Moby Dick

[fuzzygobo]

Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.

When they reached Sag Harbor, was Billy Joel the welcoming committee? 8)

 

[Old Thunder]

CHAPTER XIII.
Wheelbarrow.​

Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber, for a block,* I settled my own and comrade's bill; using, however, my comrade's money.

*Stand to hold a wig.

 

[Old Thunder]

The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg - especially as Peter Coffin's cock-and-bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person whom I now companied with.

 

[Old Thunder]

We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to the "Moss", the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf.

 

[Old Thunder]

As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much - for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets, - but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms.

 

[Old Thunder]

But we heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs.

 

[Old Thunder]

I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons.

 

[Old Thunder]

To this, in substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales.

 

[Old Thunder]

In short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows armed with their own scythes - though in no wise obliged to furnish them - even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.

 

[Old Thunder]

Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen.