\n\u201cTouching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale.\u201d \u2014Ibid. \u201cHistory of Life and Death.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise.\u201d \u2014King Henry.\r\n\r\n\u201cVery like a whale.\u201d \u2014Hamlet.\r\n\r\n     \u201cWhich to secure, no skill of leach\u2019s art\r\n     Mote him availle, but to returne againe\r\n     To his wound\u2019s worker, that with lowly dart,\r\n     Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,\r\n     Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro\u2019 the maine.\u201d\r\n      \u2014The Fairie Queen.\r\n\r\n\u201cImmense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful calm trouble the ocean till it boil.\u201d \u2014Sir William Davenant. Preface to Gondibert.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit.\u201d \u2014Sir T. Browne. Of Sperma Ceti and the Sperma Ceti Whale. Vide his V. E.\r\n\r\n     \u201cLike Spencer\u2019s Talus with his modern flail\r\n     He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.\r\n   ...\r\n     Their fixed jav\u2019lins in his side he wears,\r\n     And on his back a grove of pikes appears.\u201d\r\n      \u2014Waller\u2019s Battle of the Summer Islands.\r\n\r\n\u201cBy art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State\u2014(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.\u201d \u2014Opening sentence of Hobbes\u2019s Leviathan.\r\n\r\n\u201cSilly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat in the mouth of a whale.\u201d \u2014Pilgrim\u2019s Progress.\r\n\r\n     \u201cThat sea beast\r\n     Leviathan, which God of all his works\r\n     Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.\u201d \u2014Paradise Lost.\r\n\r\n     \u2014\u201cThere Leviathan,\r\n     Hugest of living creatures, in the deep\r\n     Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,\r\n     And seems a moving land; and at his gills\r\n     Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.\u201d \u2014Ibid.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil swimming in them.\u201d \u2014Fuller\u2019s Profane and Holy State.\r\n\r\n     \u201cSo close behind some promontory lie\r\n     The huge Leviathan to attend their prey,\r\n     And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,\r\n     Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way.\u201d\r\n      \u2014Dryden\u2019s Annus Mirabilis.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhile the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water.\u201d \u2014Thomas Edge\u2019s Ten Voyages to Spitzbergen, in Purchas.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which nature has placed on their shoulders.\u201d \u2014Sir T. Herbert\u2019s Voyages into Asia and Africa. Harris Coll.\r\n\r\n\u201cHere they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship upon them.\u201d \u2014Schouten\u2019s Sixth Circumnavigation.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The Jonas-in-the-Whale.... Some say the whale can\u2019t open his mouth, but that is a fable.... They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they can see a whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains.... I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of herrings in his belly.... One of our harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in Spitzbergen that was white all over.\u201d \u2014A Voyage to Greenland, A.D. 1671. Harris Coll.\r\n\r\n\u201cSeveral whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of baleen. The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of Pitferren.\u201d \u2014Sibbald\u2019s Fife and Kinross.\r\n\r\n\u201cMyself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness.\u201d \u2014Richard Strafford\u2019s Letter from the Bermudas. Phil. Trans. A.D. 1668.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhales in the sea God\u2019s voice obey.\u201d \u2014N. E. Primer.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the northward of us.\u201d \u2014Captain Cowley\u2019s Voyage round the Globe, A.D. 1729.\r\n\r\n\u201c... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain.\u201d \u2014Ulloa\u2019s South America.\r\n\r\n     \u201cTo fifty chosen sylphs of special note,\r\n     We trust the important charge, the petticoat.\r\n     Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,\r\n     Tho\u2019 stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale.\u201d\r\n      \u2014Rape of the Lock.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest animal in creation.\u201d \u2014Goldsmith, Nat. Hist.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great whales.\u201d \u2014Goldsmith to Johnson.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the whale, in order to avoid being seen by us.\u201d \u2014Cook\u2019s Voyages.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood, and some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order to terrify and prevent their too near approach.\u201d \u2014Uno Von Troil\u2019s Letters on Banks\u2019s and Solander\u2019s Voyage to Iceland in 1772.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen.\u201d \u2014Thomas Jefferson\u2019s Whale Memorial to the French minister in 1778.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?\u201d \u2014Edmund Burke\u2019s reference in Parliament to the Nantucket Whale-Fishery.\r\n\r\n\u201cSpain\u2014a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe.\u201d \u2014Edmund Burke. (somewhere.)\r\n\r\n\u201cA tenth branch of the king\u2019s ordinary revenue, said to be grounded on the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon. And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the property of the king.\u201d \u2014Blackstone.\r\n\r\n     \u201cSoon to the sport of death the crews repair:\r\n     Rodmond unerring o\u2019er his head suspends\r\n     The barbed steel, and every turn attends.\u201d\r\n      \u2014Falconer\u2019s Shipwreck.\r\n\r\n     \u201cBright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires,\r\n     And rockets blew self driven,\r\n     To hang their momentary fire\r\n     Around the vault of heaven.\r\n\r\n     \u201cSo fire with water to compare,\r\n     The ocean serves on high,\r\n     Up-spouted by a whale in air,\r\n     To express unwieldy joy.\u201d\r\n      \u2014Cowper, on the Queen\u2019s Visit to London.\r\n\r\n\u201cTen or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a stroke, with immense velocity.\u201d \u2014John Hunter\u2019s account of the dissection of a whale. (A small sized one.)\r\n\r\n\u201cThe aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood gushing from the whale\u2019s heart.\u201d \u2014Paley\u2019s Theology.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet.\u201d \u2014Baron Cuvier.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take any till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them.\u201d \u2014Colnett\u2019s Voyage for the Purpose of Extending the Spermaceti Whale Fishery.\r\n\r\n     \u201cIn the free element beneath me swam,\r\n     Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,\r\n     Fishes of every colour, form, and kind;\r\n     Which language cannot paint, and mariner\r\n     Had never seen; from dread Leviathan\r\n     To insect millions peopling every wave:\r\n     Gather\u2019d in shoals immense, like floating islands,\r\n     Led by mysterious instincts through that waste\r\n     And trackless region, though on every side\r\n     Assaulted by voracious enemies,\r\n     Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm\u2019d in front or jaw,\r\n     With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs.\u201d\r\n      \u2014Montgomery\u2019s World before the Flood.\r\n\r\n     \u201cIo!  Paean!  Io! sing.\r\n     To the finny people\u2019s king.\r\n     Not a mightier whale than this\r\n     In the vast Atlantic is;\r\n     Not a fatter fish than he,\r\n     Flounders round the Polar Sea.\u201d\r\n      \u2014Charles Lamb\u2019s Triumph of the Whale.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed: there\u2014pointing to the sea\u2014is a green pasture where our children\u2019s grand-children will go for bread.\u201d \u2014Obed Macy\u2019s History of Nantucket.\r\n\r\n\u201cI built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale\u2019s jaw bones.\u201d \u2014Hawthorne\u2019s Twice Told Tales.\r\n\r\n\u201cShe came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been killed by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago.\u201d \u2014Ibid.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, Sir, \u2019tis a Right Whale,\u201d answered Tom; \u201cI saw his sprout; he threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at. He\u2019s a raal oil-butt, that fellow!\u201d \u2014Cooper\u2019s Pilot.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that whales had been introduced on the stage there.\u201d \u2014Eckermann\u2019s Conversations with Goethe.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?\u201d I answered, \u201cwe have been stove by a whale.\u201d \u2014\u201cNarrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket, which was attacked and finally destroyed by a large Sperm Whale in the Pacific Ocean.\u201d By Owen Chace of Nantucket, first mate of said vessel. New York, 1821.\r\n\r\n     \u201cA mariner sat in the shrouds one night,\r\n     The wind was piping free;\r\n     Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,\r\n     And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,\r\n     As it floundered in the sea.\u201d\r\n      \u2014Elizabeth Oakes Smith.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six English miles....\r\n\r\n\u201cSometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which, cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles.\u201d \u2014Scoresby.\r\n\r\n\u201cMad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head, and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.... It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so important an animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should have excited so little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant and the most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes.\u201d \u2014Thomas Beale\u2019s History of the Sperm Whale, 1839.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Cachalot\u201d (Sperm Whale) \u201cis not only better armed than the True Whale\u201d (Greenland or Right Whale) \u201cin possessing a formidable weapon at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at once so artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as the most dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale tribe.\u201d \u2014Frederick Debell Bennett\u2019s Whaling Voyage Round the Globe, 1840.\r\n\r\n     October 13.  \u201cThere she blows,\u201d was sung out from the mast-head.\r\n     \u201cWhere away?\u201d demanded the captain.\r\n     \u201cThree points off the lee bow, sir.\u201d\r\n      \u201cRaise up your wheel.  Steady!\u201d  \u201cSteady, sir.\u201d\r\n      \u201cMast-head ahoy!  Do you see that whale now?\u201d\r\n      \u201cAy ay, sir!  A shoal of Sperm Whales!  There she blows!  There she\r\n     breaches!\u201d\r\n      \u201cSing out! sing out every time!\u201d\r\n      \u201cAy Ay, sir!  There she blows! there\u2014there\u2014thar she\r\n     blows\u2014bowes\u2014bo-o-os!\u201d\r\n      \u201cHow far off?\u201d\r\n      \u201cTwo miles and a half.\u201d\r\n      \u201cThunder and lightning! so near!  Call all hands.\u201d\r\n      \u2014J. Ross Browne\u2019s Etchings of a Whaling Cruize.  1846.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of Nantucket.\u201d \u2014\u201cNarrative of the Globe Mutiny,\u201d by Lay and Hussey survivors. A.D. 1828.\r\n\r\nBeing once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by leaping into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable.\u201d \u2014Missionary Journal of Tyerman and Bennett.\r\n\r\n\u201cNantucket itself,\u201d said Mr. Webster, \u201cis a very striking and peculiar portion of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine thousand persons living here in the sea, adding largely every year to the National wealth by the boldest and most persevering industry.\u201d \u2014Report of Daniel Webster\u2019s Speech in the U. S. Senate, on the application for the Erection of a Breakwater at Nantucket. 1828.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a moment.\u201d \u2014\u201cThe Whale and his Captors, or The Whaleman\u2019s Adventures and the Whale\u2019s Biography, gathered on the Homeward Cruise of the Commodore Preble.\u201d By Rev. Henry T. Cheever.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf you make the least damn bit of noise,\u201d replied Samuel, \u201cI will send you to hell.\u201d \u2014Life of Samuel Comstock (the mutineer), by his brother, William Comstock. Another Version of the whale-ship Globe narrative.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in order, if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale.\u201d \u2014McCulloch\u2019s Commercial Dictionary.\r\n\r\n\u201cThese things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound forward again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen seem to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-West Passage.\u201d \u2014From \u201cSomething\u201d unpublished.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being struck by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with look-outs at the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a totally different air from those engaged in regular voyage.\u201d \u2014Currents and Whaling. U.S. Ex. Ex.\r\n\r\n\u201cPedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may perhaps have been told that these were the ribs of whales.\u201d \u2014Tales of a Whale Voyager to the Arctic Ocean.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales, that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages enrolled among the crew.\u201d \u2014Newspaper Account of the Taking and Retaking of the Whale-Ship Hobomack.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels (American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they departed.\u201d \u2014Cruise in a Whale Boat.\r\n\r\n\u201cSuddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up perpendicularly into the air. It was the whale.\u201d \u2014Miriam Coffin or the Whale Fisherman.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope tied to the root of his tail.\u201d \u2014A Chapter on Whaling in Ribs and Trucks.\r\n\r\n\u201cOn one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone\u2019s throw of the shore\u201d (Terra Del Fuego), \u201cover which the beech tree extended its branches.\u201d \u2014Darwin\u2019s Voyage of a Naturalist.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Stern all!\u2019 exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw the distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the boat, threatening it with instant destruction;\u2014\u2018Stern all, for your lives!\u2019\u201d \u2014Wharton the Whale Killer.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!\u201d \u2014Nantucket Song.\r\n\r\n     \u201cOh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale\r\n     In his ocean home will be\r\n     A giant in might, where might is right,\r\n     And King of the boundless sea.\u201d\r\n      \u2014Whale Song.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 1. Loomings.\r\n\r\nCall me Ishmael. Some years ago\u2014never mind how long precisely\u2014having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people\u2019s hats off\u2014then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.\r\n\r\nThere now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs\u2014commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.\r\n\r\nCircumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?\u2014Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster\u2014tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?\r\n\r\nBut look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand\u2014miles of them\u2014leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues\u2014north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?\r\n\r\nOnce more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries\u2014stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.\r\n\r\nBut here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd\u2019s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd\u2019s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies\u2014what is the one charm wanting?\u2014Water\u2014there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.\r\n\r\nNow, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick\u2014grow quarrelsome\u2014don\u2019t sleep of nights\u2014do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;\u2014no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,\u2014though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board\u2014yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;\u2014though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.\r\n\r\nNo, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one\u2019s sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.\r\n\r\nWhat of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain\u2019t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about\u2014however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way\u2014either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other\u2019s shoulder-blades, and be content.\r\n\r\nAgain, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,\u2014what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!\r\n\r\nFinally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way\u2014he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:\r\n\r\n\u201cGrand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. \u201cWHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. \u201cBLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.\u201d\r\n\r\nThough I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces\u2014though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.\r\n\r\nChief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it\u2014would they let me\u2014since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.\r\n\r\nBy reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.\r\n\r\nI stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.\r\n\r\nAs most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolising the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original\u2014the Tyre of this Carthage;\u2014the place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobblestones\u2014so goes the story\u2014to throw at the whales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit?\r\n\r\nNow having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,\u2014So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with the darkness towards the south\u2014wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don\u2019t be too particular.\r\n\r\nWith halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of \u201cThe Crossed Harpoons\u201d\u2014but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the bright red windows of the \u201cSword-Fish Inn,\u201d there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,\u2014rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don\u2019t you hear? get away from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.\r\n\r\nSuch dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But \u201cThe Crossed Harpoons,\u201d and \u201cThe Sword-Fish?\u201d\u2014this, then must needs be the sign of \u201cThe Trap.\u201d However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, interior door.\r\n\r\nIt seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher\u2019s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of \u2018The Trap!\u2019\r\n\r\nMoving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath\u2014\u201cThe Spouter Inn:\u2014Peter Coffin.\u201d\r\n\r\nCoffin?\u2014Spouter?\u2014Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.\r\n\r\nIt was a queer sort of place\u2014a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul\u2019s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. \u201cIn judging of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,\u201d says an old writer\u2014of whose works I possess the only copy extant\u2014\u201cit maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.\u201d True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind\u2014old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn\u2019t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it\u2019s too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper\u2014(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.\r\n\r\nBut what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?\r\n\r\nNow, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.\r\n\r\nBut no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this \u201cSpouter\u201d may be.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.\r\n\r\nEntering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.\r\n\r\nBut what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.\u2014It\u2019s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.\u2014It\u2019s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.\u2014It\u2019s a blasted heath.\u2014It\u2019s a Hyperborean winter scene.\u2014It\u2019s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture\u2019s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?\r\n\r\nIn fact, the artist\u2019s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.\r\n\r\nThe opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon\u2014so like a corkscrew now\u2014was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.\r\n\r\nCrossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way\u2014cut through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with fireplaces all round\u2014you enter the public room. A still duskier place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft\u2019s cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world\u2019s remotest nooks. Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den\u2014the bar\u2014a rude attempt at a right whale\u2019s head. Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale\u2019s jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.\r\n\r\nAbominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without\u2014within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads\u2019 goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass\u2014the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.\r\n\r\nUpon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full\u2014not a bed unoccupied. \u201cBut avast,\u201d he added, tapping his forehead, \u201cyou haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer\u2019s blanket, have ye? I s\u2019pose you are goin\u2019 a-whalin\u2019, so you\u2019d better get used to that sort of thing.\u201d\r\n\r\nI told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man\u2019s blanket.\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?\u2014you want supper? Supper\u2019ll be ready directly.\u201d\r\n\r\nI sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn\u2019t make much headway, I thought.\r\n\r\nAt last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland\u2014no fire at all\u2014the landlord said he couldn\u2019t afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind\u2014not only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy boy,\u201d said the landlord, \u201cyou\u2019ll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLandlord,\u201d I whispered, \u201cthat aint the harpooneer is it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, no,\u201d said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, \u201cthe harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don\u2019t\u2014he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes \u2019em rare.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe devil he does,\u201d says I. \u201cWhere is that harpooneer? Is he here?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019ll be here afore long,\u201d was the answer.\r\n\r\nI could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this \u201cdark complexioned\u201d harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did.\r\n\r\nSupper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on.\r\n\r\nPresently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, \u201cThat\u2019s the Grampus\u2019s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years\u2019 voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we\u2019ll have the latest news from the Feegees.\u201d\r\n\r\nA tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale\u2019s mouth\u2014the bar\u2014when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island.\r\n\r\nThe liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously.\r\n\r\nI observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, it seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised a cry of \u201cBulkington! Bulkington! where\u2019s Bulkington?\u201d and darted out of the house in pursuit of him.\r\n\r\nIt was now about nine o\u2019clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the seamen.\r\n\r\nNo man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don\u2019t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.\r\n\r\nThe more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over. Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at midnight\u2014how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?\r\n\r\n\u201cLandlord! I\u2019ve changed my mind about that harpooneer.\u2014I shan\u2019t sleep with him. I\u2019ll try the bench here.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cJust as you please; I\u2019m sorry I can\u2019t spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and it\u2019s a plaguy rough board here\u201d\u2014feeling of the knots and notches. \u201cBut wait a bit, Skrimshander; I\u2019ve got a carpenter\u2019s plane there in the bar\u2014wait, I say, and I\u2019ll make ye snug enough.\u201d So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at last the plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven\u2019s sake to quit\u2014the bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in the world could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the shavings with another grin, and throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the room, he went about his business, and left me in a brown study.\r\n\r\nI now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher than the planed one\u2014so there was no yoking them. I then placed the first bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall, leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in. But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially as another current from the rickety door met the one from the window, and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night.\r\n\r\nThe devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn\u2019t I steal a march on him\u2014bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea; but upon second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down!\r\n\r\nStill, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending a sufferable night unless in some other person\u2019s bed, I began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I\u2019ll wait awhile; he must be dropping in before long. I\u2019ll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after all\u2014there\u2019s no telling.\r\n\r\nBut though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.\r\n\r\n\u201cLandlord!\u201d said I, \u201cwhat sort of a chap is he\u2014does he always keep such late hours?\u201d It was now hard upon twelve o\u2019clock.\r\n\r\nThe landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. \u201cNo,\u201d he answered, \u201cgenerally he\u2019s an early bird\u2014airley to bed and airley to rise\u2014yes, he\u2019s the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he went out a peddling, you see, and I don\u2019t see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be, he can\u2019t sell his head.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCan\u2019t sell his head?\u2014What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling me?\u201d getting into a towering rage. \u201cDo you pretend to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s precisely it,\u201d said the landlord, \u201cand I told him he couldn\u2019t sell it here, the market\u2019s overstocked.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWith what?\u201d shouted I.\r\n\r\n\u201cWith heads to be sure; ain\u2019t there too many heads in the world?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI tell you what it is, landlord,\u201d said I quite calmly, \u201cyou\u2019d better stop spinning that yarn to me\u2014I\u2019m not green.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMay be not,\u201d taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, \u201cbut I rayther guess you\u2019ll be done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin\u2019 his head.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll break it for him,\u201d said I, now flying into a passion again at this unaccountable farrago of the landlord\u2019s.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s broke a\u2019ready,\u201d said he.\r\n\r\n\u201cBroke,\u201d said I\u2014\u201cbroke, do you mean?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSartain, and that\u2019s the very reason he can\u2019t sell it, I guess.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLandlord,\u201d said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a snow-storm\u2014\u201clandlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and want a bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow\u2014a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I\u2019ve no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, you I mean, landlord, you, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWall,\u201d said the landlord, fetching a long breath, \u201cthat\u2019s a purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin\u2019 you of has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of \u2019balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he\u2019s sold all on \u2019em but one, and that one he\u2019s trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow\u2019s Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin\u2019 human heads about the streets when folks is goin\u2019 to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin\u2019 out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me\u2014but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead idolators?\r\n\r\n\u201cDepend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe pays reg\u2019lar,\u201d was the rejoinder. \u201cBut come, it\u2019s getting dreadful late, you had better be turning flukes\u2014it\u2019s a nice bed; Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There\u2019s plenty of room for two to kick about in that bed; it\u2019s an almighty big bed that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm. Arter that, Sal said it wouldn\u2019t do. Come along here, I\u2019ll give ye a glim in a jiffy;\u201d and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards me, offering to lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed \u201cI vum it\u2019s Sunday\u2014you won\u2019t see that harpooneer to-night; he\u2019s come to anchor somewhere\u2014come along then; do come; won\u2019t ye come?\u201d\r\n\r\nI considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough, with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers to sleep abreast.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere,\u201d said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; \u201cthere, make yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye.\u201d I turned round from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.\r\n\r\nFolding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; also a large seaman\u2019s bag, containing the harpooneer\u2019s wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.\r\n\r\nBut what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.\r\n\r\nI sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought a little more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now, half undressed as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about the harpooneer\u2019s not coming home at all that night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven.\r\n\r\nWhether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time. At last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light come into the room from under the door.\r\n\r\nLord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head-peddler. But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that identical New Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and without looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working away at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the room. I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time while employed in unlacing the bag\u2019s mouth. This accomplished, however, he turned round\u2014when, good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large blackish looking squares. Yes, it\u2019s just as I thought, he\u2019s a terrible bedfellow; he\u2019s been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They were stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white man\u2014a whaleman too\u2014who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is it, thought I, after all! It\u2019s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what to make of his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun\u2019s tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon the skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he then took the New Zealand head\u2014a ghastly thing enough\u2014and crammed it down into the bag. He now took off his hat\u2014a new beaver hat\u2014when I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise. There was no hair on his head\u2014none to speak of at least\u2014nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.\r\n\r\nEven as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension. Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.\r\n\r\nMeanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years\u2019 War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too\u2014perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine\u2014heavens! look at that tomahawk!\r\n\r\nBut there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a three days\u2019 old Congo baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner. But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the empty fire-place, and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this little hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons. The chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.\r\n\r\nI now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but ill at ease meantime\u2014to see what was next to follow. First he takes about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such dry sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.\r\n\r\nAll these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time, now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in which I had so long been bound.\r\n\r\nBut the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one. Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.\r\n\r\nStammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my meaning.\r\n\r\n\u201cWho-e debel you?\u201d\u2014he at last said\u2014\u201cyou no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e.\u201d And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the dark.\r\n\r\n\u201cLandlord, for God\u2019s sake, Peter Coffin!\u201d shouted I. \u201cLandlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSpeak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!\u201d again growled the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on fire. But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t be afraid now,\u201d said he, grinning again, \u201cQueequeg here wouldn\u2019t harm a hair of your head.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStop your grinning,\u201d shouted I, \u201cand why didn\u2019t you tell me that that infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought ye know\u2019d it;\u2014didn\u2019t I tell ye, he was a peddlin\u2019 heads around town?\u2014but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look here\u2014you sabbee me, I sabbee\u2014you this man sleepe you\u2014you sabbee?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMe sabbee plenty\u201d\u2014grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and sitting up in bed.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou gettee in,\u201d he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What\u2019s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself\u2014the man\u2019s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.\r\n\r\n\u201cLandlord,\u201d said I, \u201ctell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will turn in with him. But I don\u2019t fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. It\u2019s dangerous. Besides, I ain\u2019t insured.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely motioned me to get into bed\u2014rolling over to one side as much as to say\u2014\u201cI won\u2019t touch a leg of ye.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood night, landlord,\u201d said I, \u201cyou may go.\u201d\r\n\r\nI turned in, and never slept better in my life.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.\r\n\r\nUpon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg\u2019s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade\u2014owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times\u2014this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.\r\n\r\nMy sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle. The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other\u2014I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,\u2014my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o\u2019clock in the afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.\r\n\r\nI lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too; the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt worse and worse\u2014at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a good slippering for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it\u2014half steeped in dreams\u2014I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it.\r\n\r\nNow, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg\u2019s pagan arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night\u2019s events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm\u2014unlock his bridegroom clasp\u2014yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse him\u2014\u201cQueequeg!\u201d\u2014but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage\u2019s side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! \u201cQueequeg!\u2014in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!\u201d At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him. Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at last, his mind seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous how essentially polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness; staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding. Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don\u2019t see every day, he and his ways were well worth unusual regarding.\r\n\r\nHe commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one, by the by, and then\u2014still minus his trowsers\u2014he hunted up his boots. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next movement was to crush himself\u2014boots in hand, and hat on\u2014under the bed; when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was hard at work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage\u2014neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a savage, he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over his eyes, and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones\u2014probably not made to order either\u2014rather pinched and tormented him at the first go off of a bitter cold morning.\r\n\r\nSeeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on; I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers\u2019s best cutlery with a vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the long straight edges are always kept.\r\n\r\nThe rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon like a marshal\u2019s baton.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 5. Breakfast.\r\n\r\nI quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my bedfellow.\r\n\r\nHowever, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more\u2019s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.\r\n\r\nThe bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.\r\n\r\nYou could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This young fellow\u2019s healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes\u2019 western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.\r\n\r\n\u201cGrub, ho!\u201d now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to breakfast.\r\n\r\nThey say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo\u2019s performances\u2014this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had anywhere.\r\n\r\nThese reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every man maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas\u2014entire strangers to them\u2014and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table\u2014all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes\u2014looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!\r\n\r\nBut as for Queequeg\u2014why, Queequeg sat there among them\u2014at the head of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him. But that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that in most people\u2019s estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.\r\n\r\nWe will not speak of all Queequeg\u2019s peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied out for a stroll.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 6. The Street.\r\n\r\nIf I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.\r\n\r\nIn thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.\r\n\r\nBut, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here comes another with a sou\u2019-wester and a bombazine cloak.\r\n\r\nNo town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one\u2014I mean a downright bumpkin dandy\u2014a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.\r\n\r\nBut think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?\r\n\r\nGo and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?\r\n\r\nIn New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.\r\n\r\nIn summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples\u2014long avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation\u2019s final day.\r\n\r\nAnd the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 7. The Chapel.\r\n\r\nIn this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman\u2019s Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.\r\n\r\nReturning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors\u2019 wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:\u2014\r\n\r\nSACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November 1st, 1836. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS SISTER.\r\n\r\nSACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats\u2019 crews OF THE SHIP ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in the PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839. THIS MARBLE Is here placed by their surviving SHIPMATES.\r\n\r\nSACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3d, 1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.\r\n\r\nShaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.\r\n\r\nOh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say\u2014here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.\r\n\r\nIn what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.\r\n\r\nBut Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.\r\n\r\nIt needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems\u2014aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling\u2014a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.\r\n\r\nI had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a very great favourite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry. At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom\u2014the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February\u2019s snow. No one having previously heard his history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the utmost interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life he had led. When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit.\r\n\r\nLike most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.\r\n\r\nThe perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood, so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship, these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec.\r\n\r\nI pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this. Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity, that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold\u2014a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.\r\n\r\nBut the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place, borrowed from the chaplain\u2019s former sea-farings. Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel\u2019s face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the ship\u2019s tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into the Victory\u2019s plank where Nelson fell. \u201cAh, noble ship,\u201d the angel seemed to say, \u201cbeat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling off\u2014serenest azure is at hand.\u201d\r\n\r\nNor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that had achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in the likeness of a ship\u2019s bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship\u2019s fiddle-headed beak.\r\n\r\nWhat could be more full of meaning?\u2014for the pulpit is ever this earth\u2019s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God\u2019s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds. Yes, the world\u2019s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 9. The Sermon.\r\n\r\nFather Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. \u201cStarboard gangway, there! side away to larboard\u2014larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!\u201d\r\n\r\nThere was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women\u2019s shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on the preacher.\r\n\r\nHe paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit\u2019s bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.\r\n\r\nThis ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog\u2014in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy\u2014\r\n\r\n     \u201cThe ribs and terrors in the whale,\r\n     Arched over me a dismal gloom,\r\n     While all God\u2019s sun-lit waves rolled by,\r\n     And lift me deepening down to doom.\r\n\r\n     \u201cI saw the opening maw of hell,\r\n     With endless pains and sorrows there;\r\n     Which none but they that feel can tell\u2014\r\n     Oh, I was plunging to despair.\r\n\r\n     \u201cIn black distress, I called my God,\r\n     When I could scarce believe him mine,\r\n     He bowed his ear to my complaints\u2014\r\n     No more the whale did me confine.\r\n\r\n     \u201cWith speed he flew to my relief,\r\n     As on a radiant dolphin borne;\r\n     Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone\r\n     The face of my Deliverer God.\r\n\r\n     \u201cMy song for ever shall record\r\n     That terrible, that joyful hour;\r\n     I give the glory to my God,\r\n     His all the mercy and the power.\u201d\r\n \r\n\r\nNearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: \u201cBeloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah\u2014\u2018And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShipmates, this book, containing only four chapters\u2014four yarns\u2014is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah\u2019s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish\u2019s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God\u2014never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed\u2014which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do\u2014remember that\u2014and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.\r\n\r\n\u201cWith this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that\u2019s bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That\u2019s the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck. How plainly he\u2019s a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,\u2014no friends accompany him to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger\u2019s evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious way, one whispers to the other\u2014\u201cJack, he\u2019s robbed a widow;\u201d or, \u201cJoe, do you mark him; he\u2019s a bigamist;\u201d or, \u201cHarry lad, I guess he\u2019s the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom.\u201d Another runs to read the bill that\u2019s stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Who\u2019s there?\u2019 cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his papers for the Customs\u2014\u2018Who\u2019s there?\u2019 Oh! how that harmless question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again. But he rallies. \u2018I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail ye, sir?\u2019 Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. \u2018We sail with the next coming tide,\u2019 at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing him. \u2018No sooner, sir?\u2019\u2014\u2018Soon enough for any honest man that goes a passenger.\u2019 Ha! Jonah, that\u2019s another stab. But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent. \u2018I\u2019ll sail with ye,\u2019\u2014he says,\u2014\u2018the passage money how much is that?\u2014I\u2019ll pay now.\u2019 For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, \u2018that he paid the fare thereof\u2019 ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of meaning.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow Jonah\u2019s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah\u2019s Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah\u2019s purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it\u2019s assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. \u2018Point out my state-room, Sir,\u2019 says Jonah now, \u2018I\u2019m travel-weary; I need sleep.\u2019 \u2018Thou lookest like it,\u2019 says the Captain, \u2018there\u2019s thy room.\u2019 Jonah enters, and would lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors of convicts\u2019 cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship\u2019s water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels\u2019 wards.\r\n\r\n\u201cScrewed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah\u2019s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. \u2018Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!\u2019 he groans, \u2018straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cLike one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there\u2019s naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah\u2019s prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah\u2019s head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship\u2014a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, \u2018What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!\u2019 Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep.\r\n\r\n\u201cTerrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah\u2019s; that discovered, then how furiously they mob him with their questions. \u2018What is thine occupation? Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018I am a Hebrew,\u2019 he cries\u2014and then\u2014\u2018I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!\u2019 Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God then! Straightway, he now goes on to make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more and more appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his deserts,\u2014when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake this great tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish\u2019s belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhile he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when describing Jonah\u2019s sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.\r\n\r\nThere now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.\r\n\r\nBut again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these words:\r\n\r\n\u201cShipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along \u2018into the midst of the seas,\u2019 where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and \u2018the weeds were wrapped about his head,\u2019 and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet\u2014\u2018out of the belly of hell\u2019\u2014when the whale grounded upon the ocean\u2019s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and \u2018vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;\u2019 when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten\u2014his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean\u2014Jonah did the Almighty\u2019s bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!\r\n\r\n\u201cThis, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!\u201d\r\n\r\nHe dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm,\u2014\u201cBut oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him\u2014a far, far upward, and inward delight\u2014who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,\u2014top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath\u2014O Father!\u2014chiefly known to me by Thy rod\u2014mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world\u2019s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?\u201d\r\n\r\nHe said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.\r\n\r\nReturning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time. He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his heathenish way.\r\n\r\nBut being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth page\u2014as I fancied\u2014stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was only by such a large number of fifties being found together, that his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.\r\n\r\nWith much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face\u2014at least to my taste\u2014his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington\u2019s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.\r\n\r\nWhilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence, never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous book. Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is\u2014which was the only way he could get there\u2014thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have \u201cbroken his digester.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain; the storm booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I\u2019ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night\u2019s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.\r\n\r\nWe then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between us.\r\n\r\nIf there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan\u2019s breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country\u2019s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.\r\n\r\nAfter supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers\u2019 pockets. I let them stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.\r\n\r\nI was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth\u2014pagans and all included\u2014can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?\u2014to do the will of God\u2014that is worship. And what is the will of God?\u2014to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me\u2014that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.\r\n\r\nHow it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts\u2019 honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg\u2014a cosy, loving pair.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 11. Nightgown.\r\n\r\nWe had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.\r\n\r\nYes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.\r\n\r\nWe had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated twelve-o\u2019clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord\u2019s policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.\r\n\r\nWhether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 12. Biographical.\r\n\r\nQueequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.\r\n\r\nWhen a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green sapling; even then, in Queequeg\u2019s ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins\u2014royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.\r\n\r\nA Sag Harbor ship visited his father\u2019s bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father\u2019s influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.\r\n\r\nIn vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage\u2014this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain\u2019s cabin. They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen. For at bottom\u2014so he told me\u2014he was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father\u2019s heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it\u2019s a wicked world in all meridians; I\u2019ll die a pagan.\r\n\r\nAnd thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.\r\n\r\nBy hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,\u2014as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.\r\n\r\nI asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen.\r\n\r\nHis story being ended with his pipe\u2019s last dying puff, Queequeg embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.\r\n\r\nNext morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade\u2019s bill; using, however, my comrade\u2019s money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg\u2014especially as Peter Coffin\u2019s cock and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person whom I now companied with.\r\n\r\nWe borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg\u2019s canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to \u201cthe Moss,\u201d the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf. As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much\u2014for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets,\u2014but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers\u2019 meadows armed with their own scythes\u2014though in no wise obliged to furnish them\u2014even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.\r\n\r\nShifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing\u2014though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage the barrow\u2014Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. \u201cWhy,\u201d said I, \u201cQueequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn\u2019t the people laugh?\u201d\r\n\r\nUpon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander\u2014from all accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain\u2014this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg\u2019s sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride\u2019s bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg\u2019s father. Grace being said,\u2014for those people have their grace as well as we\u2014though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts\u2014Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself\u2014being Captain of a ship\u2014as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King\u2019s own house\u2014the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;\u2014taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. \u201cNow,\u201d said Queequeg, \u201cwhat you tink now?\u2014Didn\u2019t our people laugh?\u201d\r\n\r\nAt last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner. Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.\r\n\r\nGaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air!\u2014how I spurned that turnpike earth!\u2014that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.\r\n\r\nAt the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind his back. I thought the bumpkin\u2019s hour of doom was come. Dropping his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the air; then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a puff.\r\n\r\n\u201cCapting! Capting!\u201d yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer; \u201cCapting, Capting, here\u2019s the devil.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHallo, you sir,\u201d cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to Queequeg, \u201cwhat in thunder do you mean by that? Don\u2019t you know you might have killed that chap?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat him say?\u201d said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe say,\u201d said I, \u201cthat you came near kill-e that man there,\u201d pointing to the still shivering greenhorn.\r\n\r\n\u201cKill-e,\u201d cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly expression of disdain, \u201cah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLook you,\u201d roared the Captain, \u201cI\u2019ll kill-e you, you cannibal, if you try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to mind his own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck. The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was run into the wind, and while the hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now took an instant\u2019s glance around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.\r\n\r\nWas there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for water\u2014fresh water\u2014something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to himself\u2014\u201cIt\u2019s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 14. Nantucket.\r\n\r\nNothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.\r\n\r\nNantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it\u2014a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don\u2019t grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day\u2019s walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.\r\n\r\nLook now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,\u2014the poor little Indian\u2019s skeleton.\r\n\r\nWhat wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at Behring\u2019s Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious assaults!\r\n\r\nAnd thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer\u2019s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah\u2019s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 15. Chowder.\r\n\r\nIt was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse\u2014our first point of departure\u2014must be left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no mistaking.\r\n\r\nTwo enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses\u2019 ears, swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It\u2019s ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen\u2019s chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?\r\n\r\nI was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen shirt.\r\n\r\n\u201cGet along with ye,\u201d said she to the man, \u201cor I\u2019ll be combing ye!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCome on, Queequeg,\u201d said I, \u201call right. There\u2019s Mrs. Hussey.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us and said\u2014\u201cClam or Cod?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s that about Cods, ma\u2019am?\u201d said I, with much politeness.\r\n\r\n\u201cClam or Cod?\u201d she repeated.\r\n\r\n\u201cA clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?\u201d says I, \u201cbut that\u2019s a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time, ain\u2019t it, Mrs. Hussey?\u201d\r\n\r\nBut being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the word \u201cclam,\u201d Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the kitchen, and bawling out \u201cclam for two,\u201d disappeared.\r\n\r\n\u201cQueequeg,\u201d said I, \u201cdo you think that we can make out a supper for us both on one clam?\u201d\r\n\r\nHowever, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey\u2019s clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word \u201ccod\u201d with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.\r\n\r\nWe resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What\u2019s that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? \u201cBut look, Queequeg, ain\u2019t that a live eel in your bowl? Where\u2019s your harpoon?\u201d\r\n\r\nFishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen\u2019s boats, I saw Hosea\u2019s brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod\u2019s decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.\r\n\r\nSupper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. \u201cWhy not?\u201d said I; \u201cevery true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon\u2014but why not?\u201d \u201cBecause it\u2019s dangerous,\u201d says she. \u201cEver since young Stiggs coming from that unfort\u2019nt v\u2019y\u2019ge of his, when he was gone four years and a half, with only three barrels of ile, was found dead in my first floor back, with his harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take sich dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg\u201d (for she had learned his name), \u201cI will just take this here iron, and keep it for you till morning. But the chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBoth,\u201d says I; \u201cand let\u2019s have a couple of smoked herring by way of variety.\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 16. The Ship.\r\n\r\nIn bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and no small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been diligently consulting Yojo\u2014the name of his black little god\u2014and Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order to do so, had already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I, Ishmael, should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it had turned out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for the present irrespective of Queequeg.\r\n\r\nI have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great confidence in the excellence of Yojo\u2019s judgment and surprising forecast of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.\r\n\r\nNow, this plan of Queequeg\u2019s, or rather Yojo\u2019s, touching the selection of our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little relied upon Queequeg\u2019s sagacity to point out the whaler best fitted to carry us and our fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances produced no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set about this business with a determined rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that trifling little affair. Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our little bedroom\u2014for it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that day; how it was I never could find out, for, though I applied myself to it several times, I never could master his liturgies and XXXIX Articles\u2014leaving Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there were three ships up for three-years\u2019 voyages\u2014The Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod. Devil-Dam, I do not know the origin of; Tit-bit is obvious; Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes. I peered and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for a moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us.\r\n\r\nYou may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;\u2014square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull\u2019s complexion was darkened like a French grenadier\u2019s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts\u2014cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale\u2014her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,\u2014this old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake\u2019s carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.\r\n\r\nNow when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem\u2019s head. A triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a complete view forward.\r\n\r\nAnd half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the ship\u2019s work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was constructed.\r\n\r\nThere was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to windward;\u2014for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.\r\n\r\n\u201cIs this the Captain of the Pequod?\u201d said I, advancing to the door of the tent.\r\n\r\n\u201cSupposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?\u201d he demanded.\r\n\r\n\u201cI was thinking of shipping.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer\u2014ever been in a stove boat?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, Sir, I never have.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say\u2014eh?\r\n\r\n\u201cNothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I\u2019ve been several voyages in the merchant service, and I think that\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMerchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that leg?\u2014I\u2019ll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose now ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships. But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?\u2014it looks a little suspicious, don\u2019t it, eh?\u2014Hast not been a pirate, hast thou?\u2014Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?\u2014Dost not think of murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?\u201d\r\n\r\nI protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the Vineyard.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of shipping ye.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWant to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho is Captain Ahab, sir?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThou art speaking to Captain Peleg\u2014that\u2019s who ye are speaking to, young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou wantest to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one leg.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat!\u2014ah, ah!\u201d\r\n\r\nI was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I could, \u201cWhat you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I know there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of the accident.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLook ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d\u2019ye see; thou dost not talk shark a bit. Sure, ye\u2019ve been to sea before now; sure of that?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSir,\u201d said I, \u201cI thought I told you that I had been four voyages in the merchant\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant service\u2014don\u2019t aggravate me\u2014I won\u2019t have it. But let us understand each other. I have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye yet feel inclined for it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI do, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cVery good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale\u2019s throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be got rid of, that is; which I don\u2019t take to be the fact.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back to me and tell me what ye see there.\u201d\r\n\r\nFor a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But concentrating all his crow\u2019s feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started me on the errand.\r\n\r\nGoing forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, what\u2019s the report?\u201d said Peleg when I came back; \u201cwhat did ye see?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot much,\u201d I replied\u2014\u201cnothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there\u2019s a squall coming up, I think.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can\u2019t ye see the world where you stand?\u201d\r\n\r\nI was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the Pequod was as good a ship as any\u2014I thought the best\u2014and all this I now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his willingness to ship me.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd thou mayest as well sign the papers right off,\u201d he added\u2014\u201ccome along with ye.\u201d And so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.\r\n\r\nSeated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good interest.\r\n\r\nNow, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.\r\n\r\nSo that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture names\u2014a singularly common fashion on the island\u2014and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature\u2019s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language\u2014that man makes one in a whole nation\u2019s census\u2014a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.\r\n\r\nLike Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But unlike Captain Peleg\u2014who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all trifles\u2014Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn\u2014all that had not moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man\u2019s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned income.\r\n\r\nNow, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something\u2014a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other, never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.\r\n\r\nSuch, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the decks was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always sat so, and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His broad-brim was placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he seemed absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume.\r\n\r\n\u201cBildad,\u201d cried Captain Peleg, \u201cat it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been studying those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my certain knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?\u201d\r\n\r\nAs if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate, Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, and seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe says he\u2019s our man, Bildad,\u201d said Peleg, \u201che wants to ship.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDost thee?\u201d said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.\r\n\r\n\u201cI dost,\u201d said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do ye think of him, Bildad?\u201d said Peleg.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019ll do,\u201d said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at his book in a mumbling tone quite audible.\r\n\r\nI thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg, his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a chest, and drawing forth the ship\u2019s articles, placed pen and ink before him, and seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high time to settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to engage for the voyage. I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid no wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship\u2019s company. I was also aware that being a green hand at whaling, my own lay would not be very large; but considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay\u2014that is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they call a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak of my three years\u2019 beef and board, for which I would not have to pay one stiver.\r\n\r\nIt might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely fortune\u2014and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am one of those that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this grim sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, I thought that the 275th lay would be about the fair thing, but would not have been surprised had I been offered the 200th, considering I was of a broad-shouldered make.\r\n\r\nBut one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony Bildad; how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly the whole management of the ship\u2019s affairs to these two. And I did not know but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal to say about shipping hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod, quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his own fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he was such an interested party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to himself out of his book, \u201cLay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, Captain Bildad,\u201d interrupted Peleg, \u201cwhat d\u2019ye say, what lay shall we give this young man?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThou knowest best,\u201d was the sepulchral reply, \u201cthe seven hundred and seventy-seventh wouldn\u2019t be too much, would it?\u2014\u2018where moth and rust do corrupt, but lay\u2014\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\nLay, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one, shall not lay up many lays here below, where moth and rust do corrupt. It was an exceedingly long lay that, indeed; and though from the magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet the slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a teenth of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, blast your eyes, Bildad,\u201d cried Peleg, \u201cthou dost not want to swindle this young man! he must have more than that.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSeven hundred and seventy-seventh,\u201d again said Bildad, without lifting his eyes; and then went on mumbling\u2014\u201cfor where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI am going to put him down for the three hundredth,\u201d said Peleg, \u201cdo ye hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say.\u201d\r\n\r\nBildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said, \u201cCaptain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship\u2014widows and orphans, many of them\u2014and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThou Bildad!\u201d roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin. \u201cBlast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCaptain Peleg,\u201d said Bildad steadily, \u201cthy conscience may be drawing ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can\u2019t tell; but as thou art still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye insult me. It\u2019s an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that he\u2019s bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and start my soul-bolts, but I\u2019ll\u2014I\u2019ll\u2014yes, I\u2019ll swallow a live goat with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting, drab-coloured son of a wooden gun\u2014a straight wake with ye!\u201d\r\n\r\nAs he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a marvellous oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him.\r\n\r\nAlarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who, I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened wrath of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again on the transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest intention of withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways. As for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had, there seemed no more left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb, though he twitched a little as if still nervously agitated. \u201cWhew!\u201d he whistled at last\u2014\u201cthe squall\u2019s gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used to be good at sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jack-knife here needs the grindstone. That\u2019s he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my young man, Ishmael\u2019s thy name, didn\u2019t ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael, for the three hundredth lay.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCaptain Peleg,\u201d said I, \u201cI have a friend with me who wants to ship too\u2014shall I bring him down to-morrow?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTo be sure,\u201d said Peleg. \u201cFetch him along, and we\u2019ll look at him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat lay does he want?\u201d groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in which he had again been burying himself.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh! never thee mind about that, Bildad,\u201d said Peleg. \u201cHas he ever whaled it any?\u201d turning to me.\r\n\r\n\u201cKilled more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, bring him along then.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I had done a good morning\u2019s work, and that the Pequod was the identical ship that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape.\r\n\r\nBut I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the Captain with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in many cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out, and receive all her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible by arriving to take command; for sometimes these voyages are so prolonged, and the shore intervals at home so exceedingly brief, that if the captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of that sort, he does not trouble himself much about his ship in port, but leaves her to the owners till all is ready for sea. However, it is always as well to have a look at him before irrevocably committing yourself into his hands. Turning back I accosted Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It\u2019s all right enough; thou art shipped.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, but I should like to see him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I don\u2019t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don\u2019t know exactly what\u2019s the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and yet he don\u2019t look so. In fact, he ain\u2019t sick; but no, he isn\u2019t well either. Any how, young man, he won\u2019t always see me, so I don\u2019t suppose he will thee. He\u2019s a queer man, Captain Ahab\u2014so some think\u2014but a good one. Oh, thou\u2019lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. He\u2019s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn\u2019t speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab\u2019s above the common; Ahab\u2019s been in colleges, as well as \u2019mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain\u2019t Captain Bildad; no, and he ain\u2019t Captain Peleg; he\u2019s Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCome hither to me\u2014hither, hither,\u201d said Peleg, with a significance in his eye that almost startled me. \u201cLook ye, lad; never say that on board the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself. \u2019Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to warn thee. It\u2019s a lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I\u2019ve sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is\u2014a good man\u2014not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man\u2014something like me\u2014only there\u2019s a good deal more of him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he\u2019s been a kind of moody\u2014desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it\u2019s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee\u2014and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife\u2014not three voyages wedded\u2014a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!\u201d\r\n\r\nAs I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don\u2019t know what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and it did not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then. However, my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so that for the present dark Ahab slipped my mind.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.\r\n\r\nAs Queequeg\u2019s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody\u2019s religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.\r\n\r\nI say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;\u2014but what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all\u2014Presbyterians and Pagans alike\u2014for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.\r\n\r\nTowards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. \u201cQueequeg,\u201d said I softly through the key-hole:\u2014all silent. \u201cI say, Queequeg! why don\u2019t you speak? It\u2019s I\u2014Ishmael.\u201d But all remained still as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but the door opening into an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall, but nothing more. I was surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg\u2019s harpoon, which the landlady the evening previous had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That\u2019s strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here, and no possible mistake.\r\n\r\n\u201cQueequeg!\u2014Queequeg!\u201d\u2014all still. Something must have happened. Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted. Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first person I met\u2014the chamber-maid. \u201cLa! la!\u201d she cried, \u201cI thought something must be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it\u2019s been just so silent ever since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma\u2019am!\u2014Mistress! murder! Mrs. Hussey! apoplexy!\u201d\u2014and with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I following.\r\n\r\nMrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the occupation of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime.\r\n\r\n\u201cWood-house!\u201d cried I, \u201cwhich way to it? Run for God\u2019s sake, and fetch something to pry open the door\u2014the axe!\u2014the axe! he\u2019s had a stroke; depend upon it!\u201d\u2014and so saying I was unmethodically rushing up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the matter with you, young man?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGet the axe! For God\u2019s sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it open!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLook here,\u201d said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet, so as to have one hand free; \u201clook here; are you talking about prying open any of my doors?\u201d\u2014and with that she seized my arm. \u201cWhat\u2019s the matter with you? What\u2019s the matter with you, shipmate?\u201d\r\n\r\nIn as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the whole case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of her nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed\u2014\u201cNo! I haven\u2019t seen it since I put it there.\u201d Running to a little closet under the landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that Queequeg\u2019s harpoon was missing. \u201cHe\u2019s killed himself,\u201d she cried. \u201cIt\u2019s unfort\u2019nate Stiggs done over again\u2014there goes another counterpane\u2014God pity his poor mother!\u2014it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor lad a sister? Where\u2019s that girl?\u2014there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign, with\u2014\u201cno suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;\u201d\u2014might as well kill both birds at once. Kill? The Lord be merciful to his ghost! What\u2019s that noise there? You, young man, avast there!\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force open the door.\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t allow it; I won\u2019t have my premises spoiled. Go for the locksmith, there\u2019s one about a mile from here. But avast!\u201d putting her hand in her side-pocket, \u201chere\u2019s a key that\u2019ll fit, I guess; let\u2019s see.\u201d And with that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg\u2019s supplemental bolt remained unwithdrawn within.\r\n\r\n\u201cHave to burst it open,\u201d said I, and was running down the entry a little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark.\r\n\r\nWith a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming against the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected; right in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of his head. He looked neither one way nor the other way, but sat like a carved image with scarce a sign of active life.\r\n\r\n\u201cQueequeg,\u201d said I, going up to him, \u201cQueequeg, what\u2019s the matter with you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe hain\u2019t been a sittin\u2019 so all day, has he?\u201d said the landlady.\r\n\r\nBut all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally constrained; especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for upwards of eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals.\r\n\r\n\u201cMrs. Hussey,\u201d said I, \u201che\u2019s alive at all events; so leave us, if you please, and I will see to this strange affair myself.\u201d\r\n\r\nClosing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he could do\u2014for all my polite arts and blandishments\u2014he would not move a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my presence in the slightest way.\r\n\r\nI wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do they fast on their hams that way in his native island. It must be so; yes, it\u2019s part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; he\u2019ll get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can\u2019t last for ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don\u2019t believe it\u2019s very punctual then.\r\n\r\nI went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig, confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only); after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o\u2019clock, I went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he was just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece of wood on his head.\r\n\r\n\u201cFor heaven\u2019s sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have some supper. You\u2019ll starve; you\u2019ll kill yourself, Queequeg.\u201d But not a word did he reply.\r\n\r\nDespairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep; and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But previous to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere thought of Queequeg\u2014not four feet off\u2014sitting there in that uneasy position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched. Think of it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!\r\n\r\nBut somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the first glimpse of sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints, but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed his forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was over.\r\n\r\nNow, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person\u2019s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don\u2019t believe it also. But when a man\u2019s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.\r\n\r\nAnd just so I now did with Queequeg. \u201cQueequeg,\u201d said I, \u201cget into bed now, and lie and listen to me.\u201d I then went on, beginning with the rise and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various religions of the present time, during which time I labored to show Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.\r\n\r\nI then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. He said no; only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great battle wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two o\u2019clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo more, Queequeg,\u201d said I, shuddering; \u201cthat will do;\u201d for I knew the inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had visited that very island, and he told me that it was the custom, when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in the yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were placed in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths, were sent round with the victor\u2019s compliments to all his friends, just as though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys.\r\n\r\nAfter all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered from his own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and, finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.\r\n\r\nAt last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 18. His Mark.\r\n\r\nAs we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that craft, unless they previously produced their papers.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?\u201d said I, now jumping on the bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.\r\n\r\n\u201cI mean,\u201d he replied, \u201che must show his papers.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from behind Peleg\u2019s, out of the wigwam. \u201cHe must show that he\u2019s converted. Son of darkness,\u201d he added, turning to Queequeg, \u201cart thou at present in communion with any Christian church?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy,\u201d said I, \u201che\u2019s a member of the first Congregational Church.\u201d Here be it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at last come to be converted into the churches.\r\n\r\n\u201cFirst Congregational Church,\u201d cried Bildad, \u201cwhat! that worships in Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman\u2019s meeting-house?\u201d and so saying, taking out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look at Queequeg.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow long hath he been a member?\u201d he then said, turning to me; \u201cnot very long, I rather guess, young man.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo,\u201d said Peleg, \u201cand he hasn\u2019t been baptized right either, or it would have washed some of that devil\u2019s blue off his face.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo tell, now,\u201d cried Bildad, \u201cis this Philistine a regular member of Deacon Deuteronomy\u2019s meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it every Lord\u2019s day.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting,\u201d said I; \u201call I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYoung man,\u201d said Bildad sternly, \u201cthou art skylarking with me\u2014explain thyself, thou young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me.\u201d\r\n\r\nFinding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. \u201cI mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother\u2019s son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in that we all join hands.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSplice, thou mean\u2019st splice hands,\u201d cried Peleg, drawing nearer. \u201cYoung man, you\u2019d better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy\u2014why Father Mapple himself couldn\u2019t beat it, and he\u2019s reckoned something. Come aboard, come aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog there\u2014what\u2019s that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what a harpoon he\u2019s got there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?\u201d\r\n\r\nWithout saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:\u2014\r\n\r\n\u201cCap\u2019ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!\u201d and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad\u2019s broad brim, clean across the ship\u2019s decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow,\u201d said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, \u201cspos-ee him whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cQuick, Bildad,\u201d said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway. \u201cQuick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship\u2019s papers. We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we\u2019ll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that\u2019s more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon enrolled among the same ship\u2019s company to which I myself belonged.\r\n\r\nWhen all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for signing, he turned to me and said, \u201cI guess, Quohog there don\u2019t know how to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or make thy mark?\u201d\r\n\r\nBut at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so that through Captain Peleg\u2019s obstinate mistake touching his appellative, it stood something like this:\u2014\r\n\r\nQuohog. his X mark.\r\n\r\nMeanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg, and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting one entitled \u201cThe Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose,\u201d placed it in Queequeg\u2019s hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his, looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, \u201cSon of darkness, I must do my duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!\u201d\r\n\r\nSomething of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad\u2019s language, heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.\r\n\r\n\u201cAvast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer,\u201d cried Peleg. \u201cPious harpooneers never make good voyagers\u2014it takes the shark out of \u2019em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good. He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPeleg! Peleg!\u201d said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, \u201cthou thyself, as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can\u2019st thou prate in this ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did\u2019st thou not think of Death and the Judgment then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHear him, hear him now,\u201d cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,\u2014\u201chear him, all of ye. Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death and the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save all hands\u2014how to rig jury-masts\u2014how to get into the nearest port; that was what I was thinking of.\u201d\r\n\r\nBildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some sailmakers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then he stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which otherwise might have been wasted.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 19. The Prophet.\r\n\r\n\u201cShipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?\u201d\r\n\r\nQueequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us, levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.\r\n\r\n\u201cHave ye shipped in her?\u201d he repeated.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,\u201d said I, trying to gain a little more time for an uninterrupted look at him.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, the Pequod\u2014that ship there,\u201d he said, drawing back his whole arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d said I, \u201cwe have just signed the articles.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnything down there about your souls?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAbout what?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, perhaps you hav\u2019n\u2019t got any,\u201d he said quickly. \u201cNo matter though, I know many chaps that hav\u2019n\u2019t got any,\u2014good luck to \u2019em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul\u2019s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat are you jabbering about, shipmate?\u201d said I.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in other chaps,\u201d abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon the word he.\r\n\r\n\u201cQueequeg,\u201d said I, \u201clet\u2019s go; this fellow has broken loose from somewhere; he\u2019s talking about something and somebody we don\u2019t know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStop!\u201d cried the stranger. \u201cYe said true\u2014ye hav\u2019n\u2019t seen Old Thunder yet, have ye?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho\u2019s Old Thunder?\u201d said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness of his manner.\r\n\r\n\u201cCaptain Ahab.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye hav\u2019n\u2019t seen him yet, have ye?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, we hav\u2019n\u2019t. He\u2019s sick they say, but is getting better, and will be all right again before long.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll right again before long!\u201d laughed the stranger, with a solemnly derisive sort of laugh. \u201cLook ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of mine will be all right; not before.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you know about him?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat did they tell you about him? Say that!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey didn\u2019t tell much of anything about him; only I\u2019ve heard that he\u2019s a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s true, that\u2019s true\u2014yes, both true enough. But you must jump when he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go\u2014that\u2019s the word with Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights; nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa?\u2014heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn\u2019t ye hear a word about them matters and something more, eh? No, I don\u2019t think ye did; how could ye? Who knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows\u2019ever, mayhap, ye\u2019ve heard tell about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh yes, that every one knows a\u2019most\u2014I mean they know he\u2019s only one leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy friend,\u201d said I, \u201cwhat all this gibberish of yours is about, I don\u2019t know, and I don\u2019t much care; for it seems to me that you must be a little damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about the loss of his leg.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll about it, eh\u2014sure you do?\u2014all?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPretty sure.\u201d\r\n\r\nWith finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a little, turned and said:\u2014\u201cYe\u2019ve shipped, have ye? Names down on the papers? Well, well, what\u2019s signed, is signed; and what\u2019s to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won\u2019t be, after all. Anyhow, it\u2019s all fixed and arranged a\u2019ready; and some sailors or other must go with him, I suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity \u2019em! Morning to ye, shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I\u2019m sorry I stopped ye.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLook here, friend,\u201d said I, \u201cif you have anything important to tell us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are mistaken in your game; that\u2019s all I have to say.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd it\u2019s said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way; you are just the man for him\u2014the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates, morning! Oh! when ye get there, tell \u2019em I\u2019ve concluded not to make one of \u2019em.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAh, my dear fellow, you can\u2019t fool us that way\u2014you can\u2019t fool us. It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMorning to ye, shipmates, morning.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMorning it is,\u201d said I. \u201cCome along, Queequeg, let\u2019s leave this crazy man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cElijah.\u201d\r\n\r\nElijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each other\u2019s fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, but passed on with my comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same corner that we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was dogging us, but with what intent I could not for the life of me imagine. This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy things.\r\n\r\nI was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg, and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 20. All Astir.\r\n\r\nA day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod. Not only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming on board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, everything betokened that the ship\u2019s preparations were hurrying to a close. Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam keeping a sharp look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and providing at the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on the rigging were working till long after night-fall.\r\n\r\nOn the day following Queequeg\u2019s signing the articles, word was given at all the inns where the ship\u2019s company were stopping, that their chests must be on board before night, for there was no telling how soon the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps, resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod was fully equipped.\r\n\r\nEvery one knows what a multitude of things\u2014beds, sauce-pans, knives and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling, which necessitates a three-years\u2019 housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides the great length of the whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which the success of the voyage most depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and duplicate ship.\r\n\r\nAt the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and ends of things, both large and small.\r\n\r\nChief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad\u2019s sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if she could help it, nothing should be found wanting in the Pequod, after once fairly getting to sea. At one time she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward\u2019s pantry; another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate\u2019s desk, where he kept his log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one\u2019s rheumatic back. Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity\u2014Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort, and consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars.\r\n\r\nBut it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board, as she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and a still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him a long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down went his mark opposite that article upon the paper. Every once in a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.\r\n\r\nDuring these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when he was going to come on board his ship. To these questions they would answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected aboard every day; meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.\r\n\r\nAt last it was given out that some time next day the ship would certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early start.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.\r\n\r\nIt was nearly six o\u2019clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we drew nigh the wharf.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right,\u201d said I to Queequeg, \u201cit can\u2019t be shadows; she\u2019s off by sunrise, I guess; come on!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAvast!\u201d cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close behind us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.\r\n\r\n\u201cGoing aboard?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHands off, will you,\u201d said I.\r\n\r\n\u201cLookee here,\u201d said Queequeg, shaking himself, \u201cgo \u2019way!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAin\u2019t going aboard, then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, we are,\u201d said I, \u201cbut what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, no, no; I wasn\u2019t aware of that,\u201d said Elijah, slowly and wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances.\r\n\r\n\u201cElijah,\u201d said I, \u201cyou will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be detained.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYe be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s cracked, Queequeg,\u201d said I, \u201ccome on.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHolloa!\u201d cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few paces.\r\n\r\n\u201cNever mind him,\u201d said I, \u201cQueequeg, come on.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my shoulder, said\u2014\u201cDid ye see anything looking like men going towards that ship a while ago?\u201d\r\n\r\nStruck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, \u201cYes, I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cVery dim, very dim,\u201d said Elijah. \u201cMorning to ye.\u201d\r\n\r\nOnce more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and touching my shoulder again, said, \u201cSee if you can find \u2019em now, will ye?\r\n\r\n\u201cFind who?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMorning to ye! morning to ye!\u201d he rejoined, again moving off. \u201cOh! I was going to warn ye against\u2014but never mind, never mind\u2014it\u2019s all one, all in the family too;\u2014sharp frost this morning, ain\u2019t it? Good-bye to ye. Shan\u2019t see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it\u2019s before the Grand Jury.\u201d And with these cracked words he finally departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no small wonderment at his frantic impudence.\r\n\r\nAt last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his face downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber slept upon him.\r\n\r\n\u201cThose sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?\u201d said I, looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter, were it not for Elijah\u2019s otherwise inexplicable question. But I beat the thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit up with the body; telling him to establish himself accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper\u2019s rear, as though feeling if it was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there.\r\n\r\n\u201cGracious! Queequeg, don\u2019t sit there,\u201d said I.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh! perry dood seat,\u201d said Queequeg, \u201cmy country way; won\u2019t hurt him face.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFace!\u201d said I, \u201ccall that his face? very benevolent countenance then; but how hard he breathes, he\u2019s heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you are heavy, it\u2019s grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look, he\u2019ll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don\u2019t wake.\u201d\r\n\r\nQueequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing over the sleeper, from one to the other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant, and desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps in some damp marshy place.\r\n\r\nWhile narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper\u2019s head.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s that for, Queequeg?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPerry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!\u201d\r\n\r\nHe was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe, which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The strong vapor now completely filling the contracted hole, it began to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and rubbed his eyes.\r\n\r\n\u201cHolloa!\u201d he breathed at last, \u201cwho be ye smokers?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShipped men,\u201d answered I, \u201cwhen does she sail?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain came aboard last night.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat Captain?\u2014Ahab?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho but him indeed?\u201d\r\n\r\nI was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we heard a noise on deck.\r\n\r\n\u201cHolloa! Starbuck\u2019s astir,\u201d said the rigger. \u201cHe\u2019s a lively chief mate, that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to.\u201d And so saying he went on deck, and we followed.\r\n\r\nIt was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes; the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively engaged; and several of the shore people were busy in bringing various last things on board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within his cabin.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.\r\n\r\nAt length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship\u2019s riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with her last gift\u2014a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for the steward\u2014after all this, the two Captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief mate, Peleg said:\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is all ready\u2014just spoke to him\u2014nothing more to be got from shore, eh? Well, call all hands, then. Muster \u2019em aft here\u2014blast \u2019em!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg,\u201d said Bildad, \u201cbut away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding.\u201d\r\n\r\nHow now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on the quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea, as well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign of him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. But then, the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that was not at all his proper business, but the pilot\u2019s; and as he was not yet completely recovered\u2014so they said\u2014therefore, Captain Ahab stayed below. And all this seemed natural enough; especially as in the merchant service many captains never show themselves on deck for a considerable time after heaving up the anchor, but remain over the cabin table, having a farewell merry-making with their shore friends, before they quit the ship for good with the pilot.\r\n\r\nBut there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and not Bildad.\r\n\r\n\u201cAft here, ye sons of bachelors,\u201d he cried, as the sailors lingered at the main-mast. \u201cMr. Starbuck, drive \u2019em aft.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStrike the tent there!\u201d\u2014was the next order. As I hinted before, this whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.\r\n\r\n\u201cMan the capstan! Blood and thunder!\u2014jump!\u201d\u2014was the next command, and the crew sprang for the handspikes.\r\n\r\nNow in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot is the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the licensed pilots of the port\u2014he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned in, for he never piloted any other craft\u2014Bildad, I say, might now be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody, to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty good will. Nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman\u2019s berth.\r\n\r\nMeantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first kick.\r\n\r\n\u201cIs that the way they heave in the marchant service?\u201d he roared. \u201cSpring, thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don\u2019t ye spring, I say, all of ye\u2014spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!\u201d And so saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.\r\n\r\nAt last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.\r\n\r\nLank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard,\u2014\r\n\r\n      \u201cSweet fields beyond the swelling flood,\r\n         Stand dressed in living green.\r\n      So to the Jews old Canaan stood,\r\n         While Jordan rolled between.\u201d\r\n\r\nNever did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They were full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.\r\n\r\nAt last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer. The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging alongside.\r\n\r\nIt was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage\u2014beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,\u2014poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much as to say, \u201cNevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck\u2014now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.\r\n\r\nBut, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about him,\u2014\u201cCaptain Bildad\u2014come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now! Careful, careful!\u2014come, Bildad, boy\u2014say your last. Luck to ye, Starbuck\u2014luck to ye, Mr. Stubb\u2014luck to ye, Mr. Flask\u2014good-bye and good luck to ye all\u2014and this day three years I\u2019ll have a hot supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGod bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men,\u201d murmured old Bildad, almost incoherently. \u201cI hope ye\u2019ll have fine weather now, so that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among ye\u2014a pleasant sun is all he needs, and ye\u2019ll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don\u2019t stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent. within the year. Don\u2019t forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck, mind that cooper don\u2019t waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in the green locker! Don\u2019t whale it too much a\u2019 Lord\u2019s days, men; but don\u2019t miss a fair chance either, that\u2019s rejecting Heaven\u2019s good gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. Good-bye, good-bye! Don\u2019t keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck; it\u2019ll spoil. Be careful with the butter\u2014twenty cents the pound it was, and mind ye, if\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCome, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,\u2014away!\u201d and with that, Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.\r\n\r\nShip and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.\r\n\r\nSome chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.\r\n\r\nWhen on that shivering winter\u2019s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years\u2019 dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that\u2019s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship\u2019s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights \u2019gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea\u2019s landlessness again; for refuge\u2019s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!\r\n\r\nKnow ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?\r\n\r\nBut as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God\u2014so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing\u2014straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 24. The Advocate.\r\n\r\nAs Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales.\r\n\r\nIn the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.\r\n\r\nDoubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies\u2019 plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier\u2019s profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale\u2019s vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!\r\n\r\nBut, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!\r\n\r\nBut look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.\r\n\r\nWhy did the Dutch in De Witt\u2019s time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of \u00a31,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?\r\n\r\nBut this is not the half; look again.\r\n\r\nI freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship\u2019s common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world!\r\n\r\nUntil the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.\r\n\r\nThat great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.\r\n\r\nBut if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no \u00e6sthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet every time.\r\n\r\nThe whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say.\r\n\r\nThe whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!\r\n\r\nTrue enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no good blood in their veins.\r\n\r\nNo good blood in their veins? They have something better than royal blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and harpooneers\u2014all kith and kin to noble Benjamin\u2014this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.\r\n\r\nGood again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.\r\n\r\nWhaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory law, the whale is declared \u201ca royal fish.\u201d *\r\n\r\nOh, that\u2019s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand imposing way.\r\n\r\nThe whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world\u2019s capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*\r\n\r\n*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.\r\n\r\nGrant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real dignity in whaling.\r\n\r\nNo dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very heavens attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I account that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.\r\n\r\nAnd, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 25. Postscript.\r\n\r\nIn behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause\u2014such an advocate, would he not be blameworthy?\r\n\r\nIt is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely\u2014who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king\u2019s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can\u2019t amount to much in his totality.\r\n\r\nBut the only thing to be considered here, is this\u2014what kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear\u2019s oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?\r\n\r\nThink of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.\r\n\r\nThe chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. \u201cI will have no man in my boat,\u201d said Starbuck, \u201cwho is not afraid of a whale.\u201d By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye,\u201d said Stubb, the second mate, \u201cStarbuck, there, is as careful a man as you\u2019ll find anywhere in this fishery.\u201d But we shall ere long see what that word \u201ccareful\u201d precisely means when used by a man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.\r\n\r\nStarbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father\u2019s? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother?\r\n\r\nWith memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature that these things should fail in latently engendering an element in him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.\r\n\r\nBut were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck\u2019s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!\r\n\r\nIf, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman\u2019s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.\r\n\r\nStubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner.\r\n\r\nWhat, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.\r\n\r\nI say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb\u2019s tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.\r\n\r\nThe third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha\u2019s Vineyard. A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a three years\u2019 voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length of time. As a carpenter\u2019s nails are divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those battering seas.\r\n\r\nNow these three mates\u2014Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the Pequod\u2019s boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales, these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.\r\n\r\nAnd since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set down who the Pequod\u2019s harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of them belonged.\r\n\r\nFirst of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.\r\n\r\nNext was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of Martha\u2019s Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego\u2019s long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding eyes\u2014for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression\u2014all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second mate\u2019s squire.\r\n\r\nThird among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black negro-savage, with a lion-like tread\u2014an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod\u2019s company, be it said, that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world\u2019s grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever come back. Black Little Pip\u2014he never did\u2014oh, no! he went before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod\u2019s forecastle, ye shall ere long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 28. Ahab.\r\n\r\nFor several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.\r\n\r\nEvery time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at times by the ragged Elijah\u2019s diabolical incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness\u2014to call it so\u2014which I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me acquainted with, still I ascribed this\u2014and rightly ascribed it\u2014to the fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and induce confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. Three better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own different way, could not readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.\r\n\r\nThere seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini\u2019s cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego\u2019s senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out\u2014which might hardly come to pass, so he muttered\u2014then, whoever should do that last office for the dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.\r\n\r\nSo powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale\u2019s jaw. \u201cAye, he was dismasted off Japan,\u201d said the old Gay-Head Indian once; \u201cbut like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of \u2019em.\u201d\r\n\r\nI was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod\u2019s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship\u2019s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.\r\n\r\nEre long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.\r\n\r\nNevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.\r\n\r\nSome days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up\u2014flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, \u2019twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab\u2019s texture.\r\n\r\nOld age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. \u201cIt feels like going down into one\u2019s tomb,\u201d\u2014he would mutter to himself\u2014\u201cfor an old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth.\u201d\r\n\r\nSo, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way. Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below, with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.\r\n\r\n\u201cAm I a cannon-ball, Stubb,\u201d said Ahab, \u201cthat thou wouldst wad me that fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at last.\u2014Down, dog, and kennel!\u201d\r\n\r\nStarting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, \u201cI am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like it, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAvast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, sir; not yet,\u201d said Stubb, emboldened, \u201cI will not tamely be called a dog, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I\u2019ll clear the world of thee!\u201d\r\n\r\nAs he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.\r\n\r\n\u201cI was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,\u201d muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. \u201cIt\u2019s very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don\u2019t well know whether to go back and strike him, or\u2014what\u2019s that?\u2014down here on my knees and pray for him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the first time I ever did pray. It\u2019s queer; very queer; and he\u2019s queer too; aye, take him fore and aft, he\u2019s about the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed with. How he flashed at me!\u2014his eyes like powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway there\u2019s something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of the twenty-four; and he don\u2019t sleep then. Didn\u2019t that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man\u2019s hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! I guess he\u2019s got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it\u2019s a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say\u2014worse nor a toothache. Well, well; I don\u2019t know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it. He\u2019s full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what\u2019s that for, I should like to know? Who\u2019s made appointments with him in the hold? Ain\u2019t that queer, now? But there\u2019s no telling, it\u2019s the old game\u2014Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it\u2019s worth a fellow\u2019s while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of it, that\u2019s about the first thing babies do, and that\u2019s a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of \u2019em. But that\u2019s against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth\u2014So here goes again. But how\u2019s that? didn\u2019t he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of that! He might as well have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he did kick me, and I didn\u2019t observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed like a bleached bone. What the devil\u2019s the matter with me? I don\u2019t stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though\u2014How? how? how?\u2014but the only way\u2019s to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I\u2019ll see how this plaguey juggling thinks over by daylight.\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 30. The Pipe.\r\n\r\nWhen Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.\r\n\r\nIn old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.\r\n\r\nSome moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. \u201cHow now,\u201d he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, \u201cthis smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring\u2014aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I\u2019ll smoke no more\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\nHe tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.\r\n\r\nNext morning Stubb accosted Flask.\r\n\r\n\u201cSuch a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man\u2019s ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it. But what was still more curious, Flask\u2014you know how curious all dreams are\u2014through all this rage that I was in, I somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult, that kick from Ahab. \u2018Why,\u2019 thinks I, \u2018what\u2019s the row? It\u2019s not a real leg, only a false leg.\u2019 And there\u2019s a mighty difference between a living thump and a dead thump. That\u2019s what makes a blow from the hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane. The living member\u2014that makes the living insult, my little man. And thinks I to myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against that cursed pyramid\u2014so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I say, I was thinking to myself, \u2018what\u2019s his leg now, but a cane\u2014a whalebone cane. Yes,\u2019 thinks I, \u2018it was only a playful cudgelling\u2014in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me\u2014not a base kick. Besides,\u2019 thinks I, \u2018look at it once; why, the end of it\u2014the foot part\u2014what a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed farmer kicked me, there\u2019s a devilish broad insult. But this insult is whittled down to a point only.\u2019 But now comes the greatest joke of the dream, Flask. While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by the shoulders, and slews me round. \u2018What are you \u2019bout?\u2019 says he. Slid! man, but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over the fright. \u2018What am I about?\u2019 says I at last. \u2018And what business is that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do you want a kick?\u2019 By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a clout\u2014what do you think, I saw?\u2014why thunder alive, man, his stern was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on second thoughts, \u2018I guess I won\u2019t kick you, old fellow.\u2019 \u2018Wise Stubb,\u2019 said he, \u2018wise Stubb;\u2019 and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of his own gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn\u2019t going to stop saying over his \u2018wise Stubb, wise Stubb,\u2019 I thought I might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I had only just lifted my foot for it, when he roared out, \u2018Stop that kicking!\u2019 \u2018Halloa,\u2019 says I, \u2018what\u2019s the matter now, old fellow?\u2019 \u2018Look ye here,\u2019 says he; \u2018let\u2019s argue the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn\u2019t he?\u2019 \u2018Yes, he did,\u2019 says I\u2014\u2018right here it was.\u2019 \u2018Very good,\u2019 says he\u2014\u2018he used his ivory leg, didn\u2019t he?\u2019 \u2018Yes, he did,\u2019 says I. \u2018Well then,\u2019 says he, \u2018wise Stubb, what have you to complain of? Didn\u2019t he kick with right good will? it wasn\u2019t a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It\u2019s an honor; I consider it an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of; but, be your boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; be kicked by him; account his kicks honors; and on no account kick back; for you can\u2019t help yourself, wise Stubb. Don\u2019t you see that pyramid?\u2019 With that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into the air. I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my hammock! Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMay be; may be. But it\u2019s made a wise man of me, Flask. D\u2019ye see Ahab standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing you can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; never speak to him, whatever he says. Halloa! What\u2019s that he shouts? Hark!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!\r\n\r\n\u201cIf ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do you think of that now, Flask? ain\u2019t there a small drop of something queer about that, eh? A white whale\u2014did ye mark that, man? Look ye\u2014there\u2019s something special in the wind. Stand by for it, Flask. Ahab has that that\u2019s bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes this way.\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 32. Cetology.\r\n\r\nAlready we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod\u2019s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.\r\n\r\nIt is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology,\u201d says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families. * * * Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal\u201d (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.\r\n\r\n\u201cUnfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.\u201d \u201cImpenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea.\u201d \u201cA field strewn with thorns.\u201d \u201cAll these incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists.\u201d\r\n\r\nThus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:\u2014The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray; Linn\u00e6us; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson; Marten; Lac\u00e9p\u00e8de; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts will show.\r\n\r\nOf the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back, invested the then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,\u2014the Greenland whale is deposed,\u2014the great sperm whale now reigneth!\r\n\r\nThere are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale\u2019s and Bennett\u2019s; both in their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description. As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life.\r\n\r\nNow the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the various species, or\u2014in this place at least\u2014to much of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.\r\n\r\nBut it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one\u2019s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me. Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle.\r\n\r\nFirst: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linn\u00e6us declares, \u201cI hereby separate the whales from the fish.\u201d But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linn\u00e6us\u2019s express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.\r\n\r\nThe grounds upon which Linn\u00e6us would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he states as follows: \u201cOn account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,\u201d and finally, \u201cex lege natur\u00e6 jure meritoque.\u201d I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.\r\n\r\nBe it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linn\u00e6us has given you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.\r\n\r\nNext: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal position.\r\n\r\nBy the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.* Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand divisions of the entire whale host.\r\n\r\n*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology.\r\n\r\nFirst: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all, both small and large.\r\n\r\nI. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.\r\n\r\nAs the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale; of the OCTAVO, the Grampus; of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise.\r\n\r\nFOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:\u2014I. The Sperm Whale; II. the Right Whale; III. the Fin-Back Whale; IV. the Hump-backed Whale; V. the Razor Back Whale; VI. the Sulphur Bottom Whale.\r\n\r\nBOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER I. (Sperm Whale).\u2014This whale, among the English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe; the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a creature identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of time, the true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name was still retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation must at last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from which this spermaceti was really derived.\r\n\r\nBOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER II. (Right Whale).\u2014In one respect this is the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and the oil specially known as \u201cwhale oil,\u201d an inferior article in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus multitudinously baptised. What then is the whale, which I include in the second species of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the Baleine Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale which for more than two centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor\u2019 West Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.\r\n\r\nSome pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate. The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference to elucidating the sperm whale.\r\n\r\nBOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER III. (Fin-Back).\u2014Under this head I reckon a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of a less portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to olive. His great lips present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin, from which he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object. This fin is some three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if not the slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back. From having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with the right whale, among a theoretic species denominated Whalebone whales, that is, whales with baleen. Of these so called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be several varieties, most of which, however, are little known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen\u2019s names for a few sorts.\r\n\r\nIn connection with this appellative of \u201cWhalebone whales,\u201d it is of great importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be convenient in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan, founded upon either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those marked parts or features very obviously seem better adapted to afford the basis for a regular system of Cetology than any other detached bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales, without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this same humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen; but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the other parts above mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such irregular combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached, such an irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the whale-naturalists has split.\r\n\r\nBut it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the whale, in his anatomy\u2014there, at least, we shall be able to hit the right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the Greenland whale\u2019s anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the various leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as available to the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated. What then remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this is the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the only one that can possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed.\r\n\r\nBOOK I. (Folio) CHAPTER IV. (Hump Back).\u2014This whale is often seen on the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the popular name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm whale also has a hump though a smaller one. His oil is not very valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any other of them.\r\n\r\nBOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER V. (Razor Back).\u2014Of this whale little is known but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no coward, he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which rises in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody else.\r\n\r\nBOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER VI. (Sulphur Bottom).\u2014Another retiring gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen; at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas, and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more that is true of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.\r\n\r\nThus ends BOOK I. (Folio), and now begins BOOK II. (Octavo).\r\n\r\nOCTAVOES.*\u2014These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which present may be numbered:\u2014I., the Grampus; II., the Black Fish; III., the Narwhale; IV., the Thrasher; V., the Killer.\r\n\r\n*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet the bookbinder\u2019s Quarto volume in its dimensioned form does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does.\r\n\r\nBOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER I. (Grampus).\u2014Though this fish, whose loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales. But possessing all the grand distinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one. He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five feet in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist. He swims in herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable in quantity, and pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale.\r\n\r\nBOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER II. (Black Fish).\u2014I give the popular fishermen\u2019s names for all these fish, for generally they are the best. Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so, and suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish, so-called, because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not more profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment\u2014as some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though their blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of thirty gallons of oil.\r\n\r\nBOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER III. (Narwhale), that is, Nostril whale.\u2014Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is only found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard to say. It does not seem to be used like the blade of the sword-fish and bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that however this one-sided horn may really be used by the Narwhale\u2014however that may be\u2014it would certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets. The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale, and the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. From certain cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn\u2019s horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; \u201cwhen Sir Martin returned from that voyage,\u201d saith Black Letter, \u201con bended knees he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor.\u201d An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of the unicorn nature.\r\n\r\nThe Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black. His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it, and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.\r\n\r\nBOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER IV. (Killer).\u2014Of this whale little is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage\u2014a sort of Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.\r\n\r\nBOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER V. (Thrasher).\u2014This gentleman is famous for his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts the Folio whale\u2019s back, and as he swims, he works his passage by flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both are outlaws, even in the lawless seas.\r\n\r\nThus ends BOOK II. (Octavo), and begins BOOK III. (Duodecimo).\r\n\r\nDUODECIMOES.\u2014These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise. II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.\r\n\r\nTo those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five feet should be marshalled among WHALES\u2014a word, which, in the popular sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures set down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my definition of what a whale is\u2014i.e. a spouting fish, with a horizontal tail.\r\n\r\nBOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER 1. (Huzza Porpoise).\u2014This is the common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to windward. They are the lads that always live before the wind. They are accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise meat is good eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you that a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very readily discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.\r\n\r\nBOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER II. (Algerine Porpoise).\u2014A pirate. Very savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make. Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many times, but never yet saw him captured.\r\n\r\nBOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER III. (Mealy-mouthed Porpoise).\u2014The largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto been designated, is that of the fishers\u2014Right-Whale Porpoise, from the circumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentleman-like figure. He has no fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he has a lovely tail, and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship\u2019s hull, called the \u201cbright waist,\u201d that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two separate colours, black above and white below. The white comprises part of his head, and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he had just escaped from a felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of the common porpoise.\r\n\r\n* * * * * *\r\n\r\nBeyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:\u2014The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I omit them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.\r\n\r\nFinally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught\u2014nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.\r\n\r\nConcerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.\r\n\r\nThe large importance attached to the harpooneer\u2019s vocation is evinced by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an officer called the Specksnyder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In those days, the captain\u2019s authority was restricted to the navigation and general management of the vessel; while over the whale-hunting department and all its concerns, the Specksnyder or Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain\u2019s more inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground) the command of the ship\u2019s deck is also his; therefore the grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their social equal.\r\n\r\nNow, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this\u2014the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the captain\u2019s cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it.\r\n\r\nThough the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and the community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their common luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work; though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in some primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in which you will see the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the shabbiest of pilot-cloth.\r\n\r\nAnd though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or in terrorem, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.\r\n\r\nNor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man\u2019s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God\u2019s true princes of the Empire from the world\u2019s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one now alluded to.\r\n\r\nBut Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.\r\n\r\nIt is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking an observation of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on the upper part of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, \u201cDinner, Mr. Starbuck,\u201d disappears into the cabin.\r\n\r\nWhen the last echo of his sultan\u2019s step has died away, and Starbuck, the first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks, and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of pleasantness, \u201cDinner, Mr. Stubb,\u201d and descends the scuttle. The second Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace, to see whether it will be all right with that important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid \u201cDinner, Mr. Flask,\u201d follows after his predecessors.\r\n\r\nBut the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck, seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over the Grand Turk\u2019s head; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down rollicking so far at least as he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other processions, by bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and, then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab\u2019s presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.\r\n\r\nIt is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that same commander\u2019s cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own private dinner-table of invited guests, that man\u2019s unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man\u2019s royalty of state transcends Belshazzar\u2019s, for Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be C\u00e6sar. It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding. Now, if to this consideration you superadd the official supremacy of a ship-master, then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.\r\n\r\nOver his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man\u2019s knife, as he carved the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the world they would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation, even upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching out his knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck\u2019s plate towards him, the mate received his meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold below. And poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy of this weary family party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his would have been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree. Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world; nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself, the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear, sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!\r\n\r\nAnother thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask\u2019s dinner was badly jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him; and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small appetite, and soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day; for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck. Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him. Peace and satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fish a bit of old-fashioned beef in the forecastle, as I used to when I was before the mast. There\u2019s the fruits of promotion now; there\u2019s the vanity of glory: there\u2019s the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask\u2019s official capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.\r\n\r\nNow, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table in the Pequod\u2019s cabin. After their departure, taking place in inverted order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward. And then the three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary legatees. They made a sort of temporary servants\u2019 hall of the high and mighty cabin.\r\n\r\nIn strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless invisible domineerings of the captain\u2019s table, was the entire care-free license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined like lords; they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices. Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoon-wise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted Dough-Boy\u2019s memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a great empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages, Dough-Boy\u2019s whole life was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they demanded, he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, till all was over.\r\n\r\nIt was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing his filed teeth to the Indian\u2019s: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to the low carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the low cabin framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in a ship. But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious, not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad, baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through his dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating\u2014an ugly sound enough\u2014so much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would hear Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might be picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery hanging round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not at all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on his arm, but a buckler. In good time, though, to his great delight, the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous, fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling in them at every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.\r\n\r\nBut, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.\r\n\r\nIn this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights the ship\u2019s cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth, the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter it, it was something as a street-door enters a house; turning inwards for a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing, residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab\u2019s soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.\r\n\r\nIt was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the other seamen my first mast-head came round.\r\n\r\nIn most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with the vessel\u2019s leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years\u2019 voyage she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her\u2014say, an empty vial even\u2014then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.\r\n\r\nNow, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here. I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them. For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread gale of God\u2019s wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief among arch\u00e6ologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post. Of modern standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering any strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of Vendome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules\u2019 pillars, his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that their spirits penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals and what rocks must be shunned.\r\n\r\nIt may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head standers of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us, that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected lofty spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh the beach. But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner\u2014for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.\r\n\r\nIn one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years\u2019 voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your most usual point of perch is the head of the t\u2019 gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t\u2019 gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull\u2019s horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a convenient closet of your watch-coat.\r\n\r\nConcerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or pulpits, called crow\u2019s-nests, in which the look-outs of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled \u201cA Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;\u201d in this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented crow\u2019s-nest of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet\u2019s good craft. He called it the Sleet\u2019s crow\u2019s-nest, in honor of himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our own names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet\u2019s crow\u2019s-nest is something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is furnished with a movable side-screen to keep to windward of your head in a hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this crow\u2019s-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed conveniences of his crow\u2019s-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his experiments in this crow\u2019s-nest, with a small compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called the \u201clocal attraction\u201d of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship\u2019s planks, and in the Glacier\u2019s case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned \u201cbinnacle deviations,\u201d \u201cazimuth compass observations,\u201d and \u201capproximate errors,\u201d he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of his crow\u2019s nest, within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird\u2019s nest within three or four perches of the pole.\r\n\r\nBut if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.\r\n\r\nLet me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I\u2014being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude\u2014how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships\u2019 standing orders, \u201cKeep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Ph\u00e6don instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:\u2014\r\n\r\n      \u201cRoll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!\r\n      Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.\u201d\r\n\r\nVery often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient \u201cinterest\u201d in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, thou monkey,\u201d said a harpooneer to one of these lads, \u201cwe\u2019ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen\u2019s teeth whenever thou art up here.\u201d Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer\u2019s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.\r\n\r\nThere is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.\r\n\r\n(Enter Ahab: Then, all.)\r\n\r\nIt was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the garden.\r\n\r\nSoon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints\u2014the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.\r\n\r\nBut on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every outer movement.\r\n\r\n\u201cD\u2019ye mark him, Flask?\u201d whispered Stubb; \u201cthe chick that\u2019s in him pecks the shell. \u2019Twill soon be out.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe hours wore on;\u2014Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.\r\n\r\nIt drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft.\r\n\r\n\u201cSir!\u201d said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on ship-board except in some extraordinary case.\r\n\r\n\u201cSend everybody aft,\u201d repeated Ahab. \u201cMast-heads, there! come down!\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen the entire ship\u2019s company were assembled, and with curious and not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:\u2014\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat do ye do when ye see a whale, men?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSing out for him!\u201d was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood!\u201d cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd what do ye next, men?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLower away, and after him!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd what tune is it ye pull to, men?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cA dead whale or a stove boat!\u201d\r\n\r\nMore and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.\r\n\r\nBut, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:\u2014\r\n\r\n\u201cAll ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look ye! d\u2019ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?\u201d\u2014holding up a broad bright coin to the sun\u2014\u201cit is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D\u2019ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhile the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.\r\n\r\nReceiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: \u201cWhosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke\u2014look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHuzza! huzza!\u201d cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a white whale, I say,\u201d resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul: \u201ca white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out.\u201d\r\n\r\nAll this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was separately touched by some specific recollection.\r\n\r\n\u201cCaptain Ahab,\u201d said Tashtego, \u201cthat white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMoby Dick?\u201d shouted Ahab. \u201cDo ye know the white whale then, Tash?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDoes he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?\u201d said the Gay-Header deliberately.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd has he a curious spout, too,\u201d said Daggoo, \u201cvery bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd he have one, two, three\u2014oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain,\u201d cried Queequeg disjointedly, \u201call twiske-tee be-twisk, like him\u2014him\u2014\u201d faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle\u2014\u201clike him\u2014him\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCorkscrew!\u201d cried Ahab, \u201caye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen\u2014Moby Dick\u2014Moby Dick!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCaptain Ahab,\u201d said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. \u201cCaptain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick\u2014but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho told thee that?\u201d cried Ahab; then pausing, \u201cAye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,\u201d he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; \u201cAye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!\u201d Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: \u201cAye, aye! and I\u2019ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition\u2019s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye!\u201d shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: \u201cA sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGod bless ye,\u201d he seemed to half sob and half shout. \u201cGod bless ye, men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what\u2019s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander\u2019s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower layer. If money\u2019s to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe smites his chest,\u201d whispered Stubb, \u201cwhat\u2019s that for? methinks it rings most vast, but hollow.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cVengeance on a dumb brute!\u201d cried Starbuck, \u201cthat simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHark ye yet again\u2014the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event\u2014in the living act, the undoubted deed\u2014there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there\u2019s naught beyond. But \u2019tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I\u2019d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who\u2019s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends\u2019 glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn\u2014living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards\u2014the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. \u2019Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!\u2014Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGod keep me!\u2014keep us all!\u201d murmured Starbuck, lowly.\r\n\r\nBut in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck\u2019s downcast eyes lighted up with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these still drive us on.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe measure! the measure!\u201d cried Ahab.\r\n\r\nReceiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship\u2019s company formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.\r\n\r\n\u201cDrink and pass!\u201d he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the nearest seaman. \u201cThe crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short draughts\u2014long swallows, men; \u2019tis hot as Satan\u2019s hoof. So, so; it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this way it comes. Hand it me\u2014here\u2019s a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!\r\n\r\n\u201cAttend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men, you will yet see that\u2014Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner. Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, wer\u2019t not thou St. Vitus\u2019 imp\u2014away, thou ague!\r\n\r\n\u201cAdvance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me touch the axis.\u201d So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell downright.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn vain!\u201d cried Ahab; \u201cbut, maybe, \u2019tis well. For did ye three but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there\u2014yon three most honorable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension, that shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!\u201d\r\n\r\nSilently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs up, before him.\r\n\r\n\u201cStab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers, advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!\u201d Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat\u2019s bow\u2014Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!\u201d The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 37. Sunset.\r\n\r\nThe cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.\r\n\r\nI leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where\u2019er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.\r\n\r\nYonder, by ever-brimming goblet\u2019s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun\u2014slow dived from noon\u2014goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. \u2019Tis iron\u2014that I know\u2014not gold. \u2019Tis split, too\u2014that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!\r\n\r\nDry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne\u2019er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night\u2014good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.)\r\n\r\n\u2019Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I\u2019ve dared, I\u2019ve willed; and what I\u2019ve willed, I\u2019ll do! They think me mad\u2014Starbuck does; but I\u2019m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that\u2019s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and\u2014Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That\u2019s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies\u2014Take some one of your own size; don\u2019t pommel me! No, ye\u2019ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab\u2019s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents\u2019 beds, unerringly I rush! Naught\u2019s an obstacle, naught\u2019s an angle to the iron way!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 38. Dusk.\r\n\r\nBy the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it.\r\n\r\nMy soul is more than matched; she\u2019s overmanned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who\u2019s over him, he cries;\u2014aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I plainly see my miserable office,\u2014to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock\u2019s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.\r\n\r\n[A burst of revelry from the forecastle.]\r\n\r\nOh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills me through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! \u2019tis in an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,\u2014as wild, untutored things are forced to feed\u2014Oh, life! \u2019tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee! but \u2019tis not me! that horror\u2019s out of me! and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch.\r\n\r\nFore-Top.\r\n\r\n(Stubb solus, and mending a brace.)\r\n\r\nHa! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!\u2014I\u2019ve been thinking over it ever since, and that ha, ha\u2019s the final consequence. Why so? Because a laugh\u2019s the wisest, easiest answer to all that\u2019s queer; and come what will, one comfort\u2019s always left\u2014that unfailing comfort is, it\u2019s all predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the gift, might readily have prophesied it\u2014for when I clapped my eye upon his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, wise Stubb\u2014that\u2019s my title\u2014well, Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here\u2019s a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I\u2019ll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra, skirra! What\u2019s my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes out?\u2014Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate\u2019s pennant, and so am I\u2014fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh\u2014\r\n\r\n      We\u2019ll drink to-night with hearts as light,\r\n         To love, as gay and fleeting\r\n      As bubbles that swim, on the beaker\u2019s brim,\r\n         And break on the lips while meeting.\r\n\r\nA brave stave that\u2014who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir\u2014(Aside) he\u2019s my superior, he has his too, if I\u2019m not mistaken.\u2014Aye, aye, sir, just through with this job\u2014coming.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.\r\n\r\nHARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.\r\n\r\n(Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus.)\r\n\r\n     Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!\r\n     Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!\r\n     Our captain\u2019s commanded.\u2014\r\n\r\n1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don\u2019t be sentimental; it\u2019s bad for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!\r\n\r\n(Sings, and all follow.)\r\n\r\n    Our captain stood upon the deck,\r\n    A spy-glass in his hand,\r\n    A viewing of those gallant whales\r\n    That blew at every strand.\r\n    Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,\r\n    And by your braces stand,\r\n    And we\u2019ll have one of those fine whales,\r\n    Hand, boys, over hand!\r\n    So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!\r\n    While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!\r\n\r\nMATE\u2019S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Eight bells there, forward!\r\n\r\n2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d\u2019ye hear, bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me call the watch. I\u2019ve the sort of mouth for that\u2014the hogshead mouth. So, so, (thrusts his head down the scuttle,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y! Eight bells there below! Tumble up!\r\n\r\nDUTCH SAILOR. Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark this in our old Mogul\u2019s wine; it\u2019s quite as deadening to some as filliping to others. We sing; they sleep\u2014aye, lie down there, like ground-tier butts. At \u2019em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail \u2019em through it. Tell \u2019em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell \u2019em it\u2019s the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment. That\u2019s the way\u2014that\u2019s it; thy throat ain\u2019t spoiled with eating Amsterdam butter.\r\n\r\nFRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let\u2019s have a jig or two before we ride to anchor in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!\r\n\r\nPIP. (Sulky and sleepy.) Don\u2019t know where it is.\r\n\r\nFRENCH SAILOR. Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say; merry\u2019s the word; hurrah! Damn me, won\u2019t you dance? Form, now, Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs! legs!\r\n\r\nICELAND SAILOR. I don\u2019t like your floor, maty; it\u2019s too springy to my taste. I\u2019m used to ice-floors. I\u2019m sorry to throw cold water on the subject; but excuse me.\r\n\r\nMALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where\u2019s your girls? Who but a fool would take his left hand by his right, and say to himself, how d\u2019ye do? Partners! I must have partners!\r\n\r\nSICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a green!\u2014then I\u2019ll hop with ye; yea, turn grasshopper!\r\n\r\nLONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye sulkies, there\u2019s plenty more of us. Hoe corn when you may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here comes the music; now for it!\r\n\r\nAZORE SAILOR. (Ascending, and pitching the tambourine up the scuttle.) Here you are, Pip; and there\u2019s the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now, boys! (The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go below; some sleep or lie among the coils of rigging. Oaths a-plenty.)\r\n\r\nAZORE SAILOR. (Dancing) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!\r\n\r\nPIP. Jinglers, you say?\u2014there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so.\r\n\r\nCHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.\r\n\r\nFRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! Split jibs! tear yourselves!\r\n\r\nTASHTEGO. (Quietly smoking.) That\u2019s a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my sweat.\r\n\r\nOLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing over. I\u2019ll dance over your grave, I will\u2014that\u2019s the bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled crews! Well, well; belike the whole world\u2019s a ball, as you scholars have it; and so \u2019tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you\u2019re young; I was once.\r\n\r\n3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!\u2014whew! this is worse than pulling after whales in a calm\u2014give us a whiff, Tash.\r\n\r\n(They cease dancing, and gather in clusters. Meantime the sky darkens\u2014the wind rises.)\r\n\r\nLASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it\u2019ll be douse sail soon. The sky-born, high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!\r\n\r\nMALTESE SAILOR. (Reclining and shaking his cap.) It\u2019s the waves\u2014the snow\u2019s caps turn to jig it now. They\u2019ll shake their tassels soon. Now would all the waves were women, then I\u2019d go drown, and chassee with them evermore! There\u2019s naught so sweet on earth\u2014heaven may not match it!\u2014as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.\r\n\r\nSICILIAN SAILOR. (Reclining.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad\u2014fleet interlacings of the limbs\u2014lithe swayings\u2014coyings\u2014flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (Nudging.)\r\n\r\nTAHITAN SAILOR. (Reclining on a mat.) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!\u2014the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah me!\u2014not thou nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee\u2019s peak of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the villages?\u2014The blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (Leaps to his feet.)\r\n\r\nPORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing \u2019gainst the side! Stand by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell they\u2019ll go lunging presently.\r\n\r\nDANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou holdest! Well done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He\u2019s no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!\r\n\r\n4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a pistol\u2014fire your ship right into it!\r\n\r\nENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old man\u2019s a grand old cove! We are the lads to hunt him up his whale!\r\n\r\nALL. Aye! aye!\r\n\r\nOLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there\u2019s none but the crew\u2019s cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there\u2019s another in the sky\u2014lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black.\r\n\r\nDAGGOO. What of that? Who\u2019s afraid of black\u2019s afraid of me! I\u2019m quarried out of it!\r\n\r\nSPANISH SAILOR. (Aside.) He wants to bully, ah!\u2014the old grudge makes me touchy (Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind\u2014devilish dark at that. No offence.\r\n\r\nDAGGOO (grimly). None.\r\n\r\nST. JAGO\u2019S SAILOR. That Spaniard\u2019s mad or drunk. But that can\u2019t be, or else in his one case our old Mogul\u2019s fire-waters are somewhat long in working.\r\n\r\n5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What\u2019s that I saw\u2014lightning? Yes.\r\n\r\nSPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his teeth.\r\n\r\nDAGGOO (springing). Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!\r\n\r\nSPANISH SAILOR (meeting him). Knife thee heartily! big frame, small spirit!\r\n\r\nALL. A row! a row! a row!\r\n\r\nTASHTEGO (with a whiff). A row a\u2019low, and a row aloft\u2014Gods and men\u2014both brawlers! Humph!\r\n\r\nBELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge in with ye!\r\n\r\nENGLISH SAILOR. Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard\u2019s knife! A ring, a ring!\r\n\r\nOLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad\u2019st thou the ring?\r\n\r\nMATE\u2019S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails!\r\n\r\nALL. The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (They scatter.)\r\n\r\nPIP (shrinking under the windlass). Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal yard! It\u2019s worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year! Who\u2019d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and here I don\u2019t. Fine prospects to \u2019em; they\u2019re on the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet\u2014they are your white squalls, they. White squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the white whale\u2014shirr! shirr!\u2014but spoken of once! and only this evening\u2014it makes me jingle all over like my tambourine\u2014that anaconda of an old man swore \u2019em in to hunt him! Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.\r\n\r\nI, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab\u2019s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.\r\n\r\nFor some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.\r\n\r\nAnd as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults\u2014not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations\u2014but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.\r\n\r\nNor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events,\u2014as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.\r\n\r\nNo wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed f\u0153tal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.\r\n\r\nBut there were still other and more vital practical influences at work. Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would perhaps\u2014either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North; seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.\r\n\r\nAnd as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists\u2014Olassen and Povelson\u2014declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier\u2019s, were these or almost similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are \u201cstruck with the most lively terrors,\u201d and \u201coften in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against the rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death.\u201d And however the general experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.\r\n\r\nSo that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are some remarkable documents that may be consulted.\r\n\r\nNevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered.\r\n\r\nOne of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.\r\n\r\nNor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.\r\n\r\nIt is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some whalemen, that the Nor\u2019 West Passage, so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.\r\n\r\nForced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen.\r\n\r\nBut even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out\u2014a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.\r\n\r\nThe rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings.\r\n\r\nNor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.\r\n\r\nAlready several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale\u2019s infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.\r\n\r\nJudge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale\u2019s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.\r\n\r\nHis three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab\u2019s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;\u2014Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale\u2019s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart\u2019s shell upon it.\r\n\r\nIt is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun\u2019sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man\u2019s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab\u2019s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab\u2019s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.\r\n\r\nThis is much; yet Ahab\u2019s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand\u2014however grand and wonderful, now quit it;\u2014and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of man\u2019s upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.\r\n\r\nNow, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which had overtaken him.\r\n\r\nThe report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.\r\n\r\nHere, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job\u2019s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals\u2014morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man\u2019s ire\u2014by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be\u2014what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,\u2014all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.\r\n\r\nWhat the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.\r\n\r\nAside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man\u2019s soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.\r\n\r\nThough in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title \u201cLord of the White Elephants\u201d above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, C\u00e6sarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things\u2014the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.\r\n\r\nThis elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.*\r\n\r\n*With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified terror.\r\n\r\nAs for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with \u201cRequiem eternam\u201d (eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him Requin.\r\n\r\nBethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God\u2019s great, unflattering laureate, Nature.*\r\n\r\n*I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king\u2019s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney! never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman\u2019s name for albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge\u2019s wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.\r\n\r\nI assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.\r\n\r\nBut how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the ship\u2019s time and place; and then letting it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!\r\n\r\nMost famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.\r\n\r\nBut there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross.\r\n\r\nWhat is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men\u2014has no substantive deformity\u2014and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?\r\n\r\nNor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place!\r\n\r\nNor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog\u2014Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.\r\n\r\nTherefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.\r\n\r\nBut though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness\u2014though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however modified;\u2014can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?\r\n\r\nLet us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to recall them now.\r\n\r\nWhy to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?\r\n\r\nOr what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of an untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its neighbors\u2014the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia\u2019s Blue Ridge is full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does \u201cthe tall pale man\u201d of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through the green of the groves\u2014why is this phantom more terrible than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg?\r\n\r\nNor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;\u2014it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can\u2019st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.\r\n\r\nI know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the following examples.\r\n\r\nFirst: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness\u2014as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, \u201cSir, it was not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so stirred me?\u201d\r\n\r\nSecond: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.\r\n\r\nBut thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael.\r\n\r\nTell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey\u2014why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness\u2014why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?\r\n\r\nNo: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.\r\n\r\nThus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!\r\n\r\nThough neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.\r\n\r\nBut not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous\u2014why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian\u2019s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.\r\n\r\nIs it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows\u2014a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues\u2014every stately or lovely emblazoning\u2014the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge\u2014pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 43. Hark!\r\n\r\n\u201cHIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?\u201d\r\n\r\nIt was the middle-watch: a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence, only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the unceasingly advancing keel.\r\n\r\nIt was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the words above.\r\n\r\n\u201cHist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTake the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d\u2019ye mean?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere it is again\u2014under the hatches\u2014don\u2019t you hear it\u2014a cough\u2014it sounded like a cough.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCough be damned! Pass along that return bucket.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere again\u2014there it is!\u2014it sounds like two or three sleepers turning over, now!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCaramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It\u2019s the three soaked biscuits ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye\u2014nothing else. Look to the bucket!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSay what ye will, shipmate; I\u2019ve sharp ears.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, you are the chap, ain\u2019t ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress\u2019s knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you\u2019re the chap.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGrin away; we\u2019ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the wind.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTish! the bucket!\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 44. The Chart.\r\n\r\nHad you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.\r\n\r\nWhile thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.\r\n\r\nBut it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.\r\n\r\nNow, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale\u2019s food; and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey.\r\n\r\nSo assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm whale\u2019s resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.*\r\n\r\n     *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne\r\n     out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of\r\n     the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By\r\n     that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in\r\n     course of completion; and portions of it are presented in\r\n     the circular. \u201cThis chart divides the ocean into districts\r\n     of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude;\r\n     perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve\r\n     columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each\r\n     of which districts are three lines; one to show the number\r\n     of days that have been spent in each month in every\r\n     district, and the two others to show the number of days in\r\n     which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.\u201d\r\n \r\n\r\nBesides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct\u2014say, rather, secret intelligence from the Deity\u2014mostly swim in veins, as they are called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor\u2019s parallel, and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship\u2019s mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for.\r\n\r\nAnd hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly without prospect of a meeting.\r\n\r\nThere was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality, perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year, say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were found there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding grounds, where he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab\u2019s chances of accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one technical phrase\u2014the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.\r\n\r\nNow, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod\u2019s sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor\u2019-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod\u2019s circumnavigating wake.\r\n\r\nBut granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of individual recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries\u2014tallied him, and shall he escape? His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep\u2019s ear! And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.\r\n\r\nOften, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab\u2019s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.\r\n\r\nSo far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this affair.\r\n\r\nI care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these citations, I take it\u2014the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself.\r\n\r\nFirst: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by the same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same private cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and I think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the interior, where he travelled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been on its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose. This man and this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the other. I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this; that is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second attack, saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them, afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first and last, and the last time distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale\u2019s eye, which I had observed there three years previous. I say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard of many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no good ground to impeach.\r\n\r\nSecondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several memorable historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been at distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly valuable oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences of the fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about such a whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen were content to recognise him by merely touching their tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them on the sea, without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance. Like some poor devils ashore that happen to know an irascible great man, they make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the street, lest if they pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a summary thump for their presumption.\r\n\r\nBut not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual celebrity\u2014Nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or C\u00e6sar. Was it not so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long did\u2019st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.\r\n\r\nBut this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various times creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, were finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with that express object as much in view, as in setting out through the Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture that notorious murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the Indian King Philip.\r\n\r\nI do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.\r\n\r\nFirst: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur. One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home, however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan\u2014do you suppose that that poor fellow\u2019s name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will read to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very irregular between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might be called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a boat\u2019s crew. For God\u2019s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man\u2019s blood was spilled for it.\r\n\r\nSecondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold enormousness, they have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses, when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt.\r\n\r\nBut fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale has done it.\r\n\r\nFirst: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket, was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, several of the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the ship. Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that in less than \u201cten minutes\u201d she settled down and fell over. Not a surviving plank of her has been seen since. After the severest exposure, part of the crew reached the land in their boats. Being returned home at last, Captain Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and breakers; for the second time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he has never tempted it since. At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed with his son; and all this within a few miles of the scene of the catastrophe.*\r\n\r\n*The following are extracts from Chace\u2019s narrative: \u201cEvery fact seemed to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed his operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at a short interval between them, both of which, according to their direction, were calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby combining the speed of the two objects for the shock; to effect which, the exact man\u0153uvres which he made were necessary. His aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings.\u201d Again: \u201cAt all events, the whole circumstances taken together, all happening before my own eyes, and producing, at the time, impressions in my mind of decided, calculating mischief, on the part of the whale (many of which impressions I cannot now recall), induce me to be satisfied that I am correct in my opinion.\u201d\r\n\r\nHere are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a black night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any hospitable shore. \u201cThe dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the fears of being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed upon hidden rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled to a moment\u2019s thought; the dismal looking wreck, and the horrid aspect and revenge of the whale, wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again made its appearance.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn another place\u2014p. 45,\u2014he speaks of \u201cthe mysterious and mortal attack of the animal.\u201d\r\n\r\nSecondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807 totally lost off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic particulars of this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter, though from the whale hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it.\r\n\r\nThirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J\u2014\u2014, then commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon whales, the Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing strength ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present. He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could so smite his stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very good; but there is more coming. Some weeks after, the Commodore set sail in this impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments\u2019 confidential business with him. That business consisted in fetching the Commodore\u2019s craft such a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider the Commodore\u2019s interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.\r\n\r\nI will now refer you to Langsdorff\u2019s Voyages for a little circumstance in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern\u2019s famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present century. Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:\r\n\r\n\u201cBy the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day we were out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on our fur clothing. For some days we had very little wind; it was not till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up. An uncommon large whale, the body of which was larger than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the water, but was not perceived by any one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon him, so that it was impossible to prevent its striking against him. We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at least out of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether, while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck, concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we saw the monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain D\u2019Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very happily it had escaped entirely uninjured.\u201d\r\n\r\nNow, the Captain D\u2019Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of Dorchester near Boston. I have the honor of being a nephew of his. I have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff. He substantiates every word. The ship, however, was by no means a large one: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.\r\n\r\nIn that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full, too, of honest wonders\u2014the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient Dampier\u2019s old chums\u2014I found a little matter set down so like that just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a corroborative example, if such be needed.\r\n\r\nLionel, it seems, was on his way to \u201cJohn Ferdinando,\u201d as he calls the modern Juan Fernandes. \u201cIn our way thither,\u201d he says, \u201cabout four o\u2019clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which put our men in such consternation that they could hardly tell where they were or what to think; but every one began to prepare for death. And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground. * * * * * The suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin!\u201d Lionel then goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land. But I should not much wonder if, in the darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.\r\n\r\nI might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase the assailing boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his strength, let me say, that there have been examples where the lines attached to a running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and secured there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if the sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction to his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent indication of his character, that upon being attacked he will frequently open his mouth, and retain it in that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes. But I must be content with only one more and a concluding illustration; a remarkable and most significant one, by which you will not fail to see, that not only is the most marvellous event in this book corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for the millionth time we say amen with Solomon\u2014Verily there is nothing new under the sun.\r\n\r\nIn the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work every way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he has always been considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in some one or two particulars, not at all affecting the matter presently to be mentioned.\r\n\r\nNow, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term of his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty years. A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the present constitution of things, a place for his habitual gregarious resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.\r\n\r\nIn the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar substance called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale\u2014squid or cuttle-fish\u2014lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at its surface. If, then, you properly put these statements together, and reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all human reasoning, Procopius\u2019s sea-monster, that for half a century stove the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm whale.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 46. Surmises.\r\n\r\nThough, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick; though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman\u2019s ways, altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated one he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed exceptionable, there were still additional considerations which, though not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by no means incapable of swaying him.\r\n\r\nTo accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck\u2019s body and Starbuck\u2019s coerced will were Ahab\u2019s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck\u2019s brain; still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain\u2019s quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a long interval would elapse ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall into open relapses of rebellion against his captain\u2019s leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influences were brought to bear upon him. Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men\u2019s courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable\u2014they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness\u2014and when retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene and hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.\r\n\r\nNor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object\u2014that final and romantic object, too many would have turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash\u2014aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.\r\n\r\nNor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod\u2019s voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect himself. That protection could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to be subjected to.\r\n\r\nFor all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod\u2019s voyage; observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force himself to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general pursuit of his profession.\r\n\r\nBe all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.\r\n\r\nIt was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self.\r\n\r\nI was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg\u2019s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage\u2019s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance\u2014aye, chance, free will, and necessity\u2014nowise incompatible\u2014all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course\u2014its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.\r\n\r\nThus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen\u2019s look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian\u2019s.\r\n\r\nAs he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere-away?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOn the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!\u201d\r\n\r\nInstantly all was commotion.\r\n\r\nThe Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his genus.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere go flukes!\u201d was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared.\r\n\r\n\u201cQuick, steward!\u201d cried Ahab. \u201cTime! time!\u201d\r\n\r\nDough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact minute to Ahab.\r\n\r\nThe ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the opposite quarter\u2014this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected for shipkeepers\u2014that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of man-of-war\u2019s men about to throw themselves on board an enemy\u2019s ship.\r\n\r\nBut at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.\r\n\r\nThe phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the captain\u2019s, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;\u2014a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere.\r\n\r\nWhile yet the wondering ship\u2019s company were gazing upon these strangers, Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head, \u201cAll ready there, Fedallah?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cReady,\u201d was the half-hissed reply.\r\n\r\n\u201cLower away then; d\u2019ye hear?\u201d shouting across the deck. \u201cLower away there, I say.\u201d\r\n\r\nSuch was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with a dexterous, off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors, goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship\u2019s side into the tossed boats below.\r\n\r\nHardly had they pulled out from under the ship\u2019s lee, when a fourth keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern, loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely, so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not the command.\r\n\r\n\u201cCaptain Ahab?\u2014\u201d said Starbuck.\r\n\r\n\u201cSpread yourselves,\u201d cried Ahab; \u201cgive way, all four boats. Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye, sir,\u201d cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his great steering oar. \u201cLay back!\u201d addressing his crew. \u201cThere!\u2014there!\u2014there again! There she blows right ahead, boys!\u2014lay back!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNever heed yonder yellow boys, Archy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, I don\u2019t mind \u2019em, sir,\u201d said Archy; \u201cI knew it all before now. Didn\u2019t I hear \u2019em in the hold? And didn\u2019t I tell Cabaco here of it? What say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little ones,\u201d drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of uneasiness. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you break your backbones, my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They are only five more hands come to help us\u2014never mind from where\u2014the more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone\u2014devils are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that\u2019s the stroke for a thousand pounds; that\u2019s the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men\u2014all hearts alive! Easy, easy; don\u2019t be in a hurry\u2014don\u2019t be in a hurry. Why don\u2019t you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so, then:\u2014softly, softly! That\u2019s it\u2014that\u2019s it! long and strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull, can\u2019t ye? pull, won\u2019t ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes don\u2019t ye pull?\u2014pull and break something! pull, and start your eyes out! Here!\u201d whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle; \u201cevery mother\u2019s son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth. That\u2019s it\u2014that\u2019s it. Now ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits. Start her\u2014start her, my silver-spoons! Start her, marling-spikes!\u201d\r\n\r\nStubb\u2019s exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy and indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped\u2014open-mouthed at times\u2014that the mere sight of such a yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them.\r\n\r\nIn obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely across Stubb\u2019s bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.\r\n\r\n\u201cMr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye please!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHalloa!\u201d returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set like a flint from Stubb\u2019s.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat think ye of those yellow boys, sir!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSmuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong, boys!)\u201d in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: \u201cA sad business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind, Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There\u2019s hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that\u2019s what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm\u2019s the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye, I thought as much,\u201d soliloquized Stubb, when the boats diverged, \u201cas soon as I clapt eye on \u2019em, I thought so. Aye, and that\u2019s what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale\u2019s at the bottom of it. Well, well, so be it! Can\u2019t be helped! All right! Give way, men! It ain\u2019t the White Whale to-day! Give way!\u201d\r\n\r\nNow the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the ship\u2019s company; but Archy\u2019s fancied discovery having some time previous got abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb\u2019s confident way of accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for all manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab\u2019s precise agency in the matter from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.\r\n\r\nMeantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a fencer\u2019s, thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance any tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained fixed, while the boat\u2019s five oars were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats in the rear paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily down into the blue, thus giving no distantly discernible token of the movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.\r\n\r\n\u201cEvery man look out along his oars!\u201d cried Starbuck. \u201cThou, Queequeg, stand up!\u201d\r\n\r\nNimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly balancing himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea.\r\n\r\nNot very far distant Flask\u2019s boat was also lying breathlessly still; its commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above the level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with the whale line. Its top is not more spacious than the palm of a man\u2019s hand, and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched at the mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little King-Post was small and short, and at the same time little King-Post was full of a large and tall ambition, so that this loggerhead stand-point of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.\r\n\r\n\u201cI can\u2019t see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to that.\u201d\r\n\r\nUpon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty shoulders for a pedestal.\r\n\r\n\u201cGood a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you fifty feet taller.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to Flask\u2019s foot, and then putting Flask\u2019s hand on his hearse-plumed head and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a breastband to lean against and steady himself by.\r\n\r\nAt any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously perverse and cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to the negro\u2019s lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.\r\n\r\nMeanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes. The whales might have made one of their regular soundings, not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the case, Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband, where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his match across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer, whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, \u201cDown, down all, and give way!\u2014there they are!\u201d\r\n\r\nTo a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted, seemed their forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders.\r\n\r\nAll four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled water and air. But it bade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and on, as a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the hills.\r\n\r\n\u201cPull, pull, my good boys,\u201d said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty.\r\n\r\nHow different the loud little King-Post. \u201cSing out and say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I\u2019ll sign over to you my Martha\u2019s Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys. Lay me on\u2014lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad! See! see that white water!\u201d And so shouting, he pulled his hat from his head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat\u2019s stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.\r\n\r\n\u201cLook at that chap now,\u201d philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a short distance, followed after\u2014\u201cHe\u2019s got fits, that Flask has. Fits? yes, give him fits\u2014that\u2019s the very word\u2014pitch fits into \u2019em. Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;\u2014merry\u2019s the word. Pull, babes\u2014pull, sucklings\u2014pull, all. But what the devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your knives in two\u2014that\u2019s all. Take it easy\u2014why don\u2019t ye take it easy, I say, and burst all your livers and lungs!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his\u2014these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.\r\n\r\nMeanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of Flask to \u201cthat whale,\u201d as he called the fictitious monster which he declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat\u2019s bow with its tail\u2014these allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that they would cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look over the shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage pronouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but arms, in these critical moments.\r\n\r\nIt was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;\u2014all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;\u2014all this was thrilling.\r\n\r\nNot the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man\u2019s ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;\u2014neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.\r\n\r\nThe dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows flung upon the sea. The jets of vapor no longer blended, but tilted everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes. The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead to leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going with such madness through the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn from the row-locks.\r\n\r\nSoon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship nor boat to be seen.\r\n\r\n\u201cGive way, men,\u201d whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet of his sail; \u201cthere is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes. There\u2019s white water again!\u2014close to! Spring!\u201d\r\n\r\nSoon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: \u201cStand up!\u201d and Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.\r\n\r\nThough not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that the imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s his hump. There, there, give it to him!\u201d whispered Starbuck.\r\n\r\nA short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.\r\n\r\nThough completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale, tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the ocean.\r\n\r\nThe wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together; the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen. The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were useless as propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.\r\n\r\nWet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat. Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear. We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a distance of not much more than its length.\r\n\r\nFloating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it tossed and gaped beneath the ship\u2019s bows like a chip at the base of a cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose from their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our perishing,\u2014an oar or a lance pole.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 49. The Hyena.\r\n\r\nThere are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody\u2019s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.\r\n\r\n\u201cQueequeg,\u201d said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water; \u201cQueequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?\u201d Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did often happen.\r\n\r\n\u201cMr. Stubb,\u201d said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; \u201cMr. Stubb, I think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman\u2019s discretion?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCertain. I\u2019ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMr. Flask,\u201d said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close by; \u201cyou are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death\u2019s jaws?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCan\u2019t you twist that smaller?\u201d said Flask. \u201cYes, that\u2019s the law. I should like to see a boat\u2019s crew backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind that!\u201d\r\n\r\nHere then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the boat\u2014oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck\u2019s driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck\u2019s boat; and finally considering in what a devil\u2019s chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. \u201cQueequeg,\u201d said I, \u201ccome along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.\r\n\r\nNow then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 50. Ahab\u2019s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.\r\n\r\n\u201cWho would have thought it, Flask!\u201d cried Stubb; \u201cif I had but one leg you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe. Oh! he\u2019s a wonderful old man!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t think it so strange, after all, on that account,\u201d said Flask. \u201cIf his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other left, you know.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmong whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase. So Tamerlane\u2019s soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest of the fight.\r\n\r\nBut with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.\r\n\r\nAhab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt\u2014above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat\u2019s crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat\u2019s crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all that matter. Until Cabaco\u2019s published discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat\u2019s bow for bracing the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter\u2019s chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat\u2019s crew being assigned to that boat.\r\n\r\nNow, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.\r\n\r\nBut be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab\u2019s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent\u2014those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth\u2019s primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.\r\n\r\nDays, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena.\r\n\r\nIt was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. \u201cThere she blows!\u201d Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a lowering.\r\n\r\nWalking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t\u2019gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her\u2014one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab\u2019s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.\r\n\r\nThis midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be; disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.\r\n\r\nNor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.\r\n\r\nThese temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow.\r\n\r\nBut, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.\r\n\r\nClose to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.\r\n\r\nCape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoso, as called of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried.\r\n\r\nDuring all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never could Starbuck forget the old man\u2019s aspect, when one night going down into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw him with closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had some time before emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat. On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale that swung from a beam in the ceiling.*\r\n\r\n*The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the course of the ship.\r\n\r\nTerrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 52. The Albatross.\r\n\r\nSouth-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries\u2014a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.\r\n\r\nAs if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.\r\n\r\n\u201cShip ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?\u201d\r\n\r\nBut as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first mere mention of the White Whale\u2019s name to another ship, Ahab for a moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed\u2014\u201cAhoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to \u2014\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\nAt that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the stranger\u2019s flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.\r\n\r\n\u201cSwim away from me, do ye?\u201d murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in the wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice,\u2014\u201cUp helm! Keep her off round the world!\u201d\r\n\r\nRound the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.\r\n\r\nWere this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 53. The Gam.\r\n\r\nThe ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had this not been the case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded her\u2014judging by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions\u2014if so it had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative answer to the question he put. For, as it eventually turned out, he cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain, except he could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought. But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not something said here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground.\r\n\r\nIf two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a moment to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and resting in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels descrying each other at the ends of the earth\u2014off lone Fanning\u2019s Island, or the far away King\u2019s Mills; how much more natural, I say, that under such circumstances these ships should not only interchange hails, but come into still closer, more friendly and sociable contact. And especially would this seem to be a matter of course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose captains, officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to each other; and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things to talk about.\r\n\r\nFor the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a date a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn files. And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would receive the latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to which she may be destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her. And in degree, all this will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing each other\u2019s track on the cruising-ground itself, even though they are equally long absent from home. For one of them may have received a transfer of letters from some third, and now far remote vessel; and some of those letters may be for the people of the ship she now meets. Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have an agreeable chat. For not only would they meet with all the sympathies of sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a common pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils.\r\n\r\nNor would difference of country make any very essential difference; that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number of English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does not take much to heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few foibles himself.\r\n\r\nSo, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the whalers have most reason to be sociable\u2014and they are so. Whereas, some merchant ships crossing each other\u2019s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition, mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other\u2019s rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other\u2019s cross-bones, the first hail is\u2014\u201cHow many skulls?\u201d\u2014the same way that whalers hail\u2014\u201cHow many barrels?\u201d And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don\u2019t like to see overmuch of each other\u2019s villanous likenesses.\r\n\r\nBut look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a \u201cGam,\u201d a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about \u201cspouters\u201d and \u201cblubber-boilers,\u201d and such like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also all Pirates and Man-of-War\u2019s men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.\r\n\r\nBut what is a Gam? You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster\u2019s ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it.\r\n\r\nGAM. NOUN\u2014A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats\u2019 crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.\r\n\r\nThere is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a pretty little milliner\u2019s tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat\u2019s crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and the captain, having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing like a pine tree. And often you will notice that being conscious of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him from the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to the importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor is this any very easy matter; for in his rear is the immense projecting steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of his back, the after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again, it would never do in plain sight of the world\u2019s riveted eyes, it would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands in his trowsers\u2019 pockets; but perhaps being generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or two, in a sudden squall say\u2014to seize hold of the nearest oarsman\u2019s hair, and hold on there like grim death.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho\u2019s Story.\r\n\r\n(As told at the Golden Inn.)\r\n\r\nThe Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more travellers than in any other part.\r\n\r\nIt was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho\u2019s story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod\u2019s main-mast. Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting record.\r\n\r\n*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.\r\n\r\nFor my humor\u2019s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint\u2019s eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time.\r\n\r\n\u201cSome two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days\u2019 sail eastward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.\r\n\r\n\u201cThough no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Lakeman!\u2014Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?\u2019 said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.\r\n\r\n\u201cOn the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but\u2014I crave your courtesy\u2014may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,\u2014Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,\u2014possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean\u2019s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave\u2019s right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt\u2014but, gentlemen, you shall hear.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho\u2019s leak seemed again increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious.\r\n\r\n\u201cMuch this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner in her. So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was on this head no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear water; clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen\u2014that bubbling from the pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the lee scupper-holes.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours\u2014watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern\u2019s tower, and make a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may, gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy\u2019s snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne\u2019s father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.\r\n\r\n\u201cEspying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with his gay banterings.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Aye, aye, my merry lads, it\u2019s a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one of ye, and let\u2019s have a taste. By the Lord, it\u2019s worth bottling! I tell ye what, men, old Rad\u2019s investment must go for it! he had best cut away his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began the job; he\u2019s come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of \u2019em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom; making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I\u2019d tell him to jump overboard and scatter \u2019em. They\u2019re playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he\u2019s a simple old soul,\u2014Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I wonder if he\u2019d give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Damn your eyes! what\u2019s that pump stopping for?\u2019 roared Radney, pretending not to have heard the sailors\u2019 talk. \u2018Thunder away at it!\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Aye, aye, sir,\u2019 said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. \u2018Lively, boys, lively, now!\u2019 And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life\u2019s utmost energies.\r\n\r\n\u201cQuitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know not; but so it happened. Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a pig to run at large.\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, gentlemen, sweeping a ship\u2019s deck at sea is a piece of household work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention all these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood between the two men.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate\u2019s malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in any already ireful being\u2014a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really valiant men even when aggrieved\u2014this nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.\r\n\r\n\u201cTherefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping the deck was not his business, and he would not do it. And then, without at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as the customary sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little or nothing all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his command; meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper\u2019s club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near by.\r\n\r\n\u201cHeated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt could but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but somehow still smothering the conflagration within him, without speaking he remained doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the incensed Radney shook the hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do his bidding.\r\n\r\n\u201cSteelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated his intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had not the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with his twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; but it was to no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him that he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused on the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to yourself.\u2019 But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch of his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions. Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching his right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter by the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting blood like a whale.\r\n\r\n\u201cEre the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their mastheads. They were both Canallers.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Canallers!\u2019 cried Don Pedro. \u2018We have seen many whale-ships in our harbours, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are they?\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You must have heard of it.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary land, we know but little of your vigorous North.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha\u2019s very fine; and ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such information may throw side-light upon my story.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cFor three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life. There\u2019s your true Ashantee, gentlemen; there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you; under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches. For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Is that a friar passing?\u2019 said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the crowded plazza, with humorous concern.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella\u2019s Inquisition wanes in Lima,\u2019 laughed Don Sebastian. \u2018Proceed, Senor.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018A moment! Pardon!\u2019 cried another of the company. \u2018In the name of all us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast\u2014\u201cCorrupt as Lima.\u201d It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than billiard-tables, and for ever open\u2014and \u201cCorrupt as Lima.\u201d So, too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St. Mark!\u2014St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you pour out again.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cFreely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018I see! I see!\u2019 impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha upon his silvery ruffles. \u2018No need to travel! The world\u2019s one Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold and holy as the hills.\u2014But the story.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cI left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil ensued; while standing out of harm\u2019s way, the valiant captain danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into the heart of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his resentment. But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all; they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing about three or four large casks in a line with the windlass, these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Come out of that, ye pirates!\u2019 roared the captain, now menacing them with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward. \u2018Come out of that, ye cut-throats!\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cSteelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there, defied the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt\u2019s) death would be the signal for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his heart lest this might prove but too true, the captain a little desisted, but still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?\u2019 demanded their ringleader.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Turn to! turn to!\u2014I make no promise;\u2014to your duty! Do you want to sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!\u2019 and he once more raised a pistol.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Sink the ship?\u2019 cried Steelkilt. \u2018Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. What say ye, men?\u2019 turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their response.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:\u2014\u2018It\u2019s not our fault; we didn\u2019t want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was boy\u2019s business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to prick the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw; ain\u2019t those mincing knives down in the forecastle there, men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to yourself; say the word; don\u2019t be a fool; forget it all; we are ready to turn to; treat us decently, and we\u2019re your men; but we won\u2019t be flogged.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Look ye, now,\u2019 cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him, \u2018there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped for the cruise, d\u2019ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don\u2019t want a row; it\u2019s not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we won\u2019t be flogged.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Turn to!\u2019 roared the Captain.\r\n\r\n\u201cSteelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:\u2014\u2018I tell you what it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby rascal, we won\u2019t lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but till you say the word about not flogging us, we don\u2019t do a hand\u2019s turn.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I\u2019ll keep ye there till ye\u2019re sick of it. Down ye go.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Shall we?\u2019 cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave.\r\n\r\n\u201cAs the Lakeman\u2019s bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock belonging to the companionway. Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them\u2014ten in number\u2014leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had remained neutral.\r\n\r\n\u201cAll night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace; the men who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose clinking and clanking at intervals through the dreary night dismally resounded through the ship.\r\n\r\n\u201cAt sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water was then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were tossed after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it, the Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth morning three others of the mutineers bolted up into the air from the desperate arms below that sought to restrain them. Only three were left.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Better turn to, now?\u2019 said the Captain with a heartless jeer.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Shut us up again, will ye!\u2019 cried Steelkilt.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Oh certainly,\u2019 said the Captain, and the key clicked.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was the last night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met with no opposition on the part of the other two; they swore they were ready for that, or for any other mad thing, for anything in short but a surrender. And what was more, they each insisted upon being the first man on deck, when the time to make the rush should come. But to this their leader as fiercely objected, reserving that priority for himself; particularly as his two comrades would not yield, the one to the other, in the matter; and both of them could not be first, for the ladder would but admit one man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants must come out.\r\n\r\n\u201cUpon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out, in order to be the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to surrender; and thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct might merit. But when Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead them to the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany, mixed their before secret treacheries together; and when their leader fell into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in three sentences; and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords; and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight.\r\n\r\n\u201cThinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he and all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot, the still struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his perfidious allies, who at once claimed the honor of securing a man who had been fully ripe for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged along the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there they hung till morning. \u2018Damn ye,\u2019 cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them, \u2018the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains!\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cAt sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that he had a good mind to flog them all round\u2014thought, upon the whole, he would do so\u2014he ought to\u2014justice demanded it; but for the present, considering their timely surrender, he would let them go with a reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the vernacular.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018But as for you, ye carrion rogues,\u2019 turning to the three men in the rigging\u2014\u2018for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;\u2019 and, seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018My wrist is sprained with ye!\u2019 he cried, at last; \u2018but there is still rope enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn\u2019t give up. Take that gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he can say for himself.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cFor a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, said in a sort of hiss, \u2018What I say is this\u2014and mind it well\u2014if you flog me, I murder you!\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me\u2019\u2014and the Captain drew off with the rope to strike.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Best not,\u2019 hissed the Lakeman.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018But I must,\u2019\u2014and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke.\r\n\r\n\u201cSteelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain; who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck rapidly two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said, \u2018I won\u2019t do it\u2014let him go\u2014cut him down: d\u2019ye hear?\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cBut as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale man, with a bandaged head, arrested them\u2014Radney the chief mate. Ever since the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak; but mumbling something about his being willing and able to do what the captain dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced to his pinioned foe.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018You are a coward!\u2019 hissed the Lakeman.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018So I am, but take that.\u2019 The mate was in the very act of striking, when another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt\u2019s threat, whatever that might have been. The three men were then cut down, all hands were turned to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron pumps clanged as before.\r\n\r\n\u201cJust after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor was heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up, besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the crew. Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their own instance they were put down in the ship\u2019s run for salvation. Still, no sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed, that mainly at Steelkilt\u2019s instigation, they had resolved to maintain the strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the ship reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure the speediest end to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing\u2014namely, not to sing out for whales, in case any should be discovered. For, spite of her leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still maintained her mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing to lower for a fish that moment, as on the day his craft first struck the cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite as ready to change his berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the vital jaw of the whale.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of passiveness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till all was over) concerning his own proper and private revenge upon the man who had stung him in the ventricles of his heart. He was in Radney the chief mate\u2019s watch; and as if the infatuated man sought to run more than half way to meet his doom, after the scene at the rigging, he insisted, against the express counsel of the captain, upon resuming the head of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two other circumstances, Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge.\r\n\r\n\u201cDuring the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship\u2019s side. In this attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a considerable vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next trick at the helm would come round at two o\u2019clock, in the morning of the third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At his leisure, he employed the interval in braiding something very carefully in his watches below.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018What are you making there?\u2019 said a shipmate.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018What do you think? what does it look like?\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Like a lanyard for your bag; but it\u2019s an odd one, seems to me.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Yes, rather oddish,\u2019 said the Lakeman, holding it at arm\u2019s length before him; \u2018but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven\u2019t enough twine,\u2014have you any?\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cBut there was none in the forecastle.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Then I must get some from old Rad;\u2019 and he rose to go aft.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018You don\u2019t mean to go a begging to him!\u2019 said a sailor.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Why not? Do you think he won\u2019t do me a turn, when it\u2019s to help himself in the end, shipmate?\u2019 and going to the mate, he looked at him quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given him\u2014neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night an iron ball, closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the Lakeman\u2019s monkey jacket, as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent helm\u2014nigh to the man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready dug to the seaman\u2019s hand\u2014that fatal hour was then to come; and in the fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody deed he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have done.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, \u2018There she rolls! there she rolls!\u2019 Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Moby Dick!\u2019 cried Don Sebastian; \u2018St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;\u2014but that would be too long a story.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018How? how?\u2019 cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Nay, Dons, Dons\u2014nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more into the air, Sirs.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018The chicha! the chicha!\u2019 cried Don Pedro; \u2018our vigorous friend looks faint;\u2014fill up his empty glass!\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cNo need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.\u2014Now, gentlemen, so suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the ship\u2014forgetful of the compact among the crew\u2014in the excitement of the moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted his voice for the monster, though for some little time past it had been plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy. \u2018The White Whale\u2014the White Whale!\u2019 was the cry from captain, mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumours, were all anxious to capture so famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted. The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate, and when fast to a fish, it was his duty to sit next him, while Radney stood up with his lance in the prow, and haul in or slacken the line, at the word of command. Moreover, when the four boats were lowered, the mate\u2019s got the start; and none howled more fiercely with delight than did Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. After a stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney sprang to the bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat. And now his bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale\u2019s topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale\u2019s slippery back, the boat righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.\r\n\r\n\u201cMeantime, at the first tap of the boat\u2019s bottom, the Lakeman had slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific, downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose again, with some tatters of Radney\u2019s red woollen shirt, caught in the teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn good time, the Town-Ho reached her port\u2014a savage, solitary place\u2014where no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other harbor.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe ship\u2019s company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of heaving down the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting vigilance over their dangerous allies was this small band of whites necessitated, both by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard work they underwent, that upon the vessel being ready again for sea, they were in such a weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with them in so heavy a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the ship as far off shore as possible; loaded and ran out his two cannon from the bows; stacked his muskets on the poop; and warning the Islanders not to approach the ship at their peril, took one man with him, and setting the sail of his best whale-boat, steered straight before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to procure a reinforcement to his crew.\r\n\r\n\u201cOn the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but the savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of Steelkilt hailed him to heave to, or he would run him under water. The captain presented a pistol. With one foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and foam.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018What do you want of me?\u2019 cried the captain.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?\u2019 demanded Steelkilt; \u2018no lies.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018I am bound to Tahiti for more men.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Very good. Let me board you a moment\u2014I come in peace.\u2019 With that he leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood face to face with the captain.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me. As soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightnings strike me!\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018A pretty scholar,\u2019 laughed the Lakeman. \u2018Adios, Senor!\u2019 and leaping into the sea, he swam back to his comrades.\r\n\r\n\u201cWatching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the roots of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due time arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There, luck befriended him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were providentially in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor headed. They embarked; and so for ever got the start of their former captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal retribution.\r\n\r\n\u201cSome ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived, and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all right there, again resumed his cruisings.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that destroyed him. * * * *\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Are you through?\u2019 said Don Sebastian, quietly.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018I am, Don.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions, this your story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to press.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don Sebastian\u2019s suit,\u2019 cried the company, with exceeding interest.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Nay,\u2019 said Don Sebastian; \u2018but I know a worthy priest near by, who will quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well advised? this may grow too serious.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Though there are no Auto-da-F\u00e9s in Lima now,\u2019 said one of the company to another; \u2018I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy. Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no need of this.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg that you will be particular in procuring the largest sized Evangelists you can.\u2019\r\n\r\n* * * * * *\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,\u2019 said Don Sebastian, gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the light, and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2018So help me Heaven, and on my honor the story I have told ye, gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.\r\n\r\nI shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.\r\n\r\nIt may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain-armor like Saladin\u2019s, and a helmeted head like St. George\u2019s; ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific presentations of him.\r\n\r\nNow, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale\u2019s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true whale\u2019s majestic flukes.\r\n\r\nBut go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter\u2019s portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido\u2019s picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own \u201cPerseus Descending,\u201d make out one whit better. The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for the Traitors\u2019 Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales of old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah\u2019s whale, as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What shall be said of these? As for the book-binder\u2019s whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor\u2014as stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both old and new\u2014that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this book-binder\u2019s fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an old Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the Revival of Learning; and in those days, and even down to a comparatively late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a species of the Leviathan.\r\n\r\nIn the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all manner of spouts, jets d\u2019eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the original edition of the \u201cAdvancement of Learning\u201d you will find some curious whales.\r\n\r\nBut quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations, by those who know. In old Harris\u2019s collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671, entitled \u201cA Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master.\u201d In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles, with white bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with perpendicular flukes.\r\n\r\nThen again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled \u201cA Voyage round Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries.\u201d In this book is an outline purporting to be a \u201cPicture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.\u201d I doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines. To mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye!\r\n\r\nNor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of mistake. Look at that popular work \u201cGoldsmith\u2019s Animated Nature.\u201d In the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged \u201cwhale\u201d and a \u201cnarwhale.\u201d I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of schoolboys.\r\n\r\nThen, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lac\u00e9p\u00e8de, a great naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland whale (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have its counterpart in nature.\r\n\r\nBut the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier\u2019s Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.\r\n\r\nAs for the sign-painters\u2019 whales seen in the streets hanging over the shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.\r\n\r\nBut these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship\u2019s deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.\r\n\r\nBut it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham\u2019s skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy\u2019s other leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan\u2019s articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. \u201cHowever recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us,\u201d said humorous Stubb one day, \u201che can never be truly said to handle us without mittens.\u201d\r\n\r\nFor all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes.\r\n\r\nIn connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern, especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass that matter by.\r\n\r\nI know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale; Colnett\u2019s, Huggins\u2019s, Frederick Cuvier\u2019s, and Beale\u2019s. In the previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins\u2019s is far better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale\u2019s is the best. All Beale\u2019s drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his second chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though.\r\n\r\nOf the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living hunters.\r\n\r\nBut, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster\u2019s spine; and standing in that prow, for that one single incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing down upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw so good a one.\r\n\r\nIn the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.\r\n\r\nWho Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he was either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery.\r\n\r\nThe natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England\u2019s experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching the profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right whaleman, after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale, and three or four delicate miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats us to a series of classical engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no disparagement to the excellent voyager (I honor him for a veteran), but in so important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have procured for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace.\r\n\r\nIn addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself \u201cH. Durand.\u201d One of them, though not precisely adapted to our present purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It is a quiet noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the background, both drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine, when considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to windward, a black cloud, rising up with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the excited seamen.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.\r\n\r\nOn Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or kedger, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.\r\n\r\nThroughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies\u2019 busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner\u2019s fancy.\r\n\r\nLong exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.\r\n\r\nNow, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark\u2019s tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady application.\r\n\r\nAs with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark\u2019s tooth, of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles\u2019s shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.\r\n\r\nWooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy.\r\n\r\nAt some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled with \u201cHands off!\u201d you cannot examine them closely enough to decide upon their merit.\r\n\r\nIn bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf of green surges.\r\n\r\nThen, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery; like the Soloma Islands, which still remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.\r\n\r\nNor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.\r\n\r\nWith a frigate\u2019s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 58. Brit.\r\n\r\nSteering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.\r\n\r\nOn the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that escaped at the lip.\r\n\r\nAs morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*\r\n\r\n*That part of the sea known among whalemen as the \u201cBrazil Banks\u201d does not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there being shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased.\r\n\r\nBut it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the great hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea. And even when recognised at last, their immense magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse.\r\n\r\nIndeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though some old naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are of their kind in the sea; and though taking a broad general view of the thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for example, does the ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.\r\n\r\nBut though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment\u2019s consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.\r\n\r\nThe first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow. That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah\u2019s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.\r\n\r\nWherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.\r\n\r\nBut not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.\r\n\r\nConsider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.\r\n\r\nConsider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 59. Squid.\r\n\r\nSlowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely, alluring jet would be seen.\r\n\r\nBut one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.\r\n\r\nIn the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod, the negro yelled out\u2014\u201cThere! there again! there she breaches! right ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!\u201d\r\n\r\nUpon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the bees rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.\r\n\r\nWhether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave orders for lowering.\r\n\r\nThe four boats were soon on the water; Ahab\u2019s in advance, and all swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.\r\n\r\nAs with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed\u2014\u201cAlmost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat was it, Sir?\u201d said Flask.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the rest as silently following.\r\n\r\nWhatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his only food. For though other species of whales find their food above water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.\r\n\r\nThere seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond. But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he assigns it.\r\n\r\nBy some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 60. The Line.\r\n\r\nWith reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.\r\n\r\nThe line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly vapored with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to the sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general by no means adds to the rope\u2019s durability or strength, however much it may give it compactness and gloss.\r\n\r\nOf late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and I will add (since there is an \u00e6sthetics in all things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold.\r\n\r\nThe whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded \u201csheaves,\u201d or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the \u201cheart,\u201d or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody\u2019s arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles and twists.\r\n\r\nIn the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line being continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in this; because these twin-tubs being so small they fit more readily into the boat, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American tub, nearly three feet in diameter and of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky freight for a craft whose planks are but one half-inch in thickness; for the bottom of the whale-boat is like critical ice, which will bear up a considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated one. When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the American line-tub, the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales.\r\n\r\nBoth ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the tub, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything. This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First: In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This arrangement is indispensable for common safety\u2019s sake; for were the lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever find her again.\r\n\r\nBefore lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man\u2019s oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp\u2014the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.\r\n\r\nThus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit\u2014strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?\u2014Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman\u2019s nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.\r\n\r\nPerhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for those repeated whaling disasters\u2014some few of which are casually chronicled\u2014of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line, and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning; and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.\r\n\r\nAgain: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play\u2014this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.\r\n\r\nIf to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was quite a different object.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen you see him \u2019quid,\u201d said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow of his hoisted boat, \u201cthen you quick see him \u2019parm whale.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to engage them, the Pequod\u2019s crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.\r\n\r\nIt was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.\r\n\r\nEre forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.\r\n\r\nSuddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun\u2019s rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some enchanter\u2019s wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted the sparkling brine into the air.\r\n\r\n\u201cClear away the boats! Luff!\u201d cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.\r\n\r\nThe sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward, but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats, we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of the noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere go flukes!\u201d was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by Stubb\u2019s producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was granted. After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker\u2019s boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honor of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play. And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.\r\n\r\nYes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy, he was going \u201chead out\u201d; that part obliquely projecting from the mad yeast which he brewed.*\r\n\r\n*It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the entire interior of the sperm whale\u2019s enormous head consists. Though apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water formation of the lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into a sharppointed New York pilot-boat.\r\n\r\n\u201cStart her, start her, my men! Don\u2019t hurry yourselves; take plenty of time\u2014but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that\u2019s all,\u201d cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. \u201cStart her, now; give \u2019em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy\u2014start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool\u2014cucumbers is the word\u2014easy, easy\u2014only start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys\u2014that\u2019s all. Start her!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWoo-hoo! Wa-hee!\u201d screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading stroke which the eager Indian gave.\r\n\r\nBut his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. \u201cKee-hee! Kee-hee!\u201d yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat, like a pacing tiger in his cage.\r\n\r\n\u201cKa-la! Koo-loo!\u201d howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a mouthful of Grenadier\u2019s steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van, still encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke from his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the welcome cry was heard\u2014\u201cStand up, Tashtego!\u2014give it to him!\u201d The harpoon was hurled. \u201cStern all!\u201d The oarsmen backed water; the same moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists. It was the magical line. An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two additional turns with it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his pipe. As the line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb\u2019s hands, from which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy\u2019s sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.\r\n\r\n\u201cWet the line! wet the line!\u201d cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into it.* More turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place. The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego here changed places\u2014stem for stern\u2014a staggering business truly in that rocking commotion.\r\n\r\n*Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running line with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most convenient.\r\n\r\nFrom the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of the boat, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you would have thought the craft had two keels\u2014one cleaving the water, the other the air\u2014as the boat churned on through both opposing elements at once. A continual cascade played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in her wake; and, at the slightest motion from within, even but of a little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and main clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall form of Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost double, in order to bring down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened his flight.\r\n\r\n\u201cHaul in\u2014haul in!\u201d cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the whale\u2019s horrible wallow, and then ranging up for another fling.\r\n\r\nThe red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into the whale.\r\n\r\n\u201cPull up\u2014pull up!\u201d he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in his wrath. \u201cPull up!\u2014close to!\u201d and the boat ranged along the fish\u2019s flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his \u201cflurry,\u201d the monster horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day.\r\n\r\nAnd now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s dead, Mr. Stubb,\u201d said Daggoo.\r\n\r\n\u201cYes; both pipes smoked out!\u201d and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 62. The Dart.\r\n\r\nA word concerning an incident in the last chapter.\r\n\r\nAccording to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous arm to strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called a long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one\u2019s compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half started\u2014what that is none know but those who have tried it. For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same time. In this straining, bawling state, then, with his back to the fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry\u2014\u201cStand up, and give it to him!\u201d He now has to drop and secure his oar, turn round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can you expect to find it there when most wanted!\r\n\r\nAgain, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant, that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and the headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper station in the bows of the boat.\r\n\r\nNow, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from first to last; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious to any fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them.\r\n\r\nTo insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 63. The Crotch.\r\n\r\nOut of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.\r\n\r\nThe crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention. It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow, for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively called the first and second irons.\r\n\r\nBut these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one instantly after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the coming drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron into him. Nevertheless, as the second iron is already connected with the line, and the line is running, hence that weapon must, at all events, be anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else the most terrible jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water, it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line (mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances, prudently practicable. But this critical act is not always unattended with the saddest and most fatal casualties.\r\n\r\nFurthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines, or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions. Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is fairly captured and a corpse.\r\n\r\nConsider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one be ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several most important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 64. Stubb\u2019s Supper.\r\n\r\nStubb\u2019s whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals; good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call it, in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if laden with pig-lead in bulk.\r\n\r\nDarkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod\u2019s main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way into the cabin, and did not come forward again until morning.\r\n\r\nThough, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought from the sound on the Pequod\u2019s decks, that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies with its black hull close to the vessel\u2019s and seen through the darkness of the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two\u2014ship and whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines while the other remains standing.*\r\n\r\n*A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part is relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship. By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with its broad flukes or lobes.\r\n\r\nIf moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known on deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management of affairs. One small, helping cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest. Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.\r\n\r\n\u201cA steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one from his small!\u201d\r\n\r\nHere be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers who have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.\r\n\r\nAbout midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale\u2019s flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers\u2019 hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the shark seems all but miraculous. How at such an apparently unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.\r\n\r\nThough amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship\u2019s decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other\u2019s live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.\r\n\r\nBut, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his own epicurean lips.\r\n\r\n\u201cCook, cook!\u2014where\u2019s that old Fleece?\u201d he cried at length, widening his legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing with his lance; \u201ccook, you cook!\u2014sail this way, cook!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously roused from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb\u2019s sideboard; when, with both hands folded before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as to bring his best ear into play.\r\n\r\n\u201cCook,\u201d said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, \u201cdon\u2019t you think this steak is rather overdone? You\u2019ve been beating this steak too much, cook; it\u2019s too tender. Don\u2019t I always say that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks now over the side, don\u2019t you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk to \u2019em; tell \u2019em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and deliver my message. Here, take this lantern,\u201d snatching one from his sideboard; \u201cnow then, go and preach to \u2019em!\u201d\r\n\r\nSullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said.\r\n\r\n\u201cFellow-critters: I\u2019se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin\u2019 ob de lip! Massa Stubb say dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop dat dam racket!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCook,\u201d here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap on the shoulder,\u2014\u201cCook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn\u2019t swear that way when you\u2019re preaching. That\u2019s no way to convert sinners, cook!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWho dat? Den preach to him yourself,\u201d sullenly turning to go.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, cook; go on, go on.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, den, Belubed fellow-critters:\u201d\u2014\r\n\r\n\u201cRight!\u201d exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, \u201ccoax \u2019em to it; try that,\u201d and Fleece continued.\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you, fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness\u2014\u2019top dat dam slappin\u2019 ob de tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin\u2019 and bitin\u2019 dare?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCook,\u201d cried Stubb, collaring him, \u201cI won\u2019t have that swearing. Talk to \u2019em gentlemanly.\u201d\r\n\r\nOnce more the sermon proceeded.\r\n\r\n\u201cYour woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don\u2019t blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can\u2019t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not\u2019ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now, look here, bred\u2019ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don\u2019t be tearin\u2019 de blubber out your neighbour\u2019s mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I know some o\u2019 you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat de brigness of de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bit off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can\u2019t get into de scrouge to help demselves.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell done, old Fleece!\u201d cried Stubb, \u201cthat\u2019s Christianity; go on.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo use goin\u2019 on; de dam willains will keep a scougin\u2019 and slappin\u2019 each oder, Massa Stubb; dey don\u2019t hear one word; no use a-preachin\u2019 to such dam g\u2019uttons as you call \u2019em, till dare bellies is full, and dare bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get \u2019em full, dey wont hear you den; for den dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and can\u2019t hear not\u2019ing at all, no more, for eber and eber.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cUpon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction, Fleece, and I\u2019ll away to my supper.\u201d\r\n\r\nUpon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his shrill voice, and cried\u2014\r\n\r\n\u201cCussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam\u2019 bellies \u2019till dey bust\u2014and den die.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, cook,\u201d said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; \u201cstand just where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular attention.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll dention,\u201d said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the desired position.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell,\u201d said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; \u201cI shall now go back to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are you, cook?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat dat do wid de \u2019teak,\u201d said the old black, testily.\r\n\r\n\u201cSilence! How old are you, cook?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2019Bout ninety, dey say,\u201d he gloomily muttered.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook, and don\u2019t know yet how to cook a whale-steak?\u201d rapidly bolting another mouthful at the last word, so that morsel seemed a continuation of the question. \u201cWhere were you born, cook?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2019Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin\u2019 ober de Roanoke.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBorn in a ferry-boat! That\u2019s queer, too. But I want to know what country you were born in, cook!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDidn\u2019t I say de Roanoke country?\u201d he cried sharply.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, you didn\u2019t, cook; but I\u2019ll tell you what I\u2019m coming to, cook. You must go home and be born over again; you don\u2019t know how to cook a whale-steak yet.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBress my soul, if I cook noder one,\u201d he growled, angrily, turning round to depart.\r\n\r\n\u201cCome back, cook;\u2014here, hand me those tongs;\u2014now take that bit of steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it should be? Take it, I say\u201d\u2014holding the tongs towards him\u2014\u201ctake it, and taste it.\u201d\r\n\r\nFaintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro muttered, \u201cBest cooked \u2019teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCook,\u201d said Stubb, squaring himself once more; \u201cdo you belong to the church?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPassed one once in Cape-Down,\u201d said the old man sullenly.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here, and tell me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?\u201d said Stubb. \u201cWhere do you expect to go to, cook?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGo to bed berry soon,\u201d he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.\r\n\r\n\u201cAvast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It\u2019s an awful question. Now what\u2019s your answer?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen dis old brack man dies,\u201d said the negro slowly, changing his whole air and demeanor, \u201che hisself won\u2019t go nowhere; but some bressed angel will come and fetch him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch him where?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cUp dere,\u201d said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and keeping it there very solemnly.\r\n\r\n\u201cSo, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you are dead? But don\u2019t you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets? Main-top, eh?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDidn\u2019t say dat t\u2019all,\u201d said Fleece, again in the sulks.\r\n\r\n\u201cYou said up there, didn\u2019t you? and now look yourself, and see where your tongs are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by crawling through the lubber\u2019s hole, cook; but, no, no, cook, you don\u2019t get there, except you go the regular way, round by the rigging. It\u2019s a ticklish business, but must be done, or else it\u2019s no go. But none of us are in heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t\u2019other a\u2019top of your heart, when I\u2019m giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart, there?\u2014that\u2019s your gizzard! Aloft! aloft!\u2014that\u2019s it\u2014now you have it. Hold it there now, and pay attention.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAll \u2019dention,\u201d said the old black, with both hands placed as desired, vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at one and the same time.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don\u2019t you? Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private table here, the capstan, I\u2019ll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d\u2019ye hear? And now to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may go.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.\r\n\r\n\u201cCook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D\u2019ye hear? away you sail, then.\u2014Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go.\u2014Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast\u2014don\u2019t forget.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWish, by gor! whale eat him, \u2019stead of him eat whale. I\u2019m bressed if he ain\u2019t more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself,\u201d muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.\r\n\r\nThat mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it.\r\n\r\nIt is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth\u2019s time, a certain cook of the court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating. The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls. The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great porpoise grant from the crown.\r\n\r\nThe fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda, one of their most famous doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel\u2014that these men actually lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called \u201cfritters\u201d; which, indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling something like old Amsterdam housewives\u2019 dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly keep his hands off.\r\n\r\nBut what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating as the buffalo\u2019s (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is; like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try watches of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many a good supper have I thus made.\r\n\r\nIn the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in flavor somewhat resembling calves\u2019 head, which is quite a dish among some epicures; and every one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon calves\u2019 brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a calf\u2019s head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with an intelligent looking calf\u2019s head before him, is somehow one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at him, with an \u201cEt tu Brute!\u201d expression.\r\n\r\nIt is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal\u2019s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pat\u00e9-de-foie-gras.\r\n\r\nBut Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?\u2014what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.\r\n\r\nWhen in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a\u2019lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well.\r\n\r\nBut sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod\u2019s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.\r\n\r\nNevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other\u2019s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg\u2019s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.\r\n\r\n*The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is about the bigness of a man\u2019s spread hand; and in general shape, corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than the lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.\r\n\r\n\u201cQueequeg no care what god made him shark,\u201d said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; \u201cwedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 67. Cutting In.\r\n\r\nIt was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods.\r\n\r\nIn the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which no single man can possibly lift\u2014this vast bunch of grapes was swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest point anywhere above a ship\u2019s deck. The end of the hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached. And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two side-fins. This done, a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the \u201cscarf,\u201d simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard.\r\n\r\nOne of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices out a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows. Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain; so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip, called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering. The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents. And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the general friction.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 68. The Blanket.\r\n\r\nI have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion.\r\n\r\nThe question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.\r\n\r\nNow, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature\u2019s skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale\u2019s body but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.\r\n\r\nAssuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale\u2019s skin.\r\n\r\nIn life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs\u2014I should say, that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species.\r\n\r\nA word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it then\u2014except after explanation\u2014that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer.\r\n\r\nIt does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter\u2019s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.\r\n\r\nBut how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter\u2019s! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 69. The Funeral.\r\n\r\n\u201cHaul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.\r\n\r\nThere\u2019s a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.\r\n\r\nNor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale\u2019s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log\u2014shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There\u2019s your law of precedents; there\u2019s your utility of traditions; there\u2019s the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There\u2019s orthodoxy!\r\n\r\nThus, while in life the great whale\u2019s body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.\r\n\r\nAre you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.\r\n\r\nIt should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.\r\n\r\nConsider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck; on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discoloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion into the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb\u2019s boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale?\r\n\r\nWhen first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a full grown leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale\u2019s head embraces nearly one third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers\u2019 scales.\r\n\r\nThe Pequod\u2019s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against the ship\u2019s side\u2014about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element. And there with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod\u2019s waist like the giant Holofernes\u2019s from the girdle of Judith.\r\n\r\nWhen this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went below to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.\r\n\r\nA short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone from his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took Stubb\u2019s long spade\u2014still remaining there after the whale\u2019s decapitation\u2014and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.\r\n\r\nIt was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx\u2019s in the desert. \u201cSpeak, thou vast and venerable head,\u201d muttered Ahab, \u201cwhich, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world\u2019s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor\u2019s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw\u2019st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw\u2019st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed\u2014while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSail ho!\u201d cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye? Well, now, that\u2019s cheering,\u201d cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. \u201cThat lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man.\u2014Where away?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThree points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!\r\n\r\n\u201cBetter and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam\u2019s Story.\r\n\r\nHand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock.\r\n\r\nBy and by, through the glass the stranger\u2019s boats and manned mast-heads proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, the Pequod could not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what response would be made.\r\n\r\nHere be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which signals being collected in a book with the names of the respective vessels attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at considerable distances and with no small facility.\r\n\r\nThe Pequod\u2019s signal was at last responded to by the stranger\u2019s setting her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod\u2019s lee, and lowered a boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being rigged by Starbuck\u2019s order to accommodate the visiting captain, the stranger in question waved his hand from his boat\u2019s stern in token of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her captain, was fearful of infecting the Pequod\u2019s company. For, though himself and boat\u2019s crew remained untainted, and though his ship was half a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine of the land, he peremptorily refused to come into direct contact with the Pequod.\r\n\r\nBut this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an interval of some few yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam\u2019s boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to the Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it blew very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by the sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed some way ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her proper bearings again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not without still another interruption of a very different sort.\r\n\r\nPulling an oar in the Jeroboam\u2019s boat, was a man of a singular appearance, even in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities make up all totalities. He was a small, short, youngish man, sprinkled all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant yellow hair. A long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.\r\n\r\nSo soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed\u2014\u201cThat\u2019s he! that\u2019s he!\u2014the long-togged scaramouch the Town-Ho\u2019s company told us of!\u201d Stubb here alluded to a strange story told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among her crew, some time previous when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. According to this account and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody in the Jeroboam. His story was this:\r\n\r\nHe had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret meetings having several times descended from heaven by the way of a trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder, was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common-sense exterior, and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam\u2019s whaling voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon the ship\u2019s getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he declared these things;\u2014the dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium, united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of him. As such a man, however, was not of much practical use in the ship, especially as he refused to work except when he pleased, the incredulous captain would fain have been rid of him; but apprised that that individual\u2019s intention was to land him in the first convenient port, the archangel forthwith opened all his seals and vials\u2014devoting the ship and all hands to unconditional perdition, in case this intention was carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the crew, that at last in a body they went to the captain and told him if Gabriel was sent from the ship, not a man of them would remain. He was therefore forced to relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel to be any way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came to pass that Gabriel had the complete freedom of the ship. The consequence of all this was, that the archangel cared little or nothing for the captain and mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher hand than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure. The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him; in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to a god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they are true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But it is time to return to the Pequod.\r\n\r\n\u201cI fear not thy epidemic, man,\u201d said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain Mayhew, who stood in the boat\u2019s stern; \u201ccome on board.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut now Gabriel started to his feet.\r\n\r\n\u201cThink, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the horrible plague!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGabriel! Gabriel!\u201d cried Captain Mayhew; \u201cthou must either\u2014\u201d But that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings drowned all speech.\r\n\r\n\u201cHast thou seen the White Whale?\u201d demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted back.\r\n\r\n\u201cThink, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI tell thee again, Gabriel, that\u2014\u201d But again the boat tore ahead as if dragged by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a succession of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those occasional caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale\u2019s head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature seemed to warrant.\r\n\r\nWhen this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him.\r\n\r\nIt seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking a whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the White Whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity, pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the chief mate, burned with ardour to encounter him; and the captain himself being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all the archangel\u2019s denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading five men to man his boat. With them he pushed off; and, after much weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last succeeded in getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his boat\u2019s bow, and with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman\u2019s head; but the mate for ever sank.\r\n\r\nIt is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any. Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated; oftener the boat\u2019s bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the headsman stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body. But strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more instances than one, when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of violence is discernible; the man being stark dead.\r\n\r\nThe whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried from the ship. Raising a piercing shriek\u2014\u201cThe vial! the vial!\u201d Gabriel called off the terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of the whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with added influence; because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically fore-announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the ship.\r\n\r\nMayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to him, that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether he intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To which Ahab answered\u2014\u201cAye.\u201d Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started to his feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with downward pointed finger\u2014\u201cThink, think of the blasphemer\u2014dead, and down there!\u2014beware of the blasphemer\u2019s end!\u201d\r\n\r\nAhab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, \u201cCaptain, I have just bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag.\u201d\r\n\r\nEvery whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus, most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after attaining an age of two or three years or more.\r\n\r\nSoon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled, damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy.\r\n\r\n\u201cCan\u2019st not read it?\u201d cried Ahab. \u201cGive it me, man. Aye, aye, it\u2019s but a dim scrawl;\u2014what\u2019s this?\u201d As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife slightly split the end, to insert the letter there, and in that way, hand it to the boat, without its coming any closer to the ship.\r\n\r\nMeantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, \u201cMr. Har\u2014yes, Mr. Harry\u2014(a woman\u2019s pinny hand,\u2014the man\u2019s wife, I\u2019ll wager)\u2014Aye\u2014Mr. Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;\u2014why it\u2019s Macey, and he\u2019s dead!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife,\u201d sighed Mayhew; \u201cbut let me have it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNay, keep it thyself,\u201d cried Gabriel to Ahab; \u201cthou art soon going that way.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCurses throttle thee!\u201d yelled Ahab. \u201cCaptain Mayhew, stand by now to receive it\u201d; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck\u2019s hands, he caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards the boat. But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing; the boat drifted a little towards the ship\u2019s stern; so that, as if by magic, the letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel\u2019s eager hand. He clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on it, sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab\u2019s feet. Then Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.\r\n\r\nAs, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.\r\n\r\nIn the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale\u2019s back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster\u2019s back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole flensing or stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the Highland costume\u2014a shirt and socks\u2014in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to observe him, as will presently be seen.\r\n\r\nBeing the savage\u2019s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale\u2019s back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from the ship\u2019s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his waist.\r\n\r\nIt was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg\u2019s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.\r\n\r\nSo strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another\u2019s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering\u2014while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him\u2014still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg\u2019s monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.*\r\n\r\n*The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.\r\n\r\nI have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale and the ship\u2014where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent blood which began to flow from the carcass\u2014the rabid creatures swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.\r\n\r\nAnd right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man.\r\n\r\nNevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them. Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a peculiarly ferocious shark\u2014he was provided with still another protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego and Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of keen whale-spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could reach. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg\u2019s best happiness, I admit; but in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water, those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg than a tail. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there with that great iron hook\u2014poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.\r\n\r\nWell, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in and then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea\u2014what matters it, after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.\r\n\r\nBut courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs up the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over the side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory glance hands him\u2014what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands him a cup of tepid ginger and water!\r\n\r\n\u201cGinger? Do I smell ginger?\u201d suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. \u201cYes, this must be ginger,\u201d peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the astonished steward slowly saying, \u201cGinger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger? Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to kindle a fire in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!\u2014what the devil is ginger? Sea-coal? firewood?\u2014lucifer matches?\u2014tinder?\u2014gunpowder?\u2014what the devil is ginger, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg here.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,\u201d he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward. \u201cWill you look at that kannakin, sir: smell of it, if you please.\u201d Then watching the mate\u2019s countenance, he added, \u201cThe steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI trust not,\u201d said Starbuck, \u201cit is poor stuff enough.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye, steward,\u201d cried Stubb, \u201cwe\u2019ll teach you to drug a harpooneer; none of your apothecary\u2019s medicine here; you want to poison us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our lives and want to murder us all, and pocket the proceeds, do ye?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was not me,\u201d cried Dough-Boy, \u201cit was Aunt Charity that brought the ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but only this ginger-jub\u2014so she called it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGinger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It is the captain\u2019s orders\u2014grog for the harpooneer on a whale.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cEnough,\u201d replied Starbuck, \u201conly don\u2019t hit him again, but\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of that sort; and this fellow\u2019s a weazel. What were you about saying, sir?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOnly this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity\u2019s gift, and that was freely given to the waves.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over Him.\r\n\r\nIt must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale\u2019s prodigious head hanging to the Pequod\u2019s side. But we must let it continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it. For the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold.\r\n\r\nNow, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit, gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of those inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity offered.\r\n\r\nNor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two boats, Stubb\u2019s and Flask\u2019s, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further and further away, they at last became almost invisible to the men at the mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by the towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from view, as if diving under the keel. \u201cCut, cut!\u201d was the cry from the ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being brought with a deadly dash against the vessel\u2019s side. But having plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with all their might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the struggle was intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the contending strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a few feet advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it; when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were free to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly altering his course, went round the stern of the ship towing the two boats after him, so that they performed a complete circuit.\r\n\r\nMeantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale\u2019s body, rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting fountains that poured from the smitten rock.\r\n\r\nAt last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a corpse.\r\n\r\nWhile the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes, and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some conversation ensued between them.\r\n\r\n\u201cI wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard,\u201d said Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so ignoble a leviathan.\r\n\r\n\u201cWants with it?\u201d said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat\u2019s bow, \u201cdid you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale\u2019s head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale\u2019s on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never afterwards capsize?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy not?\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and he seems to know all about ships\u2019 charms. But I sometimes think he\u2019ll charm the ship to no good at last. I don\u2019t half like that chap, Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into a snake\u2019s head, Stubb?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look down there, Flask\u201d\u2014pointing into the sea with a peculiar motion of both hands\u2014\u201cAye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil in disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been stowed away on board ship? He\u2019s the devil, I say. The reason why you don\u2019t see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of it, he\u2019s always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe sleeps in his boots, don\u2019t he? He hasn\u2019t got any hammock; but I\u2019ve seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo doubt, and it\u2019s because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye see, in the eye of the rigging.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the old man have so much to do with him for?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStriking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBargain?\u2014about what?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then he\u2019ll surrender Moby Dick.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked one, I tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the old flag-ship once, switching his tail about devilish easy and gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at home. Well, he was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil, switching his hoofs, up and says, \u2018I want John.\u2019 \u2018What for?\u2019 says the old governor. \u2018What business is that of yours,\u2019 says the devil, getting mad,\u2014\u2018I want to use him.\u2019 \u2018Take him,\u2019 says the governor\u2014and by the Lord, Flask, if the devil didn\u2019t give John the Asiatic cholera before he got through with him, I\u2019ll eat this whale in one mouthful. But look sharp\u2014ain\u2019t you all ready there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let\u2019s get the whale alongside.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI think I remember some such story as you were telling,\u201d said Flask, when at last the two boats were slowly advancing with their burden towards the ship, \u201cbut I can\u2019t remember where.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThree Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded soldadoes? Did ye read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was the same you say is now on board the Pequod?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAm I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn\u2019t the devil live for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a latch-key to get into the admiral\u2019s cabin, don\u2019t you suppose he can crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you see that mainmast there?\u201d pointing to the ship; \u201cwell, that\u2019s the figure one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod\u2019s hold, and string along in a row with that mast, for oughts, do you see; well, that wouldn\u2019t begin to be Fedallah\u2019s age. Nor all the coopers in creation couldn\u2019t show hoops enough to make oughts enough.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if he\u2019s so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he is going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard\u2014tell me that?\r\n\r\n\u201cGive him a good ducking, anyhow.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut he\u2019d crawl back.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDuck him again; and keep ducking him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSuppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though\u2014yes, and drown you\u2014what then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI should like to see him try it; I\u2019d give him such a pair of black eyes that he wouldn\u2019t dare to show his face in the admiral\u2019s cabin again for a long while, let alone down in the orlop there, where he lives, and hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. Damn the devil, Flask; so you suppose I\u2019m afraid of the devil? Who\u2019s afraid of him, except the old governor who daresn\u2019t catch him and put him in double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the devil kidnapped, he\u2019d roast for him? There\u2019s a governor!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo I suppose it? You\u2019ll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now to keep a sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very suspicious going on, I\u2019ll just take him by the nape of his neck, and say\u2014Look here, Beelzebub, you don\u2019t do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I\u2019ll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short off at the stump\u2014do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, he\u2019ll sneak off without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd what will you do with the tail, Stubb?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDo with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;\u2014what else?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNow, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMean or not mean, here we are at the ship.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing him.\r\n\r\n\u201cDidn\u2019t I tell you so?\u201d said Flask; \u201cyes, you\u2019ll soon see this right whale\u2019s head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti\u2019s.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn good time, Flask\u2019s saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale\u2019s head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke\u2019s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant\u2019s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.\r\n\r\nIn disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off whole, but in the former the lips and tongue are separately removed and hoisted on deck, with all the well known black bone attached to what is called the crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the present case, had been done. The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers.\r\n\r\nMeantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale\u2019s head, and ever and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee\u2019s shadow was there at all it seemed only to blend with, and lengthen Ahab\u2019s. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing things.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale\u2019s Head\u2014Contrasted View.\r\n\r\nHere, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay together our own.\r\n\r\nOf the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod\u2019s side; and as we may freely go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:\u2014where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here?\r\n\r\nIn the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale\u2019s which the Right Whale\u2019s sadly lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale\u2019s head. As you behold it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point of pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his head at the summit, giving token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he is what the fishermen technically call a \u201cgrey-headed whale.\u201d\r\n\r\nLet us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads\u2014namely, the two most important organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale\u2019s jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt\u2019s eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head.\r\n\r\nNow, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale\u2019s eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale\u2019s eyes corresponds to that of a man\u2019s ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears. You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man\u2014what, indeed, but his eyes?\r\n\r\nMoreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale\u2019s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale\u2019s eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.\r\n\r\nA curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long as a man\u2019s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one\u2019s experience will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things\u2014however large or however small\u2014at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man\u2019s, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison.\r\n\r\nIt may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.\r\n\r\nBut the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former has an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.\r\n\r\nIs it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare\u2019s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel\u2019s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.\u2014Why then do you try to \u201cenlarge\u201d your mind? Subtilize it.\r\n\r\nLet us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant over the sperm whale\u2019s head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not that the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins.\r\n\r\nBut come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one end, instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead, and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such, alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these spikes fall with impaling force. But far more terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a ship\u2019s jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him.\r\n\r\nIn most cases this lower jaw\u2014being easily unhinged by a practised artist\u2014is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles, including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.\r\n\r\nWith a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an anchor; and when the proper time comes\u2014some few days after the other work\u2014Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists, are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of wild wood lands. There are generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and piled away like joists for building houses.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 75. The Right Whale\u2019s Head\u2014Contrasted View.\r\n\r\nCrossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale\u2019s head.\r\n\r\nAs in general shape the noble Sperm Whale\u2019s head may be compared to a Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded); so, at a broad view, the Right Whale\u2019s head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker\u2019s last. And in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her progeny.\r\n\r\nBut as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit and look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole head for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange, crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass\u2014this green, barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the \u201ccrown,\u201d and the Southern fishers the \u201cbonnet\u201d of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes solely on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a bird\u2019s nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the technical term \u201ccrown\u201d also bestowed upon it; in which case you will take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging lower lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter\u2019s measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.\r\n\r\nA great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature\u2019s age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.\r\n\r\nIn old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous \u201cwhiskers\u201d inside of the whale\u2019s mouth;* another, \u201chogs\u2019 bristles\u201d; a third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language: \u201cThere are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his upper chop, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth.\u201d\r\n\r\n*This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance.\r\n\r\nAs every one knows, these same \u201chogs\u2019 bristles,\u201d \u201cfins,\u201d \u201cwhiskers,\u201d \u201cblinds,\u201d or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne\u2019s time that the bone was in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone.\r\n\r\nBut now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing in the Right Whale\u2019s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest Turkey\u2014the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that amount of oil.\r\n\r\nEre this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started with\u2014that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale\u2019s there is no great well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale\u2019s. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.\r\n\r\nLook your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not be very long in following.\r\n\r\nCan you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale\u2019s there? It is the same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the other head\u2019s expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel\u2019s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.\r\n\r\nEre quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale\u2019s head, I would have you, as a sensible physiologist, simply\u2014particularly remark its front aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged there. Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of the most appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded history.\r\n\r\nYou observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale, the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth were entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has no external nose; and that what nose he has\u2014his spout hole\u2014is on the top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides of his head, nearly one third of his entire length from the front. Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale\u2019s head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the extreme, lower, backward sloping part of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad. Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of the substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy. In some previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head; but with this difference: about the head this envelope, though not so thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses\u2019 hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it.\r\n\r\nBethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indiamen chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold there a large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest and toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured takes the jam which would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron crow-bars. By itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive at. But supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable, at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I know, has no such provision in him; considering, too, the otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelope; considering the unique interior of his head; it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and contraction. If this be so, fancy the irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and destructive of all elements contributes.\r\n\r\nNow, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood is\u2014by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess\u2019s veil at Lais?\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.\r\n\r\nNow comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must know something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated upon.\r\n\r\nRegarding the Sperm Whale\u2019s head as a solid oblong, you may, on an inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming the expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. At the middle of the forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have two almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided by an internal wall of a thick tendinous substance.\r\n\r\n*Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathematics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a solid which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the steep inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both sides.\r\n\r\nThe lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the whale\u2019s vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly fluid, yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is just forming in water. A large whale\u2019s case generally yields about five hundred gallons of sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business of securing what you can.\r\n\r\nI know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun was coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could not possibly have compared with the silken pearl-coloured membrane, like the lining of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale\u2019s case.\r\n\r\nIt will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since\u2014as has been elsewhere set forth\u2014the head embraces one third of the whole length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet for a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship\u2019s side.\r\n\r\nAs in decapitating the whale, the operator\u2019s instrument is brought close to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless, untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side, make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.\r\n\r\nThus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and\u2014in this particular instance\u2014almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm Whale\u2019s great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.\r\n\r\nNimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the part where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting of only two parts, travelling through a single-sheaved block. Securing this block, so that it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one end of the rope, till it is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he lands on the summit of the head. There\u2014still high elevated above the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries\u2014he seems some Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches for the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business he proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house, sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this cautious search is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like a well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the whip; while the other end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or three alert hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom another person has reached up a very long pole. Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the Tun, till it entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid\u2019s pail of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the pole have gone down.\r\n\r\nNow, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way; several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up\u2014my God! poor Tashtego\u2014like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!\r\n\r\n\u201cMan overboard!\u201d cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first came to his senses. \u201cSwing the bucket this way!\u201d and putting one foot into it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold on the whip itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head, almost before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime, there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poor Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous depth to which he had sunk.\r\n\r\nAt this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing the whip\u2014which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles\u2014a sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all, one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook, upon which the entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be on the point of giving way; an event still more likely from the violent motions of the head.\r\n\r\n\u201cCome down, come down!\u201d yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop, he would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line, rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn heaven\u2019s name, man,\u201d cried Stubb, \u201care you ramming home a cartridge there?\u2014Avast! How will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on top of his head? Avast, will ye!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStand clear of the tackle!\u201d cried a voice like the bursting of a rocket.\r\n\r\nAlmost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass dropped into the sea, like Niagara\u2019s Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper; and all caught their breath, as half swinging\u2014now over the sailors\u2019 heads, and now over the water\u2014Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor, buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea! But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away, when a naked figure with a boarding-sword in his hand, was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks. The next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the side, and every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship.\r\n\r\n\u201cHa! ha!\u201d cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave.\r\n\r\n\u201cBoth! both!\u2014it is both!\u201d\u2014cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout; and soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.\r\n\r\nNow, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;\u2014he had thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way\u2014head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected.\r\n\r\nAnd thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing.\r\n\r\nI know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header\u2019s will be sure to seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have either seen or heard of some one\u2019s falling into a cistern ashore; an accident which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too than the Indian\u2019s, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale\u2019s well.\r\n\r\nBut, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and most corky part about him; and yet thou makest it sink in an element of a far greater specific gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at all, but I have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little but the dense tendinous wall of the well\u2014a double welded, hammered substance, as I have before said, much heavier than the sea water, and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking in this substance was in the present instance materially counteracted by the other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance for performing his agile obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it was a running delivery, so it was.\r\n\r\nNow, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled\u2014the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato\u2019s honey head, and sweetly perished there?\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 79. The Prairie.\r\n\r\nTo scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as for Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar, or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the Dome of the Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only treats of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore, though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things; I achieve what I can.\r\n\r\nPhysiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most conspicuous of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and finally controls their combined expression; hence it would seem that its entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely affect the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire, cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose from Phidias\u2019s marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle on his throne.\r\n\r\nIn some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This aspect is sublime.\r\n\r\nIn thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has a touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles, the elephant\u2019s brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to their decrees. It signifies\u2014\u201cGod: done this day by my hand.\u201d But in most creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which like Shakespeare\u2019s or Melancthon\u2019s rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all above them in the forehead\u2019s wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that way viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the forehead\u2019s middle, which, in man, is Lavater\u2019s mark of genius.\r\n\r\nBut how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove\u2019s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.\r\n\r\nChampollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man\u2019s and every being\u2019s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant\u2019s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale\u2019s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 80. The Nut.\r\n\r\nIf the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.\r\n\r\nIn the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as the side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level base. But in life\u2014as we have elsewhere seen\u2014this inclined plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a crater to bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this crater\u2014in another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many in depth\u2014reposes the mere handful of this monster\u2019s brain. The brain is at least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden away behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it secreted in him, that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale has any other brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by the cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea of his general might to regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his intelligence.\r\n\r\nIt is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the creature\u2019s living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.\r\n\r\nIf you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men\u2019s skulls, and you would involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say\u2014This man had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations, considered along with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best form to yourself the truest, though not the most exhilarating conception of what the most exalted potency is.\r\n\r\nBut if from the comparative dimensions of the whale\u2019s proper brain, you deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another idea for you. If you attentively regard almost any quadruped\u2019s spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebr\u00e6 to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebr\u00e6 are absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take it the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the vertebr\u00e6 of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man\u2019s character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.\r\n\r\nApply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being eight in height, and of a triangular figure with the base downwards. As it passes through the remaining vertebr\u00e6 the canal tapers in size, but for a considerable distance remains of large capacity. Now, of course, this canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance\u2014the spinal cord\u2014as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain. And what is still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain\u2019s cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost equal to that of the brain. Under all these circumstances, would it be unreasonable to survey and map out the whale\u2019s spine phrenologically? For, viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord.\r\n\r\nBut leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I would merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the Sperm Whale\u2019s hump. This august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one of the larger vertebr\u00e6, and is, therefore, in some sort, the outer convex mould of it. From its relative situation then, I should call this high hump the organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm Whale. And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have reason to know.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.\r\n\r\nThe predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick De Deer, master, of Bremen.\r\n\r\nAt one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide intervals of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with their flag in the Pacific.\r\n\r\nFor some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects. While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the bows instead of the stern.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat has he in his hand there?\u201d cried Starbuck, pointing to something wavingly held by the German. \u201cImpossible!\u2014a lamp-feeder!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot that,\u201d said Stubb, \u201cno, no, it\u2019s a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he\u2019s coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don\u2019t you see that big tin can there alongside of him?\u2014that\u2019s his boiling water. Oh! he\u2019s all right, is the Yarman.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGo along with you,\u201d cried Flask, \u201cit\u2019s a lamp-feeder and an oil-can. He\u2019s out of oil, and has come a-begging.\u201d\r\n\r\nHowever curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.\r\n\r\nAs he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all heeding what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German soon evinced his complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some remarks touching his having to turn into his hammock at night in profound darkness\u2014his last drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not a single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency; concluding by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically called a clean one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin.\r\n\r\nHis necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his ship\u2019s side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.\r\n\r\nNow, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German boats that soon followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod\u2019s keels. There were eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger, they were going all abreast with great speed straight before the wind, rubbing their flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in harness. They left a great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great wide parchment upon the sea.\r\n\r\nFull in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge, humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged to the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for such venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him, because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble.\r\n\r\n\u201cWho\u2019s got some paregoric?\u201d said Stubb, \u201che has the stomach-ache, I\u2019m afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It\u2019s the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so before? it must be, he\u2019s lost his tiller.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her way; so did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say.\r\n\r\n\u201cOnly wait a bit, old chap, and I\u2019ll give ye a sling for that wounded arm,\u201d cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.\r\n\r\n\u201cMind he don\u2019t sling thee with it,\u201d cried Starbuck. \u201cGive way, or the German will have him.\u201d\r\n\r\nWith one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this one fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were going with such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit for the time. At this juncture the Pequod\u2019s keels had shot by the three German boats last lowered; but from the great start he had had, Derick\u2019s boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by his foreign rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being already so nigh to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron before they could completely overtake and pass him. As for Derick, he seemed quite confident that this would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding gesture shook his lamp-feeder at the other boats.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe ungracious and ungrateful dog!\u201d cried Starbuck; \u201che mocks and dares me with the very poor-box I filled for him not five minutes ago!\u201d\u2014then in his old intense whisper\u2014\u201cGive way, greyhounds! Dog to it!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI tell ye what it is, men\u201d\u2014cried Stubb to his crew\u2014\u201cit\u2019s against my religion to get mad; but I\u2019d like to eat that villainous Yarman\u2014Pull\u2014won\u2019t ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come, why don\u2019t some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who\u2019s that been dropping an anchor overboard\u2014we don\u2019t budge an inch\u2014we\u2019re becalmed. Halloo, here\u2019s grass growing in the boat\u2019s bottom\u2014and by the Lord, the mast there\u2019s budding. This won\u2019t do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of it is, men, will ye spit fire or not?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh! see the suds he makes!\u201d cried Flask, dancing up and down\u2014\u201cWhat a hump\u2014Oh, do pile on the beef\u2014lays like a log! Oh! my lads, do spring\u2014slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my lads\u2014baked clams and muffins\u2014oh, do, do, spring,\u2014he\u2019s a hundred barreller\u2014don\u2019t lose him now\u2014don\u2019t oh, don\u2019t!\u2014see that Yarman\u2014Oh, won\u2019t ye pull for your duff, my lads\u2014such a sog! such a sogger! Don\u2019t ye love sperm? There goes three thousand dollars, men!\u2014a bank!\u2014a whole bank! The bank of England!\u2014Oh, do, do, do!\u2014What\u2019s that Yarman about now?\u201d\r\n\r\nAt this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the double view of retarding his rivals\u2019 way, and at the same time economically accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the backward toss.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe unmannerly Dutch dogger!\u201d cried Stubb. \u201cPull now, men, like fifty thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils. What d\u2019ye say, Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty pieces for the honor of old Gayhead? What d\u2019ye say?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI say, pull like god-dam,\u201d\u2014cried the Indian.\r\n\r\nFiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod\u2019s three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed, momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude of the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry of, \u201cThere she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with the Yarman! Sail over him!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this race, had not a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught the blade of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to free his white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick\u2019s boat was nigh to capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage;\u2014that was a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took a mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German\u2019s quarter. An instant more, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale\u2019s immediate wake, while stretching from them, on both sides, was the foaming swell that he made.\r\n\r\nIt was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright. Now to this hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I seen a bird with clipped wing making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied.\r\n\r\nSeeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod\u2019s boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually long dart, ere the last chance would for ever escape.\r\n\r\nBut no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three tigers\u2014Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo\u2014instinctively sprang to their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapors of foam and white-fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the whale\u2019s headlong rush, bumped the German\u2019s aside with such force, that both Derick and his baffled harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying keels.\r\n\r\n\u201cDon\u2019t be afraid, my butter-boxes,\u201d cried Stubb, casting a passing glance upon them as he shot by; \u201cye\u2019ll be picked up presently\u2014all right\u2014I saw some sharks astern\u2014St. Bernard\u2019s dogs, you know\u2014relieve distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a sunbeam! Hurrah!\u2014Here we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a plain\u2014makes the wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that way; and there\u2019s danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he\u2019s going to Davy Jones\u2014all a rush down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut the monster\u2019s run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them; while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at last\u2014owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue\u2014the gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more line, though the position was a little ticklish. But though boats have been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this \u201cholding on,\u201d as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because, owing to the enormous surface of him\u2014in a full grown sperm whale something less than 2000 square feet\u2014the pressure of the water is immense. We all know what an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here, above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.\r\n\r\nAs the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said\u2014\u201cCanst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!\u201d This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod\u2019s fish-spears!\r\n\r\nIn that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough to shade half Xerxes\u2019 army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!\r\n\r\n\u201cStand by, men; he stirs,\u201d cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in great part from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are scared from it into the sea.\r\n\r\n\u201cHaul in! Haul in!\u201d cried Starbuck again; \u201che\u2019s rising.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand\u2019s breadth could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two ship\u2019s lengths of the hunters.\r\n\r\nHis motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it is to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is heightened by the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the surface, his life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady jets from the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending its affrighted moisture into the air. From this last vent no blood yet came, because no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life, as they significantly call it, was untouched.\r\n\r\nAs the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale\u2019s eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discoloured bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.\r\n\r\n\u201cA nice spot,\u201d cried Flask; \u201cjust let me prick him there once.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAvast!\u201d cried Starbuck, \u201cthere\u2019s no need of that!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask\u2019s boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground\u2014so the last long dying spout of the whale.\r\n\r\nSoon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately, by Starbuck\u2019s orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a few inches beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when the ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was strongly secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the bottom.\r\n\r\nIt so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade, the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some Nor\u2019 West Indian long before America was discovered.\r\n\r\nWhat other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further discoveries, by the ship\u2019s being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the sea, owing to the body\u2019s immensely increasing tendency to sink. However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the ship would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with the body; then, when the command was given to break clear from it, such was the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other side of the deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural dislocation. In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over.\r\n\r\n\u201cHold on, hold on, won\u2019t ye?\u201d cried Stubb to the body, \u201cdon\u2019t be in such a devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cKnife? Aye, aye,\u201d cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter\u2019s heavy hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.\r\n\r\nNow, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them; even these brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.\r\n\r\nBe it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this accident than any other species. Where one of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do. This difference in the species is no doubt imputable in no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale; his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there are instances where, after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale again rises, more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this is obvious. Gases are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then. In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know where to look for it when it shall have ascended again.\r\n\r\nIt was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from the Pequod\u2019s mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back\u2019s spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale\u2019s, that by unskilful fishermen it is often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail, made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.\r\n\r\nOh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.\r\n\r\nThere are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.\r\n\r\nThe more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.\r\n\r\nThe gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men\u2019s lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city\u2019s legends and all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.\r\n\r\nAkin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda\u2014indeed, by some supposed to be indirectly derived from it\u2014is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other. \u201cThou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea,\u201d saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.\r\n\r\nLet not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus\u2019 case, St. George\u2019s whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse\u2019s head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are much better entitled to St. George\u2019s decoration than they.\r\n\r\nWhether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that antique Crockett and Kit Carson\u2014that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our clan.\r\n\r\nBut, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice vers\u00e2; certainly they are very similar. If I claim the demi-god then, why not the prophet?\r\n\r\nNor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord;\u2014Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale. When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?\r\n\r\nPerseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there\u2019s a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman\u2019s can head off like that?\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.\r\n\r\nReference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.\r\n\r\nOne old Sag-Harbor whaleman\u2019s chief reason for questioning the Hebrew story was this:\u2014He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented Jonah\u2019s whale with two spouts in his head\u2014a peculiarity only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying, \u201cA penny roll would choke him\u201d; his swallow is so very small. But, to this, Bishop Jebb\u2019s anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale\u2019s belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale\u2019s mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless.\r\n\r\nAnother reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body and the whale\u2019s gastric juices. But this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a dead whale\u2014even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; and, I would add, possibly called \u201cThe Whale,\u201d as some craft are nowadays christened the \u201cShark,\u201d the \u201cGull,\u201d the \u201cEagle.\u201d Nor have there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver\u2014an inflated bag of wind\u2014which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But he had still another reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere within three days\u2019 journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three days\u2019 journey across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast. How is that?\r\n\r\nBut was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage through the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah\u2019s weathering the Cape of Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of that great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make modern history a liar.\r\n\r\nBut all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his foolish pride of reason\u2014a thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from the sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah\u2019s going to Nineveh via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris\u2019s Voyages, speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which Mosque was a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.\r\n\r\nTo make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water are hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared, took more than customary pains in that occupation; crawling under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft\u2019s bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to some particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event.\r\n\r\nTowards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra\u2019s barges from Actium.\r\n\r\nNevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb\u2019s was foremost. By great exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But to haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and furious. What then remained?\r\n\r\nOf all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced, none exceed that fine man\u0153uvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small sword, or broad sword, in all its exercises boasts nothing like it. It is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or twelve feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon, and also of a lighter material\u2014pine. It is furnished with a small rope called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to the hand after darting.\r\n\r\nBut before going further, it is important to mention here, that though the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it is seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently successful, on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any pitchpoling comes into play.\r\n\r\nLook now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead. Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along its length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before his waistband\u2019s middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his palm, fifteen feet in the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler, balancing a long staff on his chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming distance, and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat drove the spigot out of him!\u201d cried Stubb. \u201c\u2019Tis July\u2019s immortal Fourth; all fountains must run wine today! Would now, it were old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then, Tashtego, lad, I\u2019d have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we\u2019d drink round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we\u2019d brew choice punch in the spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the living stuff.\u201d\r\n\r\nAgain and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated, the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely watches the monster die.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 85. The Fountain.\r\n\r\nThat for six thousand years\u2014and no one knows how many millions of ages before\u2014the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings\u2014that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o\u2019clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor\u2014this is surely a noteworthy thing.\r\n\r\nLet us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod might live a century, and never once raise its head above the surface. But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular lungs, like a human being\u2019s, the whale can only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale\u2019s mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his head.\r\n\r\nIf I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function indispensable to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a certain element, which being subsequently brought into contact with the blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I shall err; though I may possibly use some superfluous scientific words. Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in a man could be aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his nostrils and not fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he would then live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals, his full hour and more (when at the bottom) without drawing a single breath, or so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or more, a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in him, just as the camel crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus supply of drink for future use in its four supplementary stomachs. The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is indisputable; and that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable and true, seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise inexplicable obstinacy of that leviathan in having his spoutings out, as the fishermen phrase it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface, the Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform with all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then whenever he rises again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him, so that he sounds, he will be always dodging up again to make good his regular allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths are told, will he finally go down to stay out his full term below. Remark, however, that in different individuals these rates are different; but in any one they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere descending for good? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the whale\u2019s rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For not by hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a thousand fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!\r\n\r\nIn man, breathing is incessantly going on\u2014one breath only serving for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.\r\n\r\nIt has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at all answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power of smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout\u2014whether it be water or whether it be vapor\u2014no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on this head. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water in the sea.\r\n\r\nFurthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal, and as that long canal\u2014like the grand Erie Canal\u2014is furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!\r\n\r\nNow, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along, horizontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little to one side; this curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down in a city on one side of a street. But the question returns whether this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of the Sperm Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath, or whether that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the mouth indirectly communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this is for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because the greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale\u2019s food is far beneath the surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if you regard him very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find that when unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration.\r\n\r\nBut why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.\r\n\r\nThe central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it, when, always, when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view of his spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading all around him. And if at such times you should think that you really perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are not merely condensed from its vapor; or how do you know that they are not those identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the whale\u2019s head? For even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary\u2019s in the desert; even then, the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with rain.\r\n\r\nNor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into slight contact with the outer, vapory shreds of the jet, which will often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of the thing so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer contact with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone.\r\n\r\nStill, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument for the above supposition.\r\n\r\nAnd how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor\u2014as you will sometimes see it\u2014glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For, d\u2019ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 86. The Tail.\r\n\r\nOther poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail.\r\n\r\nReckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale\u2019s tail to begin at that point of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet. The compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet across.\r\n\r\nThe entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:\u2014upper, middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are long and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running crosswise between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those wonderful relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the great strength of the masonry.\r\n\r\nBut as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.\r\n\r\nNor does this\u2014its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their most appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.\r\n\r\nSuch is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no fairy\u2019s arm can transcend it.\r\n\r\nFive great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping; Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.\r\n\r\nFirst: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan\u2019s tail acts in a different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster when furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.\r\n\r\nSecond: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways through the opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of the whale-boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked rib or a dashed plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the most serious result. These submerged side blows are so often received in the fishery, that they are accounted mere child\u2019s play. Some one strips off a frock, and the hole is stopped.\r\n\r\nThird: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale the sense of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the elephant\u2019s trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the sea; and if he feel but a sailor\u2019s whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and all. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch! Had this tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes\u2019 elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones. On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the whale does not possess this prehensile virtue in his tail; for I have heard of yet another elephant, that when wounded in the fight, curved round his trunk and extracted the dart.\r\n\r\nFourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad palms of his tail are flirted high into the air; then smiting the surface, the thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a great gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath of vapor from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that that was the smoke from the touch-hole.\r\n\r\nFifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes lie considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime breach\u2014somewhere else to be described\u2014this peaking of the whale\u2019s flukes is perhaps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence.\r\n\r\nThe chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk of the other are concerned, should not tend to place those two opposite organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they respectively belong. For as the mightiest elephant is but a terrier to Leviathan, so, compared with Leviathan\u2019s tail, his trunk is but the stalk of a lily. The most direful blow from the elephant\u2019s trunk were as the playful tap of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and crash of the sperm whale\u2019s ponderous flukes, which in repeated instances have one after the other hurled entire boats with all their oars and crews into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls.*\r\n\r\n*Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale and the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to the elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious similitude; among these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant will often draw up water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet it forth in a stream.\r\n\r\nThe more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures, that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.\r\n\r\nThe long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia. In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia, and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas.\r\n\r\nThose narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they not a little correspond to the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, that such treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from the endless procession of ships before the wind, which for centuries past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounce their claim to more solid tribute.\r\n\r\nTime out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they have received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.\r\n\r\nWith a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these straits; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and there by the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and gain the far coast of Japan, in time for the great whaling season there. By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous to descending upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he might most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.\r\n\r\nBut how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what\u2019s in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a whole lake\u2019s contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She carries years\u2019 water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which, when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks, from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had come; they would only answer\u2014\u201cWell, boys, here\u2019s the ark!\u201d\r\n\r\nNow, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of the ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and admonished to keep wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs of the land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and with delighted nostrils the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet was descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any game hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when the customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of singular magnificence saluted us.\r\n\r\nBut here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm Whales, instead of almost invariably sailing in small detached companies, as in former times, are now frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection. To this aggregation of the Sperm Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that even in the best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months together, without being greeted by a single spout; and then be suddenly saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands.\r\n\r\nBroad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and forming a great semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right Whale, which, dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually rising and falling away to leeward.\r\n\r\nSeen from the Pequod\u2019s deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of the sea, this host of vapory spouts, individually curling up into the air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.\r\n\r\nAs marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains, accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.\r\n\r\nCrowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers handling their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their yet suspended boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had they, that chased through these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only deploy into the Oriental seas to witness the capture of not a few of their number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly directing attention to something in our wake.\r\n\r\nCorresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear. It seemed formed of detached white vapors, rising and falling something like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so completely come and go; for they constantly hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole, crying, \u201cAloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the sails;\u2014Malays, sir, and after us!\u201d\r\n\r\nAs if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should fairly have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot pursuit, to make up for their over-cautious delay. But when the swift Pequod, with a fresh leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how very kind of these tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to her own chosen pursuit,\u2014mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that they were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one the bloodthirsty pirates chasing him; some such fancy as the above seemed his. And when he glanced upon the green walls of the watery defile in which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end; and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their curses;\u2014when all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab\u2019s brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm thing from its place.\r\n\r\nBut thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and when, after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the Pequod at last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift whales had been gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so victoriously gained upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake of the whales, at length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship neared them; and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to the boats. But no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful instinct of the Sperm Whale, become notified of the three keels that were after them,\u2014though as yet a mile in their rear,\u2014than they rallied again, and forming in close ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity.\r\n\r\nStripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and after several hours\u2019 pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase, when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating token that they were now at last under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say he is gallied. The compact martial columns in which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily swimming, were now broken up in one measureless rout; and like King Porus\u2019 elephants in the Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with consternation. In all directions expanding in vast irregular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short thick spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This was still more strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But this occasional timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though banding together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre\u2019s pit, they will, at the slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.\r\n\r\nThough many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion, yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes\u2019 time, Queequeg\u2019s harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray in our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered straight for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part of the whale struck under such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and indeed is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it present one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb.\r\n\r\nAs, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what moment it may be locked in and crushed.\r\n\r\nBut not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the shouting part of the business. \u201cOut of the way, Commodore!\u201d cried one, to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant threatened to swamp us. \u201cHard down with your tail, there!\u201d cried a second to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity.\r\n\r\nAll whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick squares of wood of equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each other\u2019s grain at right angles; a line of considerable length is then attached to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more whales are close round you than you can possibly chase at one time. But sperm whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then, you must kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it is, that at times like these the drugg, comes into requisition. Our boat was furnished with three of them. The first and second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly running off, fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance of the towing drugg. They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and ball. But upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the clumsy wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in an instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the boat\u2019s bottom as the seat slid from under him. On both sides the sea came in at the wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so stopped the leaks for the time.\r\n\r\nIt had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale\u2019s way greatly diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further from the circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So that when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion. And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs. Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host.\r\n\r\nNow, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square miles. At any rate\u2014though indeed such a test at such a time might be deceptive\u2014spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller whales\u2014now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake\u2014evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting it.\r\n\r\nBut far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;\u2014even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar\u2019s bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby\u2019s ears newly arrived from foreign parts.\r\n\r\n\u201cLine! line!\u201d cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; \u201chim fast! him fast!\u2014Who line him! Who struck?\u2014Two whale; one big, one little!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat ails ye, man?\u201d cried Starbuck.\r\n\r\n\u201cLook-e here,\u201d said Queequeg, pointing down.\r\n\r\nAs when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.*\r\n\r\n*The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob:\u2014a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter\u2019s lance, the mother\u2019s pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolour the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute more hominum.\r\n\r\nAnd thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.\r\n\r\nMeanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats, still engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host; or possibly carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance of room and some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly darting to and fro across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly powerful and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or maiming his gigantic tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again. A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along with him half of the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony of the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles like the lone mounted desperado Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay wherever he went.\r\n\r\nBut agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the intervening distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived that by one of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades.\r\n\r\nThis terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the stern.\r\n\r\n\u201cOars! Oars!\u201d he intensely whispered, seizing the helm\u2014\u201cgripe your oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off, you Queequeg\u2014the whale there!\u2014prick him!\u2014hit him! Stand up\u2014stand up, and stay so! Spring, men\u2014pull, men; never mind their backs\u2014scrape them!\u2014scrape away!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor we at last shot into a temporary opening; then giving way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly watching for another outlet. After many similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into what had just been one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random whales, all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg\u2019s hat, who, while standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by.\r\n\r\nRiotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but the boats still lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand, are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both to mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior possession, should the boats of any other ship draw near.\r\n\r\nThe result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying in the Fishery,\u2014the more whales the less fish. Of all the drugged whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.\r\n\r\nThe previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those vast aggregations.\r\n\r\nNow, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each. Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated.\r\n\r\nIn cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces and endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not more than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the whole they are hereditarily entitled to en bon point.\r\n\r\nIt is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety. You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they have lounged up and down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade the other excessive temperature of the year.\r\n\r\nWhen serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the ladies, with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away! High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are to be permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of his bed; for, alas! all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not a few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters,\u2014furrowed heads, broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and dislocated mouths.\r\n\r\nBut supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at the first rush of the harem\u2019s lord, then is it very diverting to watch that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and revels there awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario, like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines. Granting other whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must take care of themselves; at least, with only the maternal help. For like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all over the world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the ardour of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life, forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky old soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors.\r\n\r\nNow, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is the lord and master of that school technically known as the schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict character, however admirably satirical, that after going to school himself, he should then go abroad inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.\r\n\r\nThe same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale\u2014as a solitary Leviathan is called\u2014proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets.\r\n\r\nThe schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while those female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter; excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.\r\n\r\nThe Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems.\r\n\r\nAnother point of difference between the male and female schools is still more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a Forty-barrel-bull\u2014poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike a member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.\r\n\r\nThe allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the last chapter but one, necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge.\r\n\r\nIt frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company, a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. For example,\u2014after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale, the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus the most vexatious and violent disputes would often arise between the fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law applicable to all cases.\r\n\r\nPerhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian\u2019s Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People\u2019s Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne\u2019s farthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.\r\n\r\nI. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.\r\n\r\nII. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.\r\n\r\nBut what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.\r\n\r\nFirst: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,\u2014a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention so to do.\r\n\r\nThese are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks\u2014the Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and honorable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases, where it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But others are by no means so scrupulous.\r\n\r\nSome fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were remonstrated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs\u2019 teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had done, he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained attached to the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their whale, line, harpoons, and boat.\r\n\r\nMr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on to illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con. case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife\u2019s viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted an action to recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he then supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason of the great stress of her plunging viciousness, had at last abandoned her; yet abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish; and therefore when a subsequent gentleman re-harpooned her, the lady then became that subsequent gentleman\u2019s property, along with whatever harpoon might have been found sticking in her.\r\n\r\nNow in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.\r\n\r\nThese pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very learned judge in set terms decided, to wit,\u2014That as for the boat, he awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to save their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale, harpoons, and line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale, because it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture; and the harpoons and line because when the fish made off with them, it (the fish) acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards took the fish had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took the fish; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs.\r\n\r\nA common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might possibly object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the matter, the two great principles laid down in the twin whaling laws previously quoted, and applied and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in the above cited case; these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture, the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two props to stand on.\r\n\r\nIs it not a saying in every one\u2019s mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow\u2019s last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain\u2019s marble mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone\u2019s family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul\u2019s income of \u00a3100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul\u2019s help) what is that globular \u00a3100,000 but a Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder\u2019s hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?\r\n\r\nBut if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.\r\n\r\nWhat was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.\r\n\r\nWhat are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men\u2019s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.\r\n\r\n\u201cDe balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam.\u201d Bracton, l. 3, c. 3.\r\n\r\nLatin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of that land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in force in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within the last two years.\r\n\r\nIt seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of them.\r\n\r\nNow when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good \u00a3150 from the precious oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale\u2019s head, he says\u2014\u201cHands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord Warden\u2019s.\u201d Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consternation\u2014so truly English\u2014knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length one of them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made bold to speak,\r\n\r\n\u201cPlease, sir, who is the Lord Warden?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Duke.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is his.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all that to go to the Duke\u2019s benefit; we getting nothing at all for our pains but our blisters?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is his.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIs the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of getting a livelihood?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is his.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of this whale.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is his.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWon\u2019t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt is his.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published) that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend gentleman) would decline meddling with other people\u2019s business. Is this the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars?\r\n\r\nIt will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested with that right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon gives us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to the King and Queen, \u201cbecause of its superior excellence.\u201d And by the soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such matters.\r\n\r\nBut why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason for that, ye lawyers!\r\n\r\nIn his treatise on \u201cQueen-Gold,\u201d or Queen-pinmoney, an old King\u2019s Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: \u201cYe tail is ye Queen\u2019s, that ye Queen\u2019s wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.\u201d Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies\u2019 bodices. But this same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.\r\n\r\nThere are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers\u2014the whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown\u2019s ordinary revenue. I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying not inquiry.\u201d Sir T. Browne, V.E.\r\n\r\nIt was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day sea, that the many noses on the Pequod\u2019s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea.\r\n\r\n\u201cI will bet something now,\u201d said Stubb, \u201cthat somewhere hereabouts are some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they would keel up before long.\u201d\r\n\r\nPresently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colours from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it. Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.\r\n\r\nComing still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of a nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of those problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted whales in general.\r\n\r\nThe Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he recognised his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were knotted round the tail of one of these whales.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s a pretty fellow, now,\u201d he banteringly laughed, standing in the ship\u2019s bows, \u201cthere\u2019s a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they will get won\u2019t be enough to dip the Captain\u2019s wick into; aye, we all know these things; but look ye, here\u2019s a Crappo that is content with our leavings, the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has there. Poor devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let\u2019s make him a present of a little oil for dear charity\u2019s sake. For what oil he\u2019ll get from that drugged whale there, wouldn\u2019t be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I\u2019ll agree to get more oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than he\u2019ll get from that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it may contain something worth a good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if our old man has thought of that. It\u2019s worth trying. Yes, I\u2019m for it;\u201d and so saying he started for the quarter-deck.\r\n\r\nBy this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb now called his boat\u2019s crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red colour. Upon her head boards, in large gilt letters, he read \u201cBouton de Rose,\u201d\u2014Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship.\r\n\r\nThough Stubb did not understand the Bouton part of the inscription, yet the word rose, and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently explained the whole to him.\r\n\r\n\u201cA wooden rose-bud, eh?\u201d he cried with his hand to his nose, \u201cthat will do very well; but how like all creation it smells!\u201d\r\n\r\nNow in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he had to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to the blasted whale; and so talk over it.\r\n\r\nArrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled\u2014\u201cBouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that speak English?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes,\u201d rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be the chief-mate.\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat whale?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe White Whale\u2014a Sperm Whale\u2014Moby Dick, have ye seen him?\r\n\r\n\u201cNever heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale\u2014no.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cVery good, then; good bye now, and I\u2019ll call again in a minute.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning over the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two hands into a trumpet and shouted\u2014\u201cNo, Sir! No!\u201d Upon which Ahab retired, and Stubb returned to the Frenchman.\r\n\r\nHe now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of bag.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the matter with your nose, there?\u201d said Stubb. \u201cBroke it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI wish it was broken, or that I didn\u2019t have any nose at all!\u201d answered the Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very much. \u201cBut what are you holding yours for?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, nothing! It\u2019s a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain\u2019t it? Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of posies, will ye, Bouton-de-Rose?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat in the devil\u2019s name do you want here?\u201d roared the Guernseyman, flying into a sudden passion.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh! keep cool\u2014cool? yes, that\u2019s the word! why don\u2019t you pack those whales in ice while you\u2019re working at \u2019em? But joking aside, though; do you know, Rose-bud, that it\u2019s all nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales? As for that dried up one, there, he hasn\u2019t a gill in his whole carcase.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI know that well enough; but, d\u2019ye see, the Captain here won\u2019t believe it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But come aboard, and mayhap he\u2019ll believe you, if he won\u2019t me; and so I\u2019ll get out of this dirty scrape.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,\u201d rejoined Stubb, and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were getting the heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather slow and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All their noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many jib-booms. Now and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up to the mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost short off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it constantly filled their olfactories.\r\n\r\nStubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the Captain\u2019s round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within. This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain\u2019s round-house (cabinet he called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times.\r\n\r\nMarking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle. Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. According to this little plan of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter\u2019s office, was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost in him during the interview.\r\n\r\nBy this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a small and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet vest with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the aspect of interpreting between them.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat shall I say to him first?\u201d said he.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy,\u201d said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, \u201cyou may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me, though I don\u2019t pretend to be a judge.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe says, Monsieur,\u201d said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his captain, \u201cthat only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a blasted whale they had brought alongside.\u201d\r\n\r\nUpon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat now?\u201d said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him carefully, I\u2019m quite certain that he\u2019s no more fit to command a whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he\u2019s a baboon.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us, as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish.\u201d\r\n\r\nInstantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat now?\u201d said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to them.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that\u2014that\u2014in fact, tell him I\u2019ve diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody else.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe says, Monsieur, that he\u2019s very happy to have been of any service to us.\u201d\r\n\r\nHearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties (meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe wants you to take a glass of wine with him,\u201d said the interpreter.\r\n\r\n\u201cThank him heartily; but tell him it\u2019s against my principles to drink with the man I\u2019ve diddled. In fact, tell him I must go.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe says, Monsieur, that his principles won\u2019t admit of his drinking; but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for it\u2019s so calm they won\u2019t drift.\u201d\r\n\r\nBy this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed the Guernsey-man to this effect,\u2014that having a long tow-line in his boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out the lighter whale of the two from the ship\u2019s side. While the Frenchman\u2019s boats, then, were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking out a most unusually long tow-line.\r\n\r\nPresently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale; hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb\u2019s whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat\u2019s crew were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters.\r\n\r\nAnd all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along with another, without at all blending with it for a time.\r\n\r\n\u201cI have it, I have it,\u201d cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in the subterranean regions, \u201ca purse! a purse!\u201d\r\n\r\nDropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this, good friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were it not for impatient Ahab\u2019s loud command to Stubb to desist, and come on board, else the ship would bid them good bye.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 92. Ambergris.\r\n\r\nNow this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter\u2019s in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.\r\n\r\nWho would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth\u2019s pills, and then running out of harm\u2019s way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.\r\n\r\nI have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be sailors\u2019 trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were nothing more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.\r\n\r\nNow that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonor, but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk. Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst.\r\n\r\nI should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot, owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman\u2019s two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate?\r\n\r\nI opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding any other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold, and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an old city grave-yard, for the foundations of a Lying-in Hospital.\r\n\r\nI partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great work on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer, fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not, perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose. Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the open air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale\u2019s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian town to do honor to Alexander the Great?\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 93. The Castaway.\r\n\r\nIt was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod\u2019s crew; an event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.\r\n\r\nNow, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing, these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats\u2019 crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.\r\n\r\nIn outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year\u2019s calendar should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year\u2019s Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king\u2019s cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life\u2019s peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler\u2019s frolic on the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to the story.\r\n\r\nIt came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb\u2019s after-oarsman chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed; and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.\r\n\r\nThe first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness; but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.\r\n\r\nNow upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip\u2019s seat. The involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken several turns around his chest and neck.\r\n\r\nTashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath, he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb, exclaimed interrogatively, \u201cCut?\u201d Meantime Pip\u2019s blue, choked face plainly looked, Do, for God\u2019s sake! All passed in a flash. In less than half a minute, this entire thing happened.\r\n\r\n\u201cDamn him, cut!\u201d roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was saved.\r\n\r\nSo soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed by yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except\u2014but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from the boat, is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, \u201cStick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won\u2019t pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can\u2019t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don\u2019t jump any more.\u201d Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.\r\n\r\nBut we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller\u2019s trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater\u2019s skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip\u2019s ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb\u2019s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.\r\n\r\nNow, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea\u2014mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.\r\n\r\nBut had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and armies.\r\n\r\nBut it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb\u2019s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip\u2019s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God\u2019s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man\u2019s insanity is heaven\u2019s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.\r\n\r\nFor the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell myself.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.\r\n\r\nThat whale of Stubb\u2019s, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod\u2019s side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.\r\n\r\nWhile some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.\r\n\r\nIt had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine\u2019s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralise.\r\n\r\nAs I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,\u2014literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.\r\n\r\nSqueeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers\u2019 hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,\u2014Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.\r\n\r\nWould that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.\r\n\r\nNow, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.\r\n\r\nFirst comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough with congealed tendons\u2014a wad of muscle\u2014but still contains some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble.\r\n\r\nPlum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale\u2019s flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.\r\n\r\nThere is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing.\r\n\r\nGurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.\r\n\r\nNippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale\u2019s vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman\u2019s nipper is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of Leviathan\u2019s tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all impurities.\r\n\r\nBut to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates. This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They generally go in pairs,\u2014a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is similar to a frigate\u2019s boarding-weapon of the same name. The gaff is something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan\u2019s feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants\u2019, would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 95. The Cassock.\r\n\r\nHad you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale\u2019s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,\u2014longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the First Book of Kings.\r\n\r\nLook at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.\r\n\r\nThat office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator\u2019s desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!*\r\n\r\n*Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates to the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.\r\n\r\nBesides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship. It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks.\r\n\r\nThe try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels\u2019 capacity. When not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls. During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them\u2014one man in each pot, side by side\u2014many confidential communications are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time.\r\n\r\nRemoving the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.\r\n\r\nIt was about nine o\u2019clock at night that the Pequod\u2019s try-works were first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business.\r\n\r\n\u201cAll ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the works.\u201d This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.\r\n\r\nBy midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.\r\n\r\nThe hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship\u2019s stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander\u2019s soul.\r\n\r\nSo seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.\r\n\r\nBut that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship\u2019s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee!\r\n\r\nLook not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp\u2014all others but liars!\r\n\r\nNevertheless the sun hides not Virginia\u2019s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome\u2019s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true\u2014not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon\u2019s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. \u201cAll is vanity.\u201d ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon\u2019s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;\u2014not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.\r\n\r\nBut even Solomon, he says, \u201cthe man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain\u201d (i.e., even while living) \u201cin the congregation of the dead.\u201d Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 97. The Lamp.\r\n\r\nHad you descended from the Pequod\u2019s try-works to the Pequod\u2019s forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.\r\n\r\nIn merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin\u2019s lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night the ship\u2019s black hull still houses an illumination.\r\n\r\nSee with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps\u2014often but old bottles and vials, though\u2014to the copper cooler at the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own supper of game.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.\r\n\r\nAlready has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;\u2014but now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by rehearsing\u2014singing, if I may\u2014the romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold, where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.\r\n\r\nWhile still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery deck, like so many land slides, till at last man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, ex officio, every sailor is a cooper.\r\n\r\nAt length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.\r\n\r\nIn the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale\u2019s head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening.\r\n\r\nBut a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works, you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly exterminates it. Hands go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower rigging. All the numerous implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the try-works, completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of sight; all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined and simultaneous industry of almost the entire ship\u2019s company, the whole of this conscientious duty is at last concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.\r\n\r\nNow, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics; propose to mat the deck; think of having hanging to the top; object not to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and bring us napkins!\r\n\r\nBut mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day rowing on the Line,\u2014they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of \u201cThere she blows!\u201d and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world\u2019s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when\u2014There she blows!\u2014the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life\u2019s old routine again.\r\n\r\nOh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage\u2014and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.\r\n\r\nEre now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck, taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood, he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.\r\n\r\nBut one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.\r\n\r\nNow this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet, untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it was set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the white whale\u2019s talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever live to spend it.\r\n\r\nNow those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun\u2019s disks and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.\r\n\r\nIt so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes\u2019 summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra.\r\n\r\nBefore this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now pausing.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here,\u2014three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician\u2019s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, \u2019tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here\u2019s stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil\u2019s claws must have left their mouldings there since yesterday,\u201d murmured Starbuck to himself, leaning against the bulwarks. \u201cThe old man seems to read Belshazzar\u2019s awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly. He goes below; let me read. A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere now\u2019s the old Mogul,\u201d soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, \u201che\u2019s been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long. And all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on Negro Hill or in Corlaer\u2019s Hook, I\u2019d not look at it very long ere spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and quarter joes. What then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing wonderful? By Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! here\u2019s signs and wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanac below calls ditto. I\u2019ll get the almanac and as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll\u2019s arithmetic, I\u2019ll try my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here\u2019s the book. Let\u2019s see now. Signs and wonders; and the sun, he\u2019s always among \u2019em. Hem, hem, hem; here they are\u2014here they go\u2014all alive:\u2014Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and Jimimi! here\u2019s Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he wheels among \u2019em. Aye, here on the coin he\u2019s just crossing the threshold between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You\u2019ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. That\u2019s my small experience, so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch\u2019s navigator, and Daboll\u2019s arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders! There\u2019s a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist\u2014hark! By Jove, I have it! Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter; and now I\u2019ll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: there\u2019s Aries, or the Ram\u2014lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull\u2014he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins\u2014that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path\u2014he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that\u2019s our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales\u2014happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound, when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here\u2019s the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep. There\u2019s a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly\u2019s the word for aye! Adieu, Doubloon! But stop; here comes little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, and let\u2019s hear what he\u2019ll have to say. There; he\u2019s before it; he\u2019ll out with something presently. So, so; he\u2019s beginning.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what\u2019s all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that\u2019s true; and at two cents the cigar, that\u2019s nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won\u2019t smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here\u2019s nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy \u2019em out.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cShall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman\u2014the old hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side of the mast; why, there\u2019s a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now he\u2019s back again; what does that mean? Hark! he\u2019s muttering\u2014voice like an old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the sun stands in some one of these signs. I\u2019ve studied signs, and know their marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what\u2019s the horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign\u2014the roaring and devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg\u2014all tattooing\u2014looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the Cannibal? As I live he\u2019s comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone; thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon\u2019s Astronomy in the back country. And by Jove, he\u2019s found something there in the vicinity of his thigh\u2014I guess it\u2019s Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don\u2019t know what to make of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king\u2019s trowsers. But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he say, with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin\u2014fire worshipper, depend upon it. Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip\u2014poor boy! would he had died, or I; he\u2019s half horrible to me. He too has been watching all of these interpreters\u2014myself included\u2014and look now, he comes to read, with that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cUpon my soul, he\u2019s been studying Murray\u2019s Grammar! Improving his mind, poor fellow! But what\u2019s that he says now\u2014hist!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, he\u2019s getting it by heart\u2014hist! again.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, that\u2019s funny.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I\u2019m a crow, especially when I stand a\u2019top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain\u2019t I a crow? And where\u2019s the scare-crow? There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWonder if he means me?\u2014complimentary!\u2014poor lad!\u2014I could go hang myself. Any way, for the present, I\u2019ll quit Pip\u2019s vicinity. I can stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he\u2019s too crazy-witty for my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHere\u2019s the ship\u2019s navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what\u2019s the consequence? Then again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught\u2019s nailed to the mast it\u2019s a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab! the White Whale; he\u2019ll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring grown over in it; some old darkey\u2019s wedding ring. How did it get there? And so they\u2019ll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold! the green miser\u2019ll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes \u2019mong the worlds blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.\r\nThe Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.\r\n\r\n\u201cShip, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?\u201d\r\n\r\nSo cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat\u2019s bow. He was a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar\u2019s surcoat.\r\n\r\n\u201cHast seen the White Whale?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSee you this?\u201d and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it, he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet.\r\n\r\n\u201cMan my boat!\u201d cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near him\u2014\u201cStand by to lower!\u201d\r\n\r\nIn less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger. But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment\u2019s warning. Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody\u2014except those who are almost hourly used to it, like whalemen\u2014to clamber up a ship\u2019s side from a boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.\r\n\r\nIt has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood, cried out, \u201cI see, I see!\u2014avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing over the cutting-tackle.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, \u201cAye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones together!\u2014an arm and a leg!\u2014an arm that never can shrink, d\u2019ye see; and a leg that never can run. Where did\u2019st thou see the White Whale?\u2014how long ago?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe White Whale,\u201d said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a telescope; \u201cthere I saw him, on the Line, last season.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd he took that arm off, did he?\u201d asked Ahab, now sliding down from the capstan, and resting on the Englishman\u2019s shoulder, as he did so.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSpin me the yarn,\u201d said Ahab; \u201chow was it?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,\u201d began the Englishman. \u201cI was ignorant of the White Whale at that time. Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and milling round so, that my boat\u2019s crew could only trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all crows\u2019 feet and wrinkles.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was he, it was he!\u201d cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended breath.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye\u2014they were mine\u2014my irons,\u201d cried Ahab, exultingly\u2014\u201cbut on!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGive me a chance, then,\u201d said the Englishman, good-humoredly. \u201cWell, this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, I see!\u2014wanted to part it; free the fast-fish\u2014an old trick\u2014I know him.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow it was exactly,\u201d continued the one-armed commander, \u201cI do not know; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow; but we didn\u2019t know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other whale\u2019s; that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was\u2014the noblest and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life\u2014I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat\u2019s crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped into my first mate\u2019s boat\u2014Mr. Mounttop\u2019s here (by the way, Captain\u2014Mounttop; Mounttop\u2014the captain);\u2014as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop\u2019s boat, which, d\u2019ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look you, sir\u2014hearts and souls alive, man\u2014the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat\u2014both eyes out\u2014all befogged and bedeadened with black foam\u2014the whale\u2019s tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the second iron, to toss it overboard\u2014down comes the tail like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me caught me here\u201d (clapping his hand just below his shoulder); \u201cyes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell\u2019s flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh\u2014clear along the whole length of my arm\u2014came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;\u2014and that gentleman there will tell you the rest (by the way, captain\u2014Dr. Bunger, ship\u2019s surgeon: Bunger, my lad,\u2014the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote his gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other, occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two crippled captains. But, at his superior\u2019s introduction of him to Ahab, he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain\u2019s bidding.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was a shocking bad wound,\u201d began the whale-surgeon; \u201cand, taking my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSamuel Enderby is the name of my ship,\u201d interrupted the one-armed captain, addressing Ahab; \u201cgo on, boy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot weather there on the Line. But it was no use\u2014I did all I could; sat up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, very severe!\u201d chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering his voice, \u201cDrinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he couldn\u2019t see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas over, about three o\u2019clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher, and very dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why don\u2019t ye? You know you\u2019re a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy, I\u2019d rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir\u201d\u2014said the imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab\u2014\u201cis apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort. But I may as well say\u2014en passant, as the French remark\u2014that I myself\u2014that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy\u2014am a strict total abstinence man; I never drink\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWater!\u201d cried the captain; \u201che never drinks it; it\u2019s a sort of fits to him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on\u2014go on with the arm story.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, I may as well,\u201d said the surgeon, coolly. \u201cI was about observing, sir, before Captain Boomer\u2019s facetious interruption, that spite of my best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more than two feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead line. In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is against all rule\u201d\u2014pointing at it with the marlingspike\u2014\u201cthat is the captain\u2019s work, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some one\u2019s brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir\u201d\u2014removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever having been a wound\u2014\u201cWell, the captain there will tell you how that came here; he knows.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, I don\u2019t,\u201d said the captain, \u201cbut his mother did; he was born with it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you\u2014you Bunger! was there ever such another Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat became of the White Whale?\u201d now cried Ahab, who thus far had been impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh!\u201d cried the one-armed captain, \u201coh, yes! Well; after he sounded, we didn\u2019t see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I didn\u2019t then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick\u2014as some call him\u2014and then I knew it was he.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDid\u2019st thou cross his wake again?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTwice.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut could not fasten?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDidn\u2019t want to try to: ain\u2019t one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm? And I\u2019m thinking Moby Dick doesn\u2019t bite so much as he swallows.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, then,\u201d interrupted Bunger, \u201cgive him your left arm for bait to get the right. Do you know, gentlemen\u201d\u2014very gravely and mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession\u2014\u201cDo you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest even a man\u2019s arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the White Whale\u2019s malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks, d\u2019ye see. No possible way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale have another chance at you shortly, that\u2019s all.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, thank ye, Bunger,\u201d said the English Captain, \u201che\u2019s welcome to the arm he has, since I can\u2019t help it, and didn\u2019t know him then; but not to another one. No more White Whales for me; I\u2019ve lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he\u2019s best let alone; don\u2019t you think so, Captain?\u201d\u2014glancing at the ivory leg.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He\u2019s all a magnet! How long since thou saw\u2019st him last? Which way heading?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBless my soul, and curse the foul fiend\u2019s,\u201d cried Bunger, stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; \u201cthis man\u2019s blood\u2014bring the thermometer!\u2014it\u2019s at the boiling point!\u2014his pulse makes these planks beat!\u2014sir!\u201d\u2014taking a lancet from his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab\u2019s arm.\r\n\r\n\u201cAvast!\u201d roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks\u2014\u201cMan the boat! Which way heading?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood God!\u201d cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put. \u201cWhat\u2019s the matter? He was heading east, I think.\u2014Is your Captain crazy?\u201d whispering Fedallah.\r\n\r\nBut Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to take the boat\u2019s steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle towards him, commanded the ship\u2019s sailors to stand by to lower.\r\n\r\nIn a moment he was standing in the boat\u2019s stern, and the Manilla men were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him. With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 101. The Decanter.\r\n\r\nEre the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman\u2019s opinion, comes not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted out the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score of years previous (ever since 1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they were the only people of the whole globe who so harpooned him.\r\n\r\nIn 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any sort in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the Amelia\u2019s example was soon followed by other ships, English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open. But not content with this good deed, the indefatigable house again bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons\u2014how many, their mother only knows\u2014and under their immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense, the British government was induced to send the sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and did some service; how much does not appear. But this is not all. In 1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own, to go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship\u2014well called the \u201cSyren\u201d\u2014made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first became generally known. The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.\r\n\r\nAll honor to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world.\r\n\r\nThe ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps\u2014every soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine gam I had\u2014long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his ivory heel\u2014it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it\u2019s squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands\u2014visitors and all\u2014were called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts did not go overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that we had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my taste.\r\n\r\nThe beef was fine\u2014tough, but with body in it. They said it was bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but substantial, symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out of you like billiard-balls. The bread\u2014but that couldn\u2019t be helped; besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread contained the only fresh fare they had. But the forecastle was not very light, and it was very easy to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all in all, taking her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the cook\u2019s boilers, including his own live parchment boilers; fore and aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong; crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat-band.\r\n\r\nBut why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other English whalers I know of\u2014not all though\u2014were such famous, hospitable ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and the joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and laughing? I will tell you. The abounding good cheer of these English whalers is matter for historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.\r\n\r\nThe English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders, Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler. Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and natural, but incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have some special origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated.\r\n\r\nDuring my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about whalers. The title was, \u201cDan Coopman,\u201d wherefore I concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one \u201cFitz Swackhammer.\u201d But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and St. Pott\u2019s, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for his trouble\u2014this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured me that \u201cDan Coopman\u201d did not mean \u201cThe Cooper,\u201d but \u201cThe Merchant.\u201d In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a very interesting account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it was, headed, \u201cSmeer,\u201d or \u201cFat,\u201d that I found a long detailed list of the outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:\r\n\r\n400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins of butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of beer.\r\n\r\nMost statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.\r\n\r\nAt the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.\r\n\r\nThe quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks\u2019 allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin. Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a boat\u2019s head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But this was very far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his boat; and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.\r\n\r\nBut no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers of two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English whalers have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the decanter.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.\r\n\r\nHitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his unconditional skeleton.\r\n\r\nBut how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.\r\n\r\nI confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the contents of that young cub?\r\n\r\nAnd as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital.\r\n\r\nAmong many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes; and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.\r\n\r\nChief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.\r\n\r\nThe ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebr\u00e6 were carved with Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles.\r\n\r\nIt was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver\u2019s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!\u2014pause!\u2014one word!\u2014whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!\u2014stay thy hand!\u2014but one single word with thee! Nay\u2014the shuttle flies\u2014the figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world\u2019s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.\r\n\r\nNow, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging\u2014a gigantic idler! Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.\r\n\r\nNow, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as an object of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced before this skeleton\u2014brushed the vines aside\u2014broke through the ribs\u2014and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbours. But soon my line was out; and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.\r\n\r\nCutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton. From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the altitude of the final rib, \u201cHow now!\u201d they shouted; \u201cDar\u2019st thou measure this our god! That\u2019s for us.\u201d \u201cAye, priests\u2014well, how long do ye make him, then?\u201d But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet and inches; they cracked each other\u2019s sconces with their yard-sticks\u2014the great skull echoed\u2014and seizing that lucky chance, I quickly concluded my own admeasurements.\r\n\r\nThese admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have what the proprietors call \u201cthe only perfect specimen of a Greenland or River Whale in the United States.\u201d Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo\u2019s.\r\n\r\nIn both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir Clifford\u2019s whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities\u2014spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan\u2014and swing all day upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead.\r\n\r\nThe skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing\u2014at least, what untattooed parts might remain\u2014I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale\u2019s Skeleton.\r\n\r\nIn the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.\r\n\r\nAccording to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base upon Captain Scoresby\u2019s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants.\r\n\r\nThink you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman\u2019s imagination?\r\n\r\nHaving already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the general structure we are about to view.\r\n\r\nIn length, the Sperm Whale\u2019s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once enclosed his vitals.\r\n\r\nTo me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine, extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time, but a long, disconnected timber.\r\n\r\nThe ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore a seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay footpath bridges over small streams.\r\n\r\nIn considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form. The largest of the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the invested body of this particular whale must have been at least sixteen feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the living magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!\r\n\r\nHow vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.\r\n\r\nBut the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a crane, to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now it\u2019s done, it looks much like Pompey\u2019s Pillar.\r\n\r\nThere are forty and odd vertebr\u00e6 in all, which in the skeleton are not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest\u2019s children, who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child\u2019s play.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.\r\n\r\nFrom his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.\r\n\r\nSince I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an arch\u00e6ological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan\u2014to an ant or a flea\u2014such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer\u2019s uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.\r\n\r\nOne often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor\u2019s quill! Give me Vesuvius\u2019 crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.\r\n\r\nEre entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking rank as Cetacean fossils.\r\n\r\nDetached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon\u2019s time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species.\r\n\r\nBut by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.\r\n\r\nWhen I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebr\u00e6, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn\u2019s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world\u2019s circumference, not an inhabitable hand\u2019s breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale\u2019s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab\u2019s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh\u2019s. Methuselah seems a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.\r\n\r\nBut not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.\r\n\r\nNor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the Temple, no Whale can pass it without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon \u2019em. They keep a Whale\u2019s Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be reached by a Man upon a Camel\u2019s Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy\u2019d of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the Temple.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 105. Does the Whale\u2019s Magnitude Diminish?\u2014Will He Perish?\r\n\r\nInasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether, in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the original bulk of his sires.\r\n\r\nBut upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier ones.\r\n\r\nOf all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen, that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen\u2019s authority, that Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of capture.\r\n\r\nBut may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may it not be, that since Adam\u2019s time they have degenerated?\r\n\r\nAssuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny tells us of whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length\u2014Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke\u2019s naturalists, we find a Danish member of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three hundred and sixty feet. And Lac\u00e9p\u00e8de, the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet. And this work was published so late as A.D. 1825.\r\n\r\nBut will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is as big as his ancestors in Pliny\u2019s time. And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so. Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks; and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which they are drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only equal, but far exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh\u2019s fat kine; in the face of all this, I will not admit that of all animals the whale alone should have degenerated.\r\n\r\nBut still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of the whale-ships, now penetrating even through Behring\u2019s straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.\r\n\r\nComparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.\r\n\r\nBut you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period ago\u2014not a good lifetime\u2014the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were, could be statistically stated.\r\n\r\nNor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that species also is declining. For they are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.\r\n\r\nFurthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.\r\n\r\nBut as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions. But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than 13,000, have been annually slain on the nor\u2019 west coast by the Americans alone; yet there are considerations which render even this circumstance of little or no account as an opposing argument in this matter.\r\n\r\nNatural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one hunting the King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the successive monarchs of the East\u2014if they still survive there in great numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea combined.\r\n\r\nMoreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more, therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult generations must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some idea of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and children who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this countless host to the present human population of the globe.\r\n\r\nWherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah\u2019s flood he despised Noah\u2019s Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 106. Ahab\u2019s Leg.\r\n\r\nThe precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to his own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough); then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.\r\n\r\nAnd, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not been very long prior to the Pequod\u2019s sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.\r\n\r\nNor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell\u2019s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.\r\n\r\nUnwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some, why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the sailing of the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead. Captain Peleg\u2019s bruited reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though, indeed, as touching all Ahab\u2019s deeper part, every revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory light. But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter did, at least. That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason, possessed the privilege of a less banned approach to him; to that timid circle the above hinted casualty\u2014remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab\u2014invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they had all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod\u2019s decks.\r\n\r\nBut be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air, or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures;\u2014he called the carpenter.\r\n\r\nAnd when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful selection of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that night; and to provide all the fittings for it, independent of those pertaining to the distrusted one in use. Moreover, the ship\u2019s forge was ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.\r\n\r\nSeat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary. But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod\u2019s carpenter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this stage.\r\n\r\nLike all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent, alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the carpenter\u2019s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years\u2019 voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary duties:\u2014repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull\u2019s eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.\r\n\r\nThe one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold, was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.\r\n\r\nA belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would have him draw the tooth.\r\n\r\nThus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;\u2014yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah\u2019s ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, multum in parvo, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior\u2014though a little swelled\u2014of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they were.\r\n\r\nYet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.\r\nThe Deck\u2014First Night Watch.\r\n\r\n(Carpenter standing before his vice-bench, and by the light of two lanterns busily filing the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is firmly fixed in the vice. Slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws, and various tools of all sorts lying about the bench. Forward, the red flame of the forge is seen, where the blacksmith is at work.)\r\n\r\nDrat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft, and that is soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and shinbones. Let\u2019s try another. Aye, now, this works better (sneezes). Halloa, this bone dust is (sneezes)\u2014why it\u2019s (sneezes)\u2014yes it\u2019s (sneezes)\u2014bless my soul, it won\u2019t let me speak! This is what an old fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and you don\u2019t get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don\u2019t get it (sneezes). Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let\u2019s have that ferule and buckle-screw; I\u2019ll be ready for them presently. Lucky now (sneezes) there\u2019s no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle a little; but a mere shinbone\u2014why it\u2019s easy as making hop-poles; only I should like to put a good finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I could turn him out as neat a leg now as ever (sneezes) scraped to a lady in a parlor. Those buckskin legs and calves of legs I\u2019ve seen in shop windows wouldn\u2019t compare at all. They soak water, they do; and of course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored (sneezes) with washes and lotions, just like live legs. There; before I saw it off, now, I must call his old Mogulship, and see whether the length will be all right; too short, if anything, I guess. Ha! that\u2019s the heel; we are in luck; here he comes, or it\u2019s somebody else, that\u2019s certain.\r\n\r\nAHAB (advancing). (During the ensuing scene, the carpenter continues sneezing at times.)\r\n\r\nWell, manmaker!\r\n\r\nJust in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length. Let me measure, sir.\r\n\r\nMeasured for a leg! good. Well, it\u2019s not the first time. About it! There; keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast here, carpenter; let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.\r\n\r\nOh, sir, it will break bones\u2014beware, beware!\r\n\r\nNo fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man. What\u2019s Prometheus about there?\u2014the blacksmith, I mean\u2014what\u2019s he about?\r\n\r\nHe must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.\r\n\r\nRight. It\u2019s a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a fierce red flame there!\r\n\r\nAye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.\r\n\r\nUm-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what\u2019s made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so hell\u2019s probable. How the soot flies! This must be the remainder the Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter, when he\u2019s through with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel shoulder-blades; there\u2019s a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack.\r\n\r\nSir?\r\n\r\nHold; while Prometheus is about it, I\u2019ll order a complete man after a desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to \u2019em, to stay in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see\u2014shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away.\r\n\r\nNow, what\u2019s he speaking about, and who\u2019s he speaking to, I should like to know? Shall I keep standing here? (aside).\r\n\r\n\u2019Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here\u2019s one. No, no, no; I must have a lantern.\r\n\r\nHo, ho! That\u2019s it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn.\r\n\r\nWhat art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man? Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.\r\n\r\nI thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter.\r\n\r\nCarpenter? why that\u2019s\u2014but no;\u2014a very tidy, and, I may say, an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here, carpenter;\u2014or would\u2019st thou rather work in clay?\r\n\r\nSir?\u2014Clay? clay, sir? That\u2019s mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.\r\n\r\nThe fellow\u2019s impious! What art thou sneezing about?\r\n\r\nBone is rather dusty, sir.\r\n\r\nTake the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under living people\u2019s noses.\r\n\r\nSir?\u2014oh! ah!\u2014I guess so;\u2014yes\u2014oh, dear!\r\n\r\nLook ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?\r\n\r\nTruly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?\r\n\r\nIt is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair, do I. Is\u2019t a riddle?\r\n\r\nI should humbly call it a poser, sir.\r\n\r\nHist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don\u2019t speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!\r\n\r\nGood Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again; I think I didn\u2019t carry a small figure, sir.\r\n\r\nLook ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.\u2014How long before the leg is done?\r\n\r\nPerhaps an hour, sir.\r\n\r\nBungle away at it then, and bring it to me (turns to go). Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I\u2019m down in the whole world\u2019s books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Pr\u00e6torians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world\u2019s); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I\u2019ll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So.\r\n\r\nCARPENTER (resuming his work).\r\n\r\nWell, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he\u2019s queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he\u2019s queer, says Stubb; he\u2019s queer\u2014queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time\u2014queer\u2014sir\u2014queer, queer, very queer. And here\u2019s his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here\u2019s his bedfellow! has a stick of whale\u2019s jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his leg; he\u2019ll stand on this. What was that now about one leg standing in three places, and all three places standing in one hell\u2014how was that? Oh! I don\u2019t wonder he looked so scornful at me! I\u2019m a sort of strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that\u2019s only haphazard-like. Then, a short, little old body like me, should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with tall, heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the chin pretty quick, and there\u2019s a great cry for life-boats. And here\u2019s the heron\u2019s leg! long and slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts a lifetime, and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly old coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he\u2019s a hard driver. Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand there with those screws, and let\u2019s finish it before the resurrection fellow comes a-calling with his horn for all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round collecting old beer barrels, to fill \u2019em up again. What a leg this is! It looks like a real live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he\u2019ll be standing on this to-morrow; he\u2019ll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So, so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.\r\n\r\nAccording to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down into the cabin to report this unfavourable affair.*\r\n\r\n*In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a regular semi-weekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is removed by the ship\u2019s pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight; while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners readily detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo.\r\n\r\nNow, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with a general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands\u2014Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old courses again.\r\n\r\n\u201cWho\u2019s there?\u201d hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round to it. \u201cOn deck! Begone!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCaptain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We must up Burtons and break out.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cUp Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cEither do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSo it is, so it is; if we get it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak! I\u2019m all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that\u2019s a far worse plight than the Pequod\u2019s, man. Yet I don\u2019t stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this life\u2019s howling gale? Starbuck! I\u2019ll not have the Burtons hoisted.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat will the owners say, sir?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLet the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship\u2019s keel.\u2014On deck!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCaptain Ahab,\u201d said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin, with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of itself; \u201cA better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would quickly enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in a happier, Captain Ahab.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDevils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?\u2014On deck!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir\u2014to be forbearing! Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?\u201d\r\n\r\nAhab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most South-Sea-men\u2019s cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: \u201cThere is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.\u2014On deck!\u201d\r\n\r\nFor an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: \u201cThou hast outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!\u201d murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. \u201cWhat\u2019s that he said\u2014Ahab beware of Ahab\u2014there\u2019s something there!\u201d Then unconsciously using the musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the little cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.\r\n\r\n\u201cThou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck,\u201d he said lowly to the mate; then raising his voice to the crew: \u201cFurl the t\u2019gallant-sails, and close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up Burton, and break out in the main-hold.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him; or mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously forbade the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient, in the important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his orders were executed; and the Burtons were hoisted.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.\r\n\r\nUpon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold were perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they go; and so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards, vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood. Tierce after tierce, too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks were hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if you were treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea like an air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons did not visit them then.\r\n\r\nNow, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast bosom-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh to his endless end.\r\n\r\nBe it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown; dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but\u2014as we have elsewhere seen\u2014mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen, the harpooneers are the holders, so called.\r\n\r\nPoor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where, stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after some days\u2019 suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell. So that\u2014let us say it again\u2014no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you saw creeping over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his final rest, and the ocean\u2019s invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and higher towards his destined heaven.\r\n\r\nNot a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself, what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favour he asked. He called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was just breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes, and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milky way. He added, that he shuddered at the thought of being buried in his hammock, according to the usual sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the death-devouring sharks. No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and much lee-way adown the dim ages.\r\n\r\nNow, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter was at once commanded to do Queequeg\u2019s bidding, whatever it might include. There was some heathenish, coffin-coloured old lumber aboard, which, upon a long previous voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal groves of the Lackaday islands, and from these dark planks the coffin was recommended to be made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of the order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle and took Queequeg\u2019s measure with great accuracy, regularly chalking Queequeg\u2019s person as he shifted the rule.\r\n\r\n\u201cAh! poor fellow! he\u2019ll have to die now,\u201d ejaculated the Long Island sailor.\r\n\r\nGoing to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and general reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin was to be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches at its extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks and his tools, and to work.\r\n\r\nWhen the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, he lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring whether they were ready for it yet in that direction.\r\n\r\nOverhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the people on deck began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one\u2019s consternation, commanded that the thing should be instantly brought to him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.\r\n\r\nLeaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with an attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits were then ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh water was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be placed over him. The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view. \u201cRarmai\u201d (it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and signed to be replaced in his hammock.\r\n\r\nBut ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all this while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took him by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine.\r\n\r\n\u201cPoor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? where go ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who\u2019s now been missing long: I think he\u2019s in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad; for look! he\u2019s left his tambourine behind;\u2014I found it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I\u2019ll beat ye your dying march.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI have heard,\u201d murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, \u201cthat in violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?\u2014Hark! he speaks again: but more wildly now.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cForm two and two! Let\u2019s make a General of him! Ho, where\u2019s his harpoon? Lay it across here.\u2014Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game cock now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!\u2014mind ye that; Queequeg dies game!\u2014take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward; died all a\u2019shiver;\u2014out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he\u2019s a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from a whale-boat! I\u2019d never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all cowards\u2014shame upon them! Let \u2019em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat. Shame! shame!\u201d\r\n\r\nDuring all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.\r\n\r\nBut now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now that his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon there seemed no need of the carpenter\u2019s box: and thereupon, when some expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the cause of his sudden convalescence was this;\u2014at a critical moment, he had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone; and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet, he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word, it was Queequeg\u2019s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.\r\n\r\nNow, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized; that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day. So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a fight.\r\n\r\nWith a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg\u2014\u201cOh, devilish tantalization of the gods!\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 111. The Pacific.\r\n\r\nWhen gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue.\r\n\r\nThere is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters\u2019 Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.\r\n\r\nTo any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world\u2019s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.\r\n\r\nBut few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab\u2019s brain, as standing like an iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese cruising-ground, the old man\u2019s purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead\u2019s veins swelled like overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull, \u201cStern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.\r\n\r\nAvailing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after concluding his contributory work for Ahab\u2019s leg, but still retained it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their various weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an eager circle, all waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads, harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement, as he toiled. Nevertheless, this old man\u2019s was a patient hammer wielded by a patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come from him. Silent, slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it was.\u2014Most miserable!\r\n\r\nA peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass that every one now knew the shameful story of his wretched fate.\r\n\r\nBelated, and not innocently, one bitter winter\u2019s midnight, on the road running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning, dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth act of the grief of his life\u2019s drama.\r\n\r\nHe was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow\u2019s technicals called ruin. He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family\u2019s heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, for prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith\u2019s shop was in the basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so that always had the young and loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness, but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old husband\u2019s hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and so, to stout Labor\u2019s iron lullaby, the blacksmith\u2019s infants were rocked to slumber.\r\n\r\nOh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and all of them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.\r\n\r\nWhy tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!\r\n\r\nDeath seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them\u2014\u201cCome hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put up thy gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!\u201d\r\n\r\nHearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith\u2019s soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went a-whaling.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 113. The Forge.\r\n\r\nWith matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the coals, and with the other at his forge\u2019s lungs, when Captain Ahab came along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag. While yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till at last, Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the anvil\u2014the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights, some of which flew close to Ahab.\r\n\r\n\u201cAre these thy Mother Carey\u2019s chickens, Perth? they are always flying in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;\u2014look here, they burn; but thou\u2014thou liv\u2019st among them without a scorch.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,\u201d answered Perth, resting for a moment on his hammer; \u201cI am past scorching; not easily can\u2019st thou scorch a scar.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should\u2019st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can\u2019st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can\u2019st not go mad?\u2014What wert thou making there?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWelding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd can\u2019st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard usage as it had?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI think so, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd I suppose thou can\u2019st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLook ye here, then,\u201d cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning with both hands on Perth\u2019s shoulders; \u201clook ye here\u2014here\u2014can ye smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith,\u201d sweeping one hand across his ribbed brow; \u201cif thou could\u2019st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes. Answer! Can\u2019st thou smoothe this seam?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for though thou only see\u2019st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the bone of my skull\u2014that is all wrinkles! But, away with child\u2019s play; no more gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!\u201d jingling the leathern bag, as if it were full of gold coins. \u201cI, too, want a harpoon made; one that a thousand yoke of fiends could not part, Perth; something that will stick in a whale like his own fin-bone. There\u2019s the stuff,\u201d flinging the pouch upon the anvil. \u201cLook ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing horses.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHorse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the melted bones of murderers. Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me first, twelve rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer these twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I\u2019ll blow the fire.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by spiralling them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. \u201cA flaw!\u201d rejecting the last one. \u201cWork that over again, Perth.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when Ahab stayed his hand, and said he would weld his own iron. As, then, with regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth passing to him the glowing rods, one after the other, and the hard pressed forge shooting up its intense straight flame, the Parsee passed silently, and bowing over his head towards the fire, seemed invoking some curse or some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he slid aside.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?\u201d muttered Stubb, looking on from the forecastle. \u201cThat Parsee smells fire like a fusee; and smells of it himself, like a hot musket\u2019s powder-pan.\u201d\r\n\r\nAt last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat; and as Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab\u2019s bent face.\r\n\r\n\u201cWould\u2019st thou brand me, Perth?\u201d wincing for a moment with the pain; \u201chave I been but forging my own branding-iron, then?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this harpoon for the White Whale?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFor the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them thyself, man. Here are my razors\u2014the best of steel; here, and make the barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea.\u201d\r\n\r\nFor a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain not use them.\r\n\r\n\u201cTake them, man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup, nor pray till\u2014but here\u2014to work!\u201d\r\n\r\nFashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, no\u2014no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb?\u201d holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale\u2019s barbs were then tempered.\r\n\r\n\u201cEgo non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!\u201d deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.\r\n\r\nNow, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of hickory, with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the socket of the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms of it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension. Pressing his foot upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed, \u201cGood! and now for the seizings.\u201d\r\n\r\nAt one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole was then driven hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope was traced half-way along the pole\u2019s length, and firmly secured so, with intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope\u2014like the Three Fates\u2014remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his cabin, light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was heard. Oh, Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the melancholy ship, and mocked it!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 114. The Gilder.\r\n\r\nPenetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild, pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing, or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small success for their pains.\r\n\r\nAt such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean\u2019s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.\r\n\r\nThese are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the western emigrants\u2019 horses only show their erected ears, while their hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.\r\n\r\nThe long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.\r\n\r\nNor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing.\r\n\r\nOh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,\u2014though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,\u2014in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:\u2014through infancy\u2019s unconscious spell, boyhood\u2019s thoughtless faith, adolescence\u2019 doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood\u2019s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling\u2019s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.\r\n\r\nAnd that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat\u2019s side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:\u2014\r\n\r\n\u201cLoveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride\u2019s eye!\u2014Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same golden light:\u2014\r\n\r\n\u201cI am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.\r\n\r\nAnd jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab\u2019s harpoon had been welded.\r\n\r\nIt was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous to pointing her prow for home.\r\n\r\nThe three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down; and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours were flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways lashed in each of her three basketed tops were two barrels of sperm; above which, in her top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of the same precious fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp.\r\n\r\nAs was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a single fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to make room for the far more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had met; and these were stowed along the deck, and in the captain\u2019s and officers\u2019 state-rooms. Even the cabin table itself had been knocked into kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined off the broad head of an oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle, the sailors had actually caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them; it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the captain\u2019s pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction.\r\n\r\nAs this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like poke or stomach skin of the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship\u2019s company were tumultuously busy at the masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been removed. You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastille, such wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and mortar were being hurled into the sea.\r\n\r\nLord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the ship\u2019s elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was full before him, and seemed merely contrived for his own individual diversion.\r\n\r\nAnd Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black, with a stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other\u2019s wakes\u2014one all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings as to things to come\u2014their two captains in themselves impersonated the whole striking contrast of the scene.\r\n\r\n\u201cCome aboard, come aboard!\u201d cried the gay Bachelor\u2019s commander, lifting a glass and a bottle in the air.\r\n\r\n\u201cHast seen the White Whale?\u201d gritted Ahab in reply.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo; only heard of him; but don\u2019t believe in him at all,\u201d said the other good-humoredly. \u201cCome aboard!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNot enough to speak of\u2014two islanders, that\u2019s all;\u2014but come aboard, old hearty, come along. I\u2019ll soon take that black from your brow. Come along, will ye (merry\u2019s the play); a full ship and homeward-bound.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHow wondrous familiar is a fool!\u201d muttered Ahab; then aloud, \u201cThou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call me an empty ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. Forward there! Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the receding Bachelor; but the Bachelor\u2019s men never heeding their gaze for the lively revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the homeward-bound craft, he took from his pocket a small vial of sand, and then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby bringing two remote associations together, for that vial was filled with Nantucket soundings.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.\r\n\r\nNot seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune\u2019s favourites sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So seemed it with the Pequod. For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor, whales were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.\r\n\r\nIt was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.\r\n\r\nSoothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales dying\u2014the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring\u2014that strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a wondrousness unknown before.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe turns and turns him to it,\u2014how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!\u2014Oh that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights. Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the Niger\u2019s unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, without a lesson to me.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet!\u2014that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.\r\n\r\n\u201cThen hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.\r\n\r\nThe four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to windward; one, less distant, to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay by its side all night; and that boat was Ahab\u2019s.\r\n\r\nThe waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale\u2019s spout-hole; and the lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which gently chafed the whale\u2019s broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.\r\n\r\nAhab and all his boat\u2019s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A sound like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.\r\n\r\nStarted from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a flooded world. \u201cI have dreamed it again,\u201d said he.\r\n\r\n\u201cOf the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin can be thine?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd who are hearsed that die on the sea?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in America.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:\u2014a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a sight we shall not soon see.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBelieve it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd what was that saying about thyself?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThough it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd when thou art so gone before\u2014if that ever befall\u2014then ere I can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?\u2014Was it not so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTake another pledge, old man,\u201d said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fire-flies in the gloom\u2014\u201cHemp only can kill thee.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe gallows, ye mean.\u2014I am immortal then, on land and on sea,\u201d cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;\u2014\u201cImmortal on land and on sea!\u201d\r\n\r\nBoth were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the slumbering crew arose from the boat\u2019s bottom, and ere noon the dead whale was brought to the ship.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.\r\n\r\nThe season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab, coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship\u2019s prow for the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon high noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun to determine his latitude.\r\n\r\nNow, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean\u2019s immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God\u2019s throne. Well that Ahab\u2019s quadrant was furnished with coloured glasses, through which to take sight of that solar fire. So, swinging his seated form to the roll of the ship, and with his astrological-looking instrument placed to his eye, he remained in that posture for some moments to catch the precise instant when the sun should gain its precise meridian. Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling beneath him on the ship\u2019s deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab\u2019s, was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly passionlessness. At length the desired observation was taken; and with his pencil upon his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at that precise instant. Then falling into a moment\u2019s revery, he again looked up towards the sun and murmured to himself: \u201cThou sea-mark! thou high and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I am\u2014but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be? Or canst thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living? Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!\u201d\r\n\r\nThen gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: \u201cFoolish toy! babies\u2019 plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man\u2019s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth\u2019s horizon are the glances of man\u2019s eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!\u201d dashing it to the deck, \u201cno longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship\u2019s compass, and the level dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye,\u201d lighting from the boat to the deck, \u201cthus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!\u201d\r\n\r\nAs the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself\u2014these passed over the mute, motionless Parsee\u2019s face. Unobserved he rose and glided away; while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck, shouted out\u2014\u201cTo the braces! Up helm!\u2014square in!\u201d\r\n\r\nIn an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon her long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one sufficient steed.\r\n\r\nStanding between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod\u2019s tumultuous way, and Ahab\u2019s also, as he went lurching along the deck.\r\n\r\n\u201cI have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye,\u201d cried Stubb, \u201cbut sea-coal ashes\u2014mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck\u2014sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab mutter, \u2018Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.\u2019 And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 119. The Candles.\r\n\r\nWarmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.\r\n\r\nTowards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the tempest had left for its after sport.\r\n\r\nHolding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab\u2019s) did not escape. A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship\u2019s high teetering side, stove in the boat\u2019s bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through like a sieve.\r\n\r\n\u201cBad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck,\u201d said Stubb, regarding the wreck, \u201cbut the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can\u2019t fight it. You see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never mind; it\u2019s all in fun: so the old song says;\u201d\u2014(sings.)\r\n\r\n  Oh! jolly is the gale,\r\n  And a joker is the whale,\r\n  A\u2019 flourishin\u2019 his tail,\u2014\r\n  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!\r\n\r\n  The scud all a flyin\u2019,\r\n  That\u2019s his flip only foamin\u2019;\r\n  When he stirs in the spicin\u2019,\u2014\r\n  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!\r\n\r\n  Thunder splits the ships,\r\n  But he only smacks his lips,\r\n  A tastin\u2019 of this flip,\u2014\r\n  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!\r\n\r\n\u201cAvast Stubb,\u201d cried Starbuck, \u201clet the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy peace.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck, there\u2019s no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat. And when that\u2019s done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a wind-up.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMadman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never mind how foolish?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHere!\u201d cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his hand towards the weather bow, \u201cmarkest thou not that the gale comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? the very course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there; where is that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand\u2014his stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if thou must!\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t half understand ye: what\u2019s in the wind?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket,\u201d soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb\u2019s question. \u201cThe gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward\u2014I see it lightens up there; but not with the lightning.\u201d\r\n\r\nAt that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.\r\n\r\n\u201cWho\u2019s there?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOld Thunder!\u201d said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed lances of fire.\r\n\r\nNow, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But as this conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may avoid all contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering not a little with some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the vessel\u2019s way in the water; because of all this, the lower parts of a ship\u2019s lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe rods! the rods!\u201d cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux, to light Ahab to his post. \u201cAre they overboard? drop them over, fore and aft. Quick!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAvast!\u201d cried Ahab; \u201clet\u2019s have fair play here, though we be the weaker side. Yet I\u2019ll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLook aloft!\u201d cried Starbuck. \u201cThe corpusants! the corpusants!\u201d\r\n\r\nAll the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.\r\n\r\n\u201cBlast the boat! let it go!\u201d cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. \u201cBlast it!\u201d\u2014but slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and immediately shifting his tone he cried\u2014\u201cThe corpusants have mercy on us all!\u201d\r\n\r\nTo sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God\u2019s burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His \u201cMene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin\u201d has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.\r\n\r\nWhile this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the preternatural light, Queequeg\u2019s tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his body.\r\n\r\nThe tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It was Stubb. \u201cWhat thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the same in the song.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, no, it wasn\u2019t; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I hope they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces?\u2014have they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck\u2014but it\u2019s too dark to look. Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a\u2019 block with sperm-oil, d\u2019ye see; and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as three spermaceti candles\u2014that\u2019s the good promise we saw.\u201d\r\n\r\nAt that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb\u2019s face slowly beginning to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: \u201cSee! see!\u201d and once more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe corpusants have mercy on us all,\u201d cried Stubb, again.\r\n\r\nAt the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab\u2019s front, but with his head bowed away from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In various enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes upcast.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye, men!\u201d cried Ahab. \u201cLook up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire! So.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen turning\u2014the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e\u2019en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe\u2019er I came; wheresoe\u2019er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there\u2019s that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.\u201d\r\n\r\n[Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his right hand pressed hard upon them.]\r\n\r\n\u201cI own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe boat! the boat!\u201d cried Starbuck, \u201clook at thy boat, old man!\u201d\r\n\r\nAhab\u2019s harpoon, the one forged at Perth\u2019s fire, remained firmly lashed in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat\u2019s bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent\u2019s tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm\u2014\u201cGod, God is against thee, old man; forbear! \u2019tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this.\u201d\r\n\r\nOverhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the braces\u2014though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast mate\u2019s thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope\u2019s end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:\u2014\r\n\r\n\u201cAll your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!\u201d And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.\r\n\r\nAs in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab\u2019s many of the mariners did run from him in a terror of dismay.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.\r\n\r\nAhab standing by the helm. Starbuck approaching him.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working loose and the lee lift is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStrike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I\u2019d sway them up now.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSir!\u2014in God\u2019s name!\u2014sir?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStrike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises, but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it.\u2014By masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some coasting smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft there! I would e\u2019en take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take medicine!\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 121. Midnight.\u2014The Forecastle Bulwarks.\r\n\r\nStubb and Flask mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over the anchors there hanging.\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but you will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how long ago is it since you said the very contrary? Didn\u2019t you once say that whatever ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra on its insurance policy, just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft and boxes of lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn\u2019t you say so?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, suppose I did? What then? I\u2019ve part changed my flesh since that time, why not my mind? Besides, supposing we are loaded with powder barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my little man, you have pretty red hair, but you couldn\u2019t get afire now. Shake yourself; you\u2019re Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat collar. Don\u2019t you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask. But hark, again, and I\u2019ll answer ye the other thing. First take your leg off from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope; now listen. What\u2019s the mighty difference between holding a mast\u2019s lightning-rod in the storm, and standing close by a mast that hasn\u2019t got any lightning-rod at all in a storm? Don\u2019t you see, you timber-head, that no harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the mast is first struck? What are you talking about, then? Not one ship in a hundred carries rods, and Ahab,\u2014aye, man, and all of us,\u2014were in no more danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ten thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why, you King-Post, you, I suppose you would have every man in the world go about with a small lightning-rod running up the corner of his hat, like a militia officer\u2019s skewered feather, and trailing behind like his sash. Why don\u2019t ye be sensible, Flask? it\u2019s easy to be sensible; why don\u2019t ye, then? any man with half an eye can be sensible.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI don\u2019t know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cYes, when a fellow\u2019s soaked through, it\u2019s hard to be sensible, that\u2019s a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; catch the turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down these anchors now as if they were never going to be used again. Tying these two anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man\u2019s hands behind him. And what big generous hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron fists, hey? What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though. There, hammer that knot down, and we\u2019ve done. So; next to touching land, lighting on deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just wring out my jacket skirts, will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs so, Flask; but seems to me, a long tailed coat ought always to be worn in all storms afloat. The tails tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d\u2019ye see. Same with cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I must mount a swallow-tail, and drive down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew! there goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord, Lord, that the winds that come from heaven should be so unmannerly! This is a nasty night, lad.\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.\u2014Thunder and Lightning.\r\n\r\nThe main-top-sail yard.\u2014Tashtego passing new lashings around it.\r\n\r\n\u201cUm, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What\u2019s the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don\u2019t want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 123. The Musket.\r\n\r\nDuring the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod\u2019s jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by its spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached to it\u2014for they were slack\u2014because some play to the tiller was indispensable.\r\n\r\nIn a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the Pequod\u2019s; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.\r\n\r\nSome hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb\u2014one engaged forward and the other aft\u2014the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.\r\n\r\nThe three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through the water with some precision again; and the course\u2014for the present, East-south-east\u2014which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more given to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the ship as near her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo! a good sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze became fair!\r\n\r\nInstantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of \u201cHo! the fair wind! oh-ye-ho, cheerly men!\u201d the crew singing for joy, that so promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents preceding it.\r\n\r\nIn compliance with the standing order of his commander\u2014to report immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change in the affairs of the deck,\u2014Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to the breeze\u2014however reluctantly and gloomily,\u2014than he mechanically went below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.\r\n\r\nEre knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp\u2014taking long swings this way and that\u2014was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man\u2019s bolted door,\u2014a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck\u2019s heart, at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe would have shot me once,\u201d he murmured, \u201cyes, there\u2019s the very musket that he pointed at me;\u2014that one with the studded stock; let me touch it\u2014lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan;\u2014that\u2019s not good. Best spill it?\u2014wait. I\u2019ll cure myself of this. I\u2019ll hold the musket boldly while I think.\u2014I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and doom,\u2014that\u2019s fair for Moby Dick. It\u2019s a fair wind that\u2019s only fair for that accursed fish.\u2014The very tube he pointed at me!\u2014the very one; this one\u2014I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I handle now.\u2014Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship\u2019s company down to doom with him?\u2014Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this instant\u2014put aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there,\u2014in there, he\u2019s sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I can\u2019t withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say\u2019st the men have vow\u2019d thy vow; say\u2019st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!\u2014But is there no other way? no lawful way?\u2014Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man\u2019s living power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would be more hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains? The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between me and law.\u2014Aye, aye, \u2019tis so.\u2014Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?\u2014And would I be a murderer, then, if\u201d\u2014and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket\u2019s end against the door.\r\n\r\n\u201cOn this level, Ahab\u2019s hammock swings within; his head this way. A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.\u2014Oh Mary! Mary!\u2014boy! boy! boy!\u2014But if I wake thee not to death, old man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck\u2019s body this day week may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall I?\u2014The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails are reefed and set; she heads her course.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!\u201d\r\n\r\nSuch were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man\u2019s tormented sleep, as if Starbuck\u2019s voice had caused the long dumb dream to speak.\r\n\r\nThe yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard\u2019s arm against the panel; Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell him. I must see to the deck here. Thou know\u2019st what to say.\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 124. The Needle.\r\n\r\nNext morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod\u2019s gurgling track, pushed her on like giants\u2019 palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.\r\n\r\nLong maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time the tetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye the bright sun\u2019s rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun\u2019s rearward place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating wake.\r\n\r\n\u201cHa, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.\r\n\r\n\u201cEast-sou-east, sir,\u201d said the frightened steersman.\r\n\r\n\u201cThou liest!\u201d smiting him with his clenched fist. \u201cHeading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?\u201d\r\n\r\nUpon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very blinding palpableness must have been the cause.\r\n\r\nThrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.\r\n\r\nBut ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, \u201cI have it! It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night\u2019s thunder turned our compasses\u2014that\u2019s all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye; but never before has it happened to me, sir,\u201d said the pale mate, gloomily.\r\n\r\nHere, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner\u2019s needle, is, as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at, that such things should be. Instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife\u2019s knitting needle. But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.\r\n\r\nDeliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship\u2019s course to be changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair one had only been juggling her.\r\n\r\nMeanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask\u2014who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings\u2014likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab\u2019s.\r\n\r\nFor a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.\r\n\r\n\u201cThou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun\u2019s pilot! yesterday I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck\u2014a lance without a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker\u2019s needles. Quick!\u201d\r\n\r\nAccessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.\r\n\r\n\u201cMen,\u201d said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had demanded, \u201cmy men, the thunder turned old Ahab\u2019s needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any.\u201d\r\n\r\nAbashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow. But Starbuck looked away.\r\n\r\nWith a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through some small strange motions with it\u2014whether indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain\u2014he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass-cards. At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,\u2014\u201cLook ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!\u201d\r\n\r\nOne after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.\r\n\r\nIn his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.\r\n\r\nWhile now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel\u2019s place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form\u2019s sake than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden reel and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and wind had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level log and line. The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots.\r\n\r\n\u201cForward, there! Heave the log!\u201d\r\n\r\nTwo seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. \u201cTake the reel, one of ye, I\u2019ll heave.\u201d\r\n\r\nThey went towards the extreme stern, on the ship\u2019s lee side, where the deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.\r\n\r\nThe Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.\r\n\r\nAhab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to speak.\r\n\r\n\u201cSir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have spoiled it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2019Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee? Thou seem\u2019st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey hairs of mine \u2019tis not worth while disputing, \u2019specially with a superior, who\u2019ll ne\u2019er confess.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s that? There now\u2019s a patched professor in Queen Nature\u2019s granite-founded College; but methinks he\u2019s too subservient. Where wert thou born?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIn the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cExcellent! Thou\u2019st hit the world by that.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI know not, sir, but I was born there.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIn the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it\u2019s good. Here\u2019s a man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man; which is sucked in\u2014by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.\r\n\r\n\u201cHold hard!\u201d\r\n\r\nSnap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging log was gone.\r\n\r\n\u201cI crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line. See to it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere he goes now; to him nothing\u2019s happened; but to me, the skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip\u2019s missing. Let\u2019s see now if ye haven\u2019t fished him up here, fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he\u2019s holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul in no cowards here. Ho! there\u2019s his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off\u2014we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir, sir! here\u2019s Pip, trying to get on board again.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cPeace, thou crazy loon,\u201d cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. \u201cAway from the quarter-deck!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,\u201d muttered Ahab, advancing. \u201cHands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?\r\n\r\n\u201cAstern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art thou, boy?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBell-boy, sir; ship\u2019s-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high\u2014looks cowardly\u2014quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who\u2019s seen Pip the coward?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab\u2019s cabin shall be Pip\u2019s home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let\u2019s down.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat\u2019s this? here\u2019s velvet shark-skin,\u201d intently gazing at Ahab\u2019s hand, and feeling it. \u201cAh, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne\u2019er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor\u2019s!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere go two daft ones now,\u201d muttered the old Manxman. \u201cOne daft with strength, the other daft with weakness. But here\u2019s the end of the rotten line\u2014all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new line altogether. I\u2019ll see Mr. Stubb about it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.\r\n\r\nSteering now south-eastward by Ahab\u2019s levelled steel, and her progress solely determined by Ahab\u2019s level log and line; the Pequod held on her path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.\r\n\r\nAt last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch\u2014then headed by Flask\u2014was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly\u2014like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod\u2019s murdered Innocents\u2014that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman\u2014the oldest mariner of all\u2014declared that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea.\r\n\r\nBelow in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus explained the wonder.\r\n\r\nThose rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men.\r\n\r\nBut the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore; and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard\u2014a cry and a rushing\u2014and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea.\r\n\r\nThe life-buoy\u2014a long slender cask\u2014was dropped from the stern, where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.\r\n\r\nAnd thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the White Whale, on the White Whale\u2019s own peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they had heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.\r\n\r\nThe lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be; therefore, they were going to leave the ship\u2019s stern unprovided with a buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint concerning his coffin.\r\n\r\n\u201cA life-buoy of a coffin!\u201d cried Starbuck, starting.\r\n\r\n\u201cRather queer, that, I should say,\u201d said Stubb.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt will make a good enough one,\u201d said Flask, \u201cthe carpenter here can arrange it easily.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBring it up; there\u2019s nothing else for it,\u201d said Starbuck, after a melancholy pause. \u201cRig it, carpenter; do not look at me so\u2014the coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd shall I nail down the lid, sir?\u201d moving his hand as with a hammer.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd shall I caulk the seams, sir?\u201d moving his hand as with a caulking-iron.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?\u201d moving his hand as with a pitch-pot.\r\n\r\n\u201cAway! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and no more.\u2014Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks. Now I don\u2019t like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he won\u2019t put his head into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin? And now I\u2019m ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It\u2019s like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side now. I don\u2019t like this cobbling sort of business\u2014I don\u2019t like it at all; it\u2019s undignified; it\u2019s not my place. Let tinkers\u2019 brats do tinkerings; we are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean, virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler\u2019s job, that\u2019s at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end. It\u2019s the old woman\u2019s tricks to be giving cobbling jobs. Lord! what an affection all old women have for tinkers. I know an old woman of sixty-five who ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once. And that\u2019s the reason I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore, when I kept my job-shop in the Vineyard; they might have taken it into their lonely old heads to run off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps. Let me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over the same with pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with the snap-spring over the ship\u2019s stern. Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere they would do the job. But I\u2019m made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I don\u2019t budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing about with a grave-yard tray! But never mind. We workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling, and then we stash it if we can. Hem! I\u2019ll do the job, now, tenderly. I\u2019ll have me\u2014let\u2019s see\u2014how many in the ship\u2019s company, all told? But I\u2019ve forgotten. Any way, I\u2019ll have me thirty separate, Turk\u2019s-headed life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round to the coffin. Then, if the hull go down, there\u2019ll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer, caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let\u2019s to it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 127. The Deck.\r\n\r\nThe coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between the vice-bench and the open hatchway; the Carpenter caulking its seams; the string of twisted oakum slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of his frock.\u2014Ahab comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip following him.\r\n\r\n\u201cBack, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand complies with my humor more genially than that boy.\u2014Middle aisle of a church! What\u2019s here?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLife-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck\u2019s orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the hatchway!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cArt not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they\u2019ve set me now to turning it into something else.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling, monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a jack-of-all-trades.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin? The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand. Dost thou never?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I\u2019m indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is full of it. Hark to it.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, and that\u2019s because the lid there\u2019s a sounding-board; and what in all things makes the sounding-board is this\u2014there\u2019s naught beneath. And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter. Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against the churchyard gate, going in?\r\n\r\n\u201cFaith, sir, I\u2019ve\u2014\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFaith? What\u2019s that?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy, faith, sir, it\u2019s only a sort of exclamation-like\u2014that\u2019s all, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cUm, um; go on.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI was about to say, sir, that\u2014\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cArt thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look at thy bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes. I\u2019ve heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He\u2019s always under the Line\u2014fiery hot, I tell ye! He\u2019s looking this way\u2014come, oakum; quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, and I\u2019m the professor of musical glasses\u2014tap, tap!\u201d\r\n\r\n(Ahab to himself.)\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s a sight! There\u2019s a sound! The greyheaded woodpecker tapping the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man\u2019s seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now\u2019s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I\u2019ll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return again. Now, then, Pip, we\u2019ll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.\r\n\r\nNext day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the time the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from the smitten hull.\r\n\r\n\u201cBad news; she brings bad news,\u201d muttered the old Manxman. But ere her commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he could hopefully hail, Ahab\u2019s voice was heard.\r\n\r\n\u201cHast seen the White Whale?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?\u201d\r\n\r\nThrottling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question; and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain himself, having stopped his vessel\u2019s way, was seen descending her side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod\u2019s main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was recognised by Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation was exchanged.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhere was he?\u2014not killed!\u2014not killed!\u201d cried Ahab, closely advancing. \u201cHow was it?\u201d\r\n\r\nIt seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while three of the stranger\u2019s boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, which had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and while they were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat\u2014a reserved one\u2014had been instantly lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth boat\u2014the swiftest keeled of all\u2014seemed to have succeeded in fastening\u2014at least, as well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it. In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam of bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it was concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as often happens. There was some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet. The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced to pick up her three far to windward boats\u2014ere going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction\u2014the ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded all sail\u2014stunsail on stunsail\u2014after the missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out. But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the absent ones when last seen; though she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull all around her; and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued doing till daylight; yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.\r\n\r\nThe story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.\r\n\r\n\u201cI will wager something now,\u201d whispered Stubb to Flask, \u201cthat some one in that missing boat wore off that Captain\u2019s best coat; mayhap, his watch\u2014he\u2019s so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season? See, Flask, only see how pale he looks\u2014pale in the very buttons of his eyes\u2014look\u2014it wasn\u2019t the coat\u2014it must have been the\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy boy, my own boy is among them. For God\u2019s sake\u2014I beg, I conjure\u201d\u2014here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far had but icily received his petition. \u201cFor eight-and-forty hours let me charter your ship\u2014I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it\u2014if there be no other way\u2014for eight-and-forty hours only\u2014only that\u2014you must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHis son!\u201d cried Stubb, \u201coh, it\u2019s his son he\u2019s lost! I take back the coat and watch\u2014what says Ahab? We must save that boy.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe\u2019s drowned with the rest on \u2019em, last night,\u201d said the old Manx sailor standing behind them; \u201cI heard; all of ye heard their spirits.\u201d\r\n\r\nNow, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel\u2019s the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the Captain\u2019s sons among the number of the missing boat\u2019s crew; but among the number of the other boat\u2019s crews, at the same time, but on the other hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase, there had been still another son; as that for a time, the wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity; which was only solved for him by his chief mate\u2019s instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure of a whale-ship in such emergencies, that is, when placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the majority first. But the captain, for some unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by Ahab\u2019s iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer\u2019s paternal love, had thus early sought to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race. Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years\u2019 voyage in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman\u2019s career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a father\u2019s natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.\r\n\r\nMeantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab; and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.\r\n\r\n\u201cI will not go,\u201d said the stranger, \u201ctill you say aye to me. Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case. For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab\u2014though but a child, and nestling safely at home now\u2014a child of your old age too\u2014Yes, yes, you relent; I see it\u2014run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAvast,\u201d cried Ahab\u2014\u201ctouch not a rope-yarn\u201d; then in a voice that prolongingly moulded every word\u2014\u201cCaptain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.\u201d\r\n\r\nHurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship.\r\n\r\nSoon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot, however small, on the sea. This way and that her yards were swung round; starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat against a head sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the while, her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.\r\n\r\nBut by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 129. The Cabin.\r\n\r\n(Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow.)\r\n\r\n\u201cLad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNo, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man!\u2014and a black! and crazy!\u2014but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin. But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with ye.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIf thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab\u2019s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh good master, master, master!\r\n\r\n\u201cWeep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad. Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!\u2014Met! True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that,\u2014God for ever save thee, let what will befall.\u201d\r\n\r\n(Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward.)\r\n\r\n\u201cHere he this instant stood; I stand in his air,\u2014but I\u2019m alone. Now were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he\u2019s missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding! Who\u2019s seen Pip? He must be up here; let\u2019s try the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there\u2019s no opening it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I\u2019ll seat me, against the transom, in the ship\u2019s full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me. Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of captains and lieutenants. Ha! what\u2019s this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy\u2019s host to white men with gold lace upon their coats!\u2014Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?\u2014a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat once;\u2014seen him? No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and let\u2019s drink shame upon all cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards.\u2014Hist! above there, I hear ivory\u2014Oh, master! master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I\u2019ll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me.\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 130. The Hat.\r\n\r\nAnd now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab,\u2014all other whaling waters swept\u2014seemed to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick;\u2014and now that all his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man\u2019s eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months\u2019 night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab\u2019s purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf.\r\n\r\nIn this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab\u2019s iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old man\u2019s despot eye was on them.\r\n\r\nBut did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that even as Ahab\u2019s eyes so awed the crew\u2019s, the inscrutable Parsee\u2019s glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it. Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen being\u2019s body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did plainly say\u2014We two watchmen never rest.\r\n\r\nNor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,\u2014the main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,\u2014his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next day\u2019s sunshine dried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.\r\n\r\nHe ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,\u2014breakfast and dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee\u2019s mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these two never seemed to speak\u2014one man to the other\u2014unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance.\r\n\r\nAnd yet, somehow, did Ahab\u2014in his own proper self, as daily, hourly, and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,\u2014Ahab seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab.\r\n\r\nAt the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft,\u2014\u201cMan the mast-heads!\u201d\u2014and all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking of the helmsman\u2019s bell, was heard\u2014\u201cWhat d\u2019ye see?\u2014sharp! sharp!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac old man seemed distrustful of his crew\u2019s fidelity; at least, of nearly all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.\r\n\r\n\u201cI will have the first sight of the whale myself,\u201d\u2014he said. \u201cAye! Ahab must have the doubloon!\u201d and with his own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block, to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of the downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done, with that end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,\u2014\u201cTake the rope, sir\u2014I give it into thy hands, Starbuck.\u201d Then arranging his person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles,\u2014ahead, astern, this side, and that,\u2014within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height.\r\n\r\nWhen in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in such a wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the sea. So Ahab\u2019s proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest degree approaching to decision\u2014one of those too, whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat;\u2014it was strange, that this was the very man he should select for his watchman; freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person\u2019s hands.\r\n\r\nNow, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round his head.\r\n\r\nBut with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight.\r\n\r\n\u201cYour hat, your hat, sir!\u201d suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing them.\r\n\r\nBut already the sable wing was before the old man\u2019s eyes; the long hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize.\r\n\r\nAn eagle flew thrice round Tarquin\u2019s head, removing his cap to replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab\u2019s hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.\r\n\r\nThe intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.\r\n\r\nUpon the stranger\u2019s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.\r\n\r\n\u201cHast seen the White Whale?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLook!\u201d replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.\r\n\r\n\u201cHast killed him?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that,\u201d answered the other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot forged!\u201d and snatching Perth\u2019s levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming\u2014\u201cLook ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThen God keep thee, old man\u2014see\u2019st thou that\u201d\u2014pointing to the hammock\u2014\u201cI bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb.\u201d Then turning to his crew\u2014\u201cAre ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and lift the body; so, then\u2014Oh! God\u201d\u2014advancing towards the hammock with uplifted hands\u2014\u201cmay the resurrection and the life\u2014\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBrace forward! Up helm!\u201d cried Ahab like lightning to his men.\r\n\r\nBut the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.\r\n\r\nAs Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy hanging at the Pequod\u2019s stern came into conspicuous relief.\r\n\r\n\u201cHa! yonder! look yonder, men!\u201d cried a foreboding voice in her wake. \u201cIn vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 132. The Symphony.\r\n\r\nIt was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman\u2019s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson\u2019s chest in his sleep.\r\n\r\nHither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.\r\n\r\nBut though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them.\r\n\r\nAloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion\u2014most seen here at the equator\u2014denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.\r\n\r\nTied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl\u2019s forehead of heaven.\r\n\r\nOh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab\u2019s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.\r\n\r\nSlowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel\u2014forbidding\u2014now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.\r\n\r\nStarbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.\r\n\r\nAhab turned.\r\n\r\n\u201cStarbuck!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day\u2014very much such a sweetness as this\u2014I struck my first whale\u2014a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty\u2014forty\u2014forty years ago!\u2014ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain\u2019s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without\u2014oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!\u2014when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before\u2014and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare\u2014fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil!\u2014when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world\u2019s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts\u2014away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow\u2014wife? wife?\u2014rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey\u2014more a demon than a man!\u2014aye, aye! what a forty years\u2019 fool\u2014fool\u2014old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!\u2014crack my heart!\u2014stave my brain!\u2014mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!\u2014lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck\u2019s\u2014wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!\u2014this instant let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey have, they have. I have seen them\u2014some summer days in the morning. About this time\u2014yes, it is his noon nap now\u2014the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201c\u2019Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father\u2019s sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy\u2019s face from the window! the boy\u2019s hand on the hill!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut Ahab\u2019s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who\u2019s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year\u2019s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths\u2014Starbuck!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut blanched to a corpse\u2019s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.\r\n\r\nAhab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 133. The Chase\u2014First Day.\r\n\r\nThat night, in the mid-watch, when the old man\u2014as his wont at intervals\u2014stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship\u2019s dog will, in drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship\u2019s course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be shortened.\r\n\r\nThe acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.\r\n\r\n\u201cMan the mast-heads! Call all hands!\u201d\r\n\r\nThundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear with their clothes in their hands.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat d\u2019ye see?\u201d cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.\r\n\r\n\u201cNothing, nothing sir!\u201d was the sound hailing down in reply.\r\n\r\n\u201cT\u2019gallant sails!\u2014stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!\u201d\r\n\r\nAll sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the air. \u201cThere she blows!\u2014there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!\u201d\r\n\r\nFired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian\u2019s head was almost on a level with Ahab\u2019s heel. From this height the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd did none of ye see it before?\u201d cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all around him.\r\n\r\n\u201cI saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried out,\u201d said Tashtego.\r\n\r\n\u201cNot the same instant; not the same\u2014no, the doubloon is mine, Fate reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the White Whale first. There she blows!\u2014there she blows!\u2014there she blows! There again!\u2014there again!\u201d he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale\u2019s visible jets. \u201cHe\u2019s going to sound! In stunsails! Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,\u2014quick, quicker!\u201d and he slid through the air to the deck.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe is heading straight to leeward, sir,\u201d cried Stubb, \u201cright away from us; cannot have seen the ship yet.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBe dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!\u2014brace up! Shiver her!\u2014shiver her!\u2014So; well that! Boats, boats!\u201d\r\n\r\nSoon all the boats but Starbuck\u2019s were dropped; all the boat-sails set\u2014all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up Fedallah\u2019s sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.\r\n\r\nLike noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side. But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale\u2019s back; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons.\r\n\r\nA gentle joyousness\u2014a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.\r\n\r\nOn each soft side\u2014coincident with the parted swell, that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away\u2014on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way thou may\u2019st have bejuggled and destroyed before.\r\n\r\nAnd thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia\u2019s Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool that he left.\r\n\r\nWith oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick\u2019s reappearance.\r\n\r\n\u201cAn hour,\u201d said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat\u2019s stern; and he gazed beyond the whale\u2019s place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze now freshened; the sea began to swell.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe birds!\u2014the birds!\u201d cried Tashtego.\r\n\r\nIn long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now all flying towards Ahab\u2019s boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous, expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man\u2019s; Ahab could discover no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick\u2019s open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and seizing Perth\u2019s harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and stand by to stern.\r\n\r\nNow, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis, its bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale\u2019s head while yet under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat.\r\n\r\nThrough and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab\u2019s head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other\u2019s heads to gain the uttermost stern.\r\n\r\nAnd now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them across.\r\n\r\nAt that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first to perceive the whale\u2019s intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only slipping further into the whale\u2019s mouth, and tilting over sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea.\r\n\r\nRipplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose\u2014some twenty or more feet out of the water\u2014the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray still higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap its summit with their scud.\r\n\r\n*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively view whatever objects may be encircling him.\r\n\r\nBut soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus\u2019s elephants in the book of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale\u2019s insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,\u2014though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab\u2019s head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst. From the boat\u2019s fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale\u2019s aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge of the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old man\u2019s head.\r\n\r\nMeantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship\u2019s mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene; and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!\u2014\u201cSail on the\u201d\u2014but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering crest, he shouted,\u2014\u201cSail on the whale!\u2014Drive him off!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe Pequod\u2019s prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam off, the boats flew to the rescue.\r\n\r\nDragged into Stubb\u2019s boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab\u2019s bodily strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body\u2019s doom: for a time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb\u2019s boat, like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.\r\n\r\nBut this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more abbreviate it. In an instant\u2019s compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men\u2019s whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe harpoon,\u201d said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one bended arm\u2014\u201cis it safe?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it,\u201d said Stubb, showing it.\r\n\r\n\u201cLay it before me;\u2014any missing men?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOne, two, three, four, five;\u2014there were five oars, sir, and here are five men.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s good.\u2014Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there! there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!\u2014Hands off from me! The eternal sap runs up in Ahab\u2019s bones again! Set the sail; out oars; the helm!\u201d\r\n\r\nIt is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up to their cranes\u2014the two parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her\u2014and then hoisting everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At the well known, methodic intervals, the whale\u2019s glittering spout was regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the allotted hour expired, his voice was heard.\u2014\u201cWhose is the doubloon now? D\u2019ye see him?\u201d and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded them to lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.\r\n\r\nAs he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft, or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still greater breadth\u2014thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern. At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old man\u2019s face there now stole some such added gloom as this.\r\n\r\nStubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in his Captain\u2019s mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed\u2014\u201cThe thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, sir,\u201d said Starbuck drawing near, \u201c\u2019tis a solemn sight; an omen, and an ill one.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOmen? omen?\u2014the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives\u2019 darkling hint.\u2014Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold\u2014I shiver!\u2014How now? Aloft there! D\u2019ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling. Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.\r\n\r\n\u201cCan\u2019t see the spout now, sir;\u2014too dark\u201d\u2014cried a voice from the air.\r\n\r\n\u201cHow heading when last seen?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAs before, sir,\u2014straight to leeward.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGood! he will travel slower now \u2019tis night. Down royals and top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before morning; he\u2019s making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! keep her full before the wind!\u2014Aloft! come down!\u2014Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning.\u201d\u2014Then advancing towards the doubloon in the main-mast\u2014\u201cMen, this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that man\u2019s; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away now!\u2014the deck is thine, sir!\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rousing himself to see how the night wore on.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 134. The Chase\u2014Second Day.\r\n\r\nAt day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.\r\n\r\n\u201cD\u2019ye see him?\u201d cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light to spread.\r\n\r\n\u201cSee nothing, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTurn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought for;\u2014the top-gallant sails!\u2014aye, they should have been kept on her all night. But no matter\u2014\u2019tis but resting for the rush.\u201d\r\n\r\nHere be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale, continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable rate of progression during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature\u2019s future wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the pilot\u2019s coast is to him. So that to this hunter\u2019s wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby\u2019s pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman\u2019s allies; for of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port? Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales.\r\n\r\nThe ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level field.\r\n\r\n\u201cBy salt and hemp!\u201d cried Stubb, \u201cbut this swift motion of the deck creeps up one\u2019s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two brave fellows!\u2014Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise, on the sea,\u2014for by live-oaks! my spine\u2019s a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThere she blows\u2014she blows!\u2014she blows!\u2014right ahead!\u201d was now the mast-head cry.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye!\u201d cried Stubb, \u201cI knew it\u2014ye can\u2019t escape\u2014blow on and split your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump\u2014blister your lungs!\u2014Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream!\u201d\r\n\r\nAnd Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the past night\u2019s suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.\r\n\r\nThey were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things\u2014oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp\u2014yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man\u2019s valor, that man\u2019s fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.\r\n\r\nThe rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!\r\n\r\n\u201cWhy sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?\u201d cried Ahab, when, after the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard. \u201cSway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet that way, and then disappears.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as\u2014much nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead\u2014Moby Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere she breaches! there she breaches!\u201d was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!\u201d cried Ahab, \u201cthy hour and thy harpoon are at hand!\u2014Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore. The boats!\u2014stand by!\u201d\r\n\r\nUnmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from his perch.\r\n\r\n\u201cLower away,\u201d he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat\u2014a spare one, rigged the afternoon previous. \u201cMr. Starbuck, the ship is thine\u2014keep away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!\u201d\r\n\r\nAs if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the three crews. Ahab\u2019s boat was central; and cheering his men, he told them he would take the whale head-and-head,\u2014that is, pull straight up to his forehead,\u2014a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit, such a course excludes the coming onset from the whale\u2019s sidelong vision. But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all three boats were plain as the ship\u2019s three masts to his eye; the White Whale churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which those boats were made. But skilfully man\u0153uvred, incessantly wheeling like trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while eluded him; though, at times, but by a plank\u2019s breadth; while all the time, Ahab\u2019s unearthly slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds.\r\n\r\nBut at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves, warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now for a moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more line: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again\u2014hoping that way to disencumber it of some snarls\u2014when lo!\u2014a sight more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks!\r\n\r\nCaught and twisted\u2014corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab\u2019s boat. Only one thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically reached within\u2014through\u2014and then, without\u2014the rays of steel; dragged in the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then, twice sundering the rope near the chocks\u2014dropped the intercepted fagot of steel into the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the White Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.\r\n\r\nWhile the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old man\u2019s line\u2014now parting\u2014admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could;\u2014in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils,\u2014Ahab\u2019s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires,\u2014as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell again\u2014gunwale downwards\u2014and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it, like seals from a sea-side cave.\r\n\r\nThe first uprising momentum of the whale\u2014modifying its direction as he struck the surface\u2014involuntarily launched him along it, to a little distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and with his back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes from side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward way at a traveller\u2019s methodic pace.\r\n\r\nAs before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at, and safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were there; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. As with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to his boat\u2019s broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor did it so exhaust him as the previous day\u2019s mishap.\r\n\r\nBut when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye, Starbuck, \u2019tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe ferrule has not stood, sir,\u201d said the carpenter, now coming up; \u201cI put good work into that leg.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut no bones broken, sir, I hope,\u201d said Stubb with true concern.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!\u2014d\u2019ye see it.\u2014But even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that\u2019s lost. Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape yonder roof?\u2014Aloft there! which way?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cDead to leeward, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cUp helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of the spare boats and rig them\u2014Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat\u2019s crews.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLet me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSir?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane\u2014there, that shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By heaven it cannot be!\u2014missing?\u2014quick! call them all.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe old man\u2019s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the Parsee was not there.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Parsee!\u201d cried Stubb\u2014\u201che must have been caught in\u2014\u2014\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe black vomit wrench thee!\u2014run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle\u2014find him\u2014not gone\u2014not gone!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was nowhere to be found.\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, sir,\u201d said Stubb\u2014\u201ccaught among the tangles of your line\u2014I thought I saw him dragging under.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cMy line! my line? Gone?\u2014gone? What means that little word?\u2014What death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry. The harpoon, too!\u2014toss over the litter there,\u2014d\u2019ye see it?\u2014the forged iron, men, the white whale\u2019s\u2014no, no, no,\u2014blistered fool! this hand did dart it!\u2014\u2019tis in the fish!\u2014Aloft there! Keep him nailed\u2014Quick!\u2014all hands to the rigging of the boats\u2014collect the oars\u2014harpooneers! the irons, the irons!\u2014hoist the royals higher\u2014a pull on all the sheets!\u2014helm there! steady, steady for your life! I\u2019ll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I\u2019ll slay him yet!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cGreat God! but for one single instant show thyself,\u201d cried Starbuck; \u201cnever, never wilt thou capture him, old man\u2014In Jesus\u2019 name no more of this, that\u2019s worse than devil\u2019s madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone\u2014all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:\u2014what more wouldst thou have?\u2014Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,\u2014Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStarbuck, of late I\u2019ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw\u2014thou know\u2019st what, in one another\u2019s eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand\u2014a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act\u2019s immutably decreed. \u2019Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates\u2019 lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.\u2014Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. \u2019Tis Ahab\u2014his body\u2019s part; but Ahab\u2019s soul\u2019s a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, ye\u2019ll hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that Ahab\u2019s hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick\u2014two days he\u2019s floated\u2014tomorrow will be the third. Aye, men, he\u2019ll rise once more,\u2014but only to spout his last! D\u2019ye feel brave men, brave?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAs fearless fire,\u201d cried Stubb.\r\n\r\n\u201cAnd as mechanical,\u201d muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he muttered on: \u201cThe things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek to drive out of others\u2019 hearts what\u2019s clinched so fast in mine!\u2014The Parsee\u2014the Parsee!\u2014gone, gone? and he was to go before:\u2014but still was to be seen again ere I could perish\u2014How\u2019s that?\u2014There\u2019s a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the whole line of judges:\u2014like a hawk\u2019s beak it pecks my brain. I\u2019ll, I\u2019ll solve it, though!\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.\r\n\r\nSo once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as on the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of Ahab\u2019s wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while still as on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle; his hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat due eastward for the earliest sun.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCHAPTER 135. The Chase.\u2014Third Day.\r\n\r\nThe morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.\r\n\r\n\u201cD\u2019ye see him?\u201d cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.\r\n\r\n\u201cIn his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that\u2019s all. Helm there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here\u2019s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that\u2019s tingling enough for mortal man! to think\u2019s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I\u2019ve sometimes thought my brain was very calm\u2014frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it\u2019s like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!\u2014it\u2019s tainted. Were I the wind, I\u2019d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I\u2019d crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, \u2019tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing\u2014a nobler thing than that. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There\u2019s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there\u2019s something all glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them\u2014something so unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft there! What d\u2019ye see?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNothing, sir.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cNothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun! Aye, aye, it must be so. I\u2019ve oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he\u2019s chasing me now; not I, him\u2014that\u2019s bad; I might have known it, too. Fool! the lines\u2014the harpoons he\u2019s towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by last night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular look outs! Man the braces!\u201d\r\n\r\nSteering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod\u2019s quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own white wake.\r\n\r\n\u201cAgainst the wind he now steers for the open jaw,\u201d murmured Starbuck to himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. \u201cGod keep us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStand by to sway me up!\u201d cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket. \u201cWe should meet him soon.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, aye, sir,\u201d and straightway Starbuck did Ahab\u2019s bidding, and once more Ahab swung on high.\r\n\r\nA whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it.\r\n\r\n\u201cForehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck there!\u2014brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind\u2019s eye. He\u2019s too far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there\u2019s time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The same!\u2014the same!\u2014the same to Noah as to me. There\u2019s a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead somewhere\u2014to something else than common land, more palmy than the palms. Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward, then; the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old mast-head! What\u2019s this?\u2014green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks. No such green weather stains on Ahab\u2019s head! There\u2019s the difference now between man\u2019s old age and matter\u2019s. But aye, old mast, we both grow old together; sound in our hulls, though, are we not, my ship? Aye, minus a leg, that\u2019s all. By heaven this dead wood has the better of my live flesh every way. I can\u2019t compare with it; and I\u2019ve known some ships made of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers. What\u2019s that he said? he should still go before me, my pilot; and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless stairs? and all night I\u2019ve been sailing from him, wherever he did sink to. Aye, aye, like many more thou told\u2019st direful truth as touching thyself, O Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head\u2014keep a good eye upon the whale, the while I\u2019m gone. We\u2019ll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail.\u201d\r\n\r\nHe gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through the cloven blue air to the deck.\r\n\r\nIn due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop\u2019s stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the mate,\u2014who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck\u2014and bade him pause.\r\n\r\n\u201cStarbuck!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSir?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cFor the third time my soul\u2019s ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cAye, sir, thou wilt have it so.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSome ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cTruth, sir: saddest truth.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cSome men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;\u2014and I feel now like a billow that\u2019s all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;\u2014shake hands with me, man.\u201d\r\n\r\nTheir hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck\u2019s tears the glue.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, my captain, my captain!\u2014noble heart\u2014go not\u2014go not!\u2014see, it\u2019s a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cLower away!\u201d\u2014cried Ahab, tossing the mate\u2019s arm from him. \u201cStand by the crew!\u201d\r\n\r\nIn an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe sharks! the sharks!\u201d cried a voice from the low cabin-window there; \u201cO master, my master, come back!\u201d\r\n\r\nBut Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the boat leaped on.\r\n\r\nYet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching regiments in the east. But these were the first sharks that had been observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first descried; and whether it was that Ahab\u2019s crew were all such tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the sharks\u2014a matter sometimes well known to affect them,\u2014however it was, they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others.\r\n\r\n\u201cHeart of wrought steel!\u201d murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and following with his eyes the receding boat\u2014\u201ccanst thou yet ring boldly to that sight?\u2014lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical third day?\u2014For when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thing\u2014be that end what it may. Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant,\u2014fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between\u2014Is my journey\u2019s end coming? My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,\u2014beats it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!\u2014stave it off\u2014move, move! speak aloud!\u2014Mast-head there! See ye my boy\u2019s hand on the hill?\u2014Crazed;\u2014aloft there!\u2014keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:\u2014mark well the whale!\u2014Ho! again!\u2014drive off that hawk! see! he pecks\u2014he tears the vane\u201d\u2014pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck\u2014\u201cHa! he soars away with it!\u2014Where\u2019s the old man now? see\u2019st thou that sight, oh Ahab!\u2014shudder, shudder!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads\u2014a downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the opposing bow.\r\n\r\n\u201cDrive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no hearse can be mine:\u2014and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!\u201d\r\n\r\nSuddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.\r\n\r\n\u201cGive way!\u201d cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday\u2019s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates\u2019 boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab\u2019s almost without a scar.\r\n\r\nWhile Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish\u2019s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.\r\n\r\nThe harpoon dropped from his hand.\r\n\r\n\u201cBefooled, befooled!\u201d\u2014drawing in a long lean breath\u2014\u201cAye, Parsee! I see thee again.\u2014Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die\u2014Down, men! the first thing that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.\u2014Where\u2019s the whale? gone down again?\u201d\r\n\r\nBut he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,\u2014which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.\r\n\r\n\u201cOh! Ahab,\u201d cried Starbuck, \u201cnot too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!\u201d\r\n\r\nSetting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck\u2019s face as he leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them. One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped, he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking that the vane or flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast.\r\n\r\nWhether fagged by the three days\u2019 running chase, and the resistance to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White Whale\u2019s way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him once more; though indeed the whale\u2019s last start had not been so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost every dip.\r\n\r\n\u201cHeed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on! \u2019tis the better rest, the shark\u2019s jaw than the yielding water.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cBut at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey will last long enough! pull on!\u2014But who can tell\u201d\u2014he muttered\u2014\u201cwhether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on Ahab?\u2014But pull on! Aye, all alive, now\u2014we near him. The helm! take the helm! let me pass,\u201d\u2014and so saying two of the oarsmen helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.\r\n\r\nAt length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with the White Whale\u2019s flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance\u2014as the whale sometimes will\u2014and Ahab was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale\u2019s spout, curled round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen\u2014who foreknew not the precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects\u2014these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.\r\n\r\nAlmost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!\u2014\u2019tis whole again; oars! oars! Burst in upon him!\u201d\r\n\r\nHearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it\u2014it may be\u2014a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.\r\n\r\nAhab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. \u201cI grow blind; hands! stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is\u2019t night?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe whale! The ship!\u201d cried the cringing oarsmen.\r\n\r\n\u201cOars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! I see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?\u201d\r\n\r\nBut as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water.\r\n\r\nMeantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego\u2019s mast-head hammer remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon as he.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman\u2019s fainting fit. Up helm, I say\u2014ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cStand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb\u2019s own unwinking eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but there\u2019ll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though;\u2014cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cCherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor mother\u2019s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will now come to her, for the voyage is up.\u201d\r\n\r\nFrom the ship\u2019s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship\u2019s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe ship! The hearse!\u2014the second hearse!\u201d cried Ahab from the boat; \u201cits wood could only be American!\u201d\r\n\r\nDiving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab\u2019s boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent.\r\n\r\n\u201cI turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,\u2014death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell\u2019s heart I stab at thee; for hate\u2019s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!\u201d\r\n\r\nThe harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;\u2014ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope\u2019s final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.\r\n\r\nFor an instant, the tranced boat\u2019s crew stood still; then turned. \u201cThe ship? Great God, where is the ship?\u201d Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.\r\n\r\nBut as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;\u2014at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.\r\n\r\nNow small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nEpilogue\r\n\u201cAND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE\u201d Job.\r\n\r\nThe drama\u2019s done. Why then here does any one step forth?\u2014Because one did survive the wreck.\r\n\r\nIt so chanced, that after the Parsee\u2019s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab\u2019s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.\r\n*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR, THE WHALE ***\r\nUpdated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed.\r\nCreating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. 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