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"But avast," he added, tapping his forehead, "you haint no objections to sharing a harpooner's blanket, have ye? I s'pose you are goin' a-whalin', so you'd better get used to that sort of thing."

I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full -- not a bed unoccupied.

Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander.* *Usually scrimshaw; scenes drawn on or objects carved from whale teeth or bone.

Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the fully glass -- the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp for a shilling.

Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets.

Though true cylinders without -- within, the villainous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom.

Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison.

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. *Prophet...

Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive beneath it.

Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den -- the bar -- a rude attempt at a right whale's head.

On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass-cases, filled with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks.

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's cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously.

Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way -- cut through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with fireplaces all round -- you enter the public room.

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.

And that harpoon -- so like a corkscrew now -- was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco.

With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset.

Some were stories weapons.

Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed.

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.

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.