d mounts; if I shall touch
that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow
over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear
me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal
mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great
democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the
pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves
of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who
didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a
war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all
Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from
the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!

CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.

Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky;
neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an
indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the
chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged
for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his
crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable
arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the
snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of
the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as
a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes
while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had,
for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he
thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of
it at all, might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his
mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor,
he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir
themselves there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed
the order, and not sooner.

What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,
unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a
world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs;
what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of