Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

I am no coward, but what to make of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension.

 

[Old Thunder]

Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night.

 

[Old Thunder]

In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.

 

[Old Thunder]

Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his chest and arms.

 

[Old Thunder]

As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt.

 

[Old Thunder]

Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms.

 

[Old Thunder]

It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country.

 

[Old Thunder]

I quaked to think of it.

 

[Old Thunder]

A pedlar of heads too -- perhaps the heads of his own brothers.

 

[Old Thunder]

He might take a fancy to mine -- heavens! look at that tomahawk!