last one
pause:--through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless
faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then
disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once
gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men,
and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no
more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will
never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like
those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of
our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that
same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:--

"Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's
eye!--Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping
cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep
down and do believe."

And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same
golden light:--

"I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that
he has always been jolly!"

CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.

And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down
before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded.

It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her
last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad
holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing
round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous to
pointing her prow for home.

The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting
at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down;
and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the
last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours
were flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways lashed in each of
her three basketed tops were two barrels of sperm; above which, in her
top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of the same precious
fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp.

As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising
success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same
seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a
single fish. Not only h