sical School
for some months. Dr. Charles E. West, the well-known Brooklyn educator,
was then in charge of the school, and remembers the lad's deftness in
English composition, and his struggles with mathematics.

The following year was passed at Pittsfield, Mass., where he engaged in
work on his uncle's farm, long known as the 'Van Schaack place.' This
uncle was Thomas Melville, president of the Berkshire Agricultural
Society, and a successful gentleman farmer.

Herman's roving disposition, and a desire to support himself
independently of family assistance, soon led him to ship as cabin boy
in a New York vessel bound for Liverpool. He made the voyage, visited
London, and returned in the same ship. 'Redburn: His First Voyage,'
published in 1849, is partly founded on the experiences of this trip,
which was undertaken with the full consent of his relatives, and which
seems to have satisfied his nautical ambition for a time. As told in the
book, Melville met with more than the usual hardships of a sailor-boy's
first venture. It does not seem difficult in 'Redburn' to separate the
author's actual experiences from those invented by him, this being the
case in some of his other writings.

A good part of the succeeding three years, from 1837 to 1840, was
occupied with school-teaching. While so engaged at Greenbush, now
East Albany, N.Y., he received the munificent salary of 'six dollars
a quarter and board.' He taught for one term at Pittsfield, Mass.,
'boarding around' with the families of his pupils, in true American
fashion, and easily suppressing, on one memorable occasion, the efforts
of his larger scholars to inaugurate a rebellion by physical force.

I fancy that it was the reading of Richard Henry Dana's 'Two Years
Before the Mast' which revived the spirit of adventure in Melville's
breast. That book was published in 1840, and was at once talked of
everywhere. Melville must have read it at the time, mindful of his
own experience as a sailor. At any rate, he once more signed a ship's
articles, and on January 1, 1841, sailed from New Bedford harbour in the
whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific Ocean and the sperm fishery.
He has left very little direct information as to the events of this
eighteen months' cruise, although his whaling romance, 'Moby Dick; or,
the Whale,' probably gives many pictures of life on board the Acushnet.
In the present volume he confines himself to a general account of
the captain's bad treat