s--The first insect--Preparations for departure--Narrow
escape--Cutting out--Once more afloat--Ship on fire--Crew take to the
boats.

CHAPTER XXV.
Escape to Upernavik--Letter from home--Meetuck's grandmother--Dumps and
Poker again.

CHAPTER XXVI.
The return--The surprise--Buzzby's sayings and doings--The
narrative--Fighting battles o'er again--Conclusion.

CHAPTER I.

_Some of the "dramatis personae" introduced--Retrospective
glances--Causes of future effects--Our hero's early life at sea--A
pirate--A terrible fight and its consequences--Buzzby's helm lashed
amidships--A whaling-cruise begun._

Nobody ever caught John Buzzby asleep by any chance whatever. No weasel
was ever half so sensitive on that point as he was. Wherever he happened
to be (and in the course of his adventurous life he had been to nearly
all parts of the known world) he was the first awake in the morning and
the last asleep at night; he always answered promptly to the first call;
and was never known by any man living to have been seen with his eyes
shut, except when he winked, and that operation he performed less
frequently than other men.

John Buzzby was an old salt--a regular true-blue Jack tar of the old
school, who had been born and bred at sea; had visited foreign ports
innumerable; had weathered more storms than he could count, and had
witnessed more strange sights than he could remember. He was tough, and
sturdy, and grizzled, and broad, and square, and massive--a first-rate
specimen of a John Bull, and according to himself, "always kept his
weather-eye open." This remark of his was apt to create confusion in the
minds of his hearers; for John meant the expression to be understood
figuratively, while, in point of fact, he almost always kept one of his
literal eyes open and the other partially closed, but as he reversed the
order of arrangement frequently, he might have been said to keep his
lee-eye as much open as the weather one. This peculiarity gave to his
countenance an expression of earnest thoughtfulness mingled with humour.
Buzzby was fond of being thought old, and he looked much older than he
really was. Men guessed his age at fifty-five, but they were ten years
out in their reckoning; for John had numbered only forty-five summers,
and was as tough and muscular as ever he had been--although not quite so
elastic.

John Buzzby stood on the pier of the sea-port town of Grayton watching
the active operations of the cre