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The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears.

The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundering 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.

In fact, the artist's 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.

But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

That once found out, and all the rest were plain.

But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst.

Ever and anon a bright, but, alas! deceptive idea would dart you through. -- It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. -- It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. -- It's a blasted heath. -- It's a Hyperborean winter scene. -- It's the breaking-up of the ice bound stream of Time.

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.

A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.

But 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.

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.

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.

On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights 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...

CHAPTER III. The Spouter-Inn. Entering 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.

Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of place this "Spouter" may be.

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come.

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.

Now, 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.* *Also called the Spice Islands; in the Malay Archipelago.

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?

Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here?