many
weeks putting aside all foreign considerations, in favor of self too
long merged in others and neglected.

[Footnote 70: One of our most accomplished female writers; a native of
Mississippi, but long resident in Kentucky.]

* * * * *

=_Herman Melville, 1819-._= (Manual, p. 505.)

From "Moby Dick."

=_309._= SPERM WHALE FISHING.

It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the
omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made as they rolled along
the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green;
the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on
the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening
to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and
hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite
hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side; all these, with
the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of
the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down
upon her boats, with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her
screaming brood; all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, marching
from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not
the dead man's ghost, encountering the first unknown phantom in the
other world; neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions
than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into
the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.

Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship
nor boat to be seen.

"Give way, men," whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet
of his sail; "there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes.
There's white water again! close to! Spring!" Though not one of the
oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril so close to them ahead,
yet with their eyes on the intense countenance of the mate in the stern
of the boat, they knew that the imminent instant had come; they heard,
too, an enormous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their
litter. Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the mist, the
waves curling and hissing around us like the erected crests of enraged
serpents.

"That's his hump. _There, there_, give it to him!" whispered Starbuck.

A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of
Queequ