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"Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right. There's Mrs. Hussey."

"Get along with ye," said she to the man, "or I'll be combing ye!"

I 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.

Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?

A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too!

It's ominous, thinks I.

A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, two or them, one for Queequeg, and one for me.

Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving.

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.

Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by *****' ears, swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an old doorway.

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.

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...

In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at the Try Pots.

The landlord of the Spouter-In 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. *The hotel is...

CHAPTER XV. Chowder. It 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.

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.

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.

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.

There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.

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.