Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.

 

[Old Thunder]

But what thinks Lazarus?

 

[Old Thunder]

Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights?

 

[Old Thunder]

Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here?

 

[Old Thunder]

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?

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

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

 

[Old Thunder]

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

 

[Old Thunder]

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.