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Presently a rioting noise was heard without.

Supper 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.

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.

I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this "dark complexioned" harpooner.

"He'll be here afore long," was the answer.

"The devil he does," says I. "Where is that harpooner? Is he here?"

"Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the harpooner is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don't -- he eats nothing but steaks, and likes 'em rare."

"Landlord," I whispered, "that ain't the harpooner, is it?"

"My boy," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty."

One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner.

But the fare was of the most substantial kind -- not only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper!

We were fain to button up our monkey-jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers.

Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet.

It was cold as Iceland -- no fire at all -- the landlord said he couldn't afford it.

At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room.

He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn't make much headway, I thought.

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.

I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery.* *Southern tip of Manhattan in New York City.

"I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper? -- you want supper? Supper'll be ready directly."

I 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 harpooner might be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooner was not decidedly objectionable, why, rather than wander further about a strange...