he air of a man whose opinion was
settled. Wilder, however, paid no attention to the movements of his
subordinate, but continued pacing the deck for hours; now casting his
eyes at the heavens, and now sending frequent and anxious glances around
the limited horizon, while the _Royal Caroline_ still continued drifting
before the wind, a shorn and naked wreck.

THE CAPTURE OF THE GREAT WHITE WHALE

From "Moby Dick," BY HERMAN MELVILLE

That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man--as his wont at
intervals--stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went
to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing
up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in drawing nigh to some
barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that
peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living
sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner
surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane,
and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as
possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's course to be slightly
altered, and the sail to be shortened.

The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated
at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and
lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery
wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift
tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.

"Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!"

Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle
deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they
seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear
with their clothes in their hands.

"What d'ye see?" cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.

"Nothing, nothing, sir!" was the sound hailing down in reply.

"T'gallant sails!--stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!"

All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for
swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were
hoisting him thither, when, while but two-thirds of the way aloft, and
while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the
main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the
air, "There she blows!--there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It
is Moby Dick!"

Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up b