r of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel;
afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers
of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and
harpooneers--all kith and kin to noble Benjamin--this day darting the
barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.

Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not
respectable.

WHALING NOT RESPECTABLE? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory
law, the whale is declared "a royal fish."*

Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any
grand imposing way.

THE WHALE NEVER FIGURED IN ANY GRAND IMPOSING WAY? In one of the mighty
triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world's capital,
the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were
the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*

*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.

Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real
dignity in whaling.

NO DIGNITY IN WHALING? The dignity of our calling the very heavens
attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your
hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I
know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty
whales. I account that man more honourable than that great captain of
antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered
prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small
but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if
hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather
have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or
more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here
I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a
whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

CHAPTER 25. Postscript.

In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but
substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who
should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might
tell eloquently upon his cause--such an advocate, would he not be
blameworthy?

It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern
ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is
gone through. There is a saltcellar of st