Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.

 

[Old Thunder]

Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of "The Trap!"

 

[Old Thunder]

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of out-hanging 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 -- "The Spouter-Inn: -- Peter Coffin."

 

[Old Thunder]

Coffin? -- Spouter?

 

[Old Thunder]

Rather ominous in that particular connection, thought I.

 

[Old Thunder]

But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there.

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

It was a queer sort of place -- a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly.

Are we going to include the chapters on the whaling industry? I know my friend read a version that omitted those.

I forgot to respond to this; I said we're doing the whole thing - so we're doin' the whole thing. I have the Barnes & Nobles Classics edition BTW, hence I'm also including the endnotes and footnotes alongside the text itself.

 

[Old Thunder]

It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft.