it's a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab!
the White Whale; he'll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in old
Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring grown
over in it; some old darkey's wedding ring. How did it get there? And
so they'll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old
mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the
shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold! the green
miser'll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes 'mong the worlds
blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey,
hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!"

CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.

The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.

"Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?"

So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing
down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his
hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger
captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow. He was
a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or
thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in
festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed
behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar's surcoat.

"Hast seen the White Whale!"

"See you this?" and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it,
he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head
like a mallet.

"Man my boat!" cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near
him--"Stand by to lower!"

In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his
crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger.
But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the
moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never
once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was
always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to
the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other
vessel at a moment's warning. Now, it is no very easy matter
for anybody--except those who are almost hourly used to it, like
whalemen--to clamber up a ship's side from a boat on the open sea; for
the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and
then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kel