all, and
made them wild, perverse and various like herself. I went from one to
the other without any system whatever, searching for the ideal
resting-place, and often thinking that I had found it: but only wearying
of it at the thought that there was a yet deeper and dreamier in the
world. But in this search I received a check, my God, which chilled me
to the marrow, and set me flying from these places.

* * * * *

One evening, the 29th November, I dined rather late--at eight--sitting,
as was my custom in calm weather, cross-legged on the cabin-rug at the
port aft corner, a small semicircle of _Speranza_ gold-plate before me,
and near above me the red-shaded lamp with green conical reservoir,
whose creakings never cease in the stillest mid-sea, and beyond the
plates the array of preserved soups, meat-extracts, meats, fruit,
sweets, wines, nuts, liqueurs, coffee on the silver spirit-tripod,
glasses, cruet, and so on, which it was always my first care to select
from the store-room, open, and lay out once for all in the morning on
rising. I was late, seven being my hour: for on that day I had been
engaged in the occasionally necessary, but always deferred, task of
overhauling the ship, brushing here a rope with tar, there a board with
paint, there a crank with oil, rubbing a door-handle, a brass-fitting,
filling the three cabin-lamps, dusting mirrors and furniture, dashing
the great neat-joinered plains of deck with bucketfulls, or, high in
air, chopping loose with its rigging the mizzen top-mast, which since a
month was sprained at the clamps, all this in cotton drawers under loose
_quamis_, bare-footed, my beard knotted up, the sun a-blaze, the sea
smooth and pale with the smooth pallor of strong currents, the ship
still enough, no land in sight, yet great tracts of sea-weed making
eastward--I working from 11 A.M. till near 7, when sudden darkness
interrupted: for I wished to have it all over in one obnoxious day. I
was therefore very tired when I went down, lit the central chain-lever
lamp and my own two, washed and dressed in my bedroom, and sat to dinner
in the dining-hall corner. I ate voraciously, with sweat, as usual,
pouring down my eager brow, using knife or spoon in the right hand, but
never the Western fork, licking the plates clean in the Mohammedan
manner, and drinking pretty freely. Still I was tired, and went upon
deck, where I had the threadbare blue-velvet easy-chair with