ew elsewhere?--and did she come in
the vintage season, with her children and her friends, to gather in the
rich purple clusters, bearing them back as did the Israelitish spies, to
show the fatness of the promised land?

It was one of the fairest days of the Indian summer, when Caleb, Mysie,
and the Baron (a young gentleman four years old) set gayly forth to
explore this new and almost unknown region.

The first stage of their journey was New Bedford; and at the neat and
quiet hotel where they spent the night, Caleb ascertained that the
steamer "Eagle's Wing" would leave its wharf, bound to the Vineyard.

Pending this event, the trio wandered about the quiet wharves,
inspecting the shipping, and saturating themselves with nautical odors
and information. They discovered that whaleships are not the leviathans
of the deep which Mysie had supposed them, being very rarely of a
thousand tons, and averaging five hundred. They were informed that
whaling has ceased to be a profitable occupation to any but the officers
of the ships, the owners frequently making only enough to repay their
outlay from a voyage which has brought the captain and first mate
several thousand dollars each.

Every member of a whaleship's crew, from the captain down to the
cabin-boy, is paid, not fixed wages, but a "lay," or share of the
profits of the voyage. Formerly, these "lays" were so graduated, that
the chief advantage of the expedition was to the owners; but, of late
years, matters have altered, so that now it is not uncommon for the
captain to receive a twelfth, tenth, or even eighth of the entire
profit, and the other officers in proportion.

The attention of our travellers was now directed to numerous squares and
plateaus of great black objects buried in seaweed; these, they were
informed, were casks of oil, stored in this manner instead of in
warehouses, as less liable to leakage.

It was also asserted, as a fact, that the sperm whale, alarmed at the
untiring rigor of his assailants, has almost disappeared from the
navigable waters, retreating to the fastnesses of the Frozen Ocean,
where he is still pursued, although at the greatest peril, by the
dauntless New Bedford, Nantucket, and Vineyard whalemen, who, as the
narrator proudly stated, have, time and again, come out unscathed from
the perils under which Franklin and his crew succumbed. Many a man now
walks the streets of these seaports who has conversed with the Esquimaux
last in comp