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And then it grew time for the river-mackerel, and they used to bring in at sunset two or three hundred in a shining heap, together with great lobsters that looked as if they'd been carved out of heliotrope-stone, and so old that they were barnacled. And it was so novel to Mr. Gabriel, that he used to act as if he'd fallen in fairy-land.
Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste of waters she was still floating, and there were YEARS during which I never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the Navy-yard without saying to myself, "The Wasp has come!" and almost thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling the water before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands.
In the centre of the mantel was a stuffed bird-of-paradise, while about the room were scattered gorgeous shells from the southern seas, delicate sprays of coral sprouting from barnacled pi-pi shells and cased in glass, assegais from South Africa, stone axes from New Guinea, huge Alaskan tobacco-pouches beaded with heraldic totem designs, a boomerang from Australia, divers ships in glass bottles, a cannibal kai-kai bowl from the Marquesas, and fragile cabinets from China and the Indies and inlaid with mother-of-pearl and precious woods.
Wilson watched it all with sullen envy. How was it that these brown savages were free, and he barnacled to a slab-sided bark? Was he not a white man, and their superior? Did he not look down at them from the heights of the world's ruling race, kindly, tolerantly, contemptuously, as one does on children? And yet who had the best of it, by God?
No mourning they wear for the Boneeta left far astern; nor for those so cruelly killed by Samoa. No, no; all is glee, fishy glee, and frolicking fun; light hearts and light fins; gay backs and gay spirits. Swim away, swim away! my merry fins all. Let us roam the flood; let us follow this monster fish with the barnacled sides; this strange-looking fish, so high out of water; that goes without fins.
Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.
He did not call the white people foreign devils; he called them customers. That they worshipped a bearded Buddha was no concern of his. Born in the modern town, having spent twelve years in San Francisco, he was not heavily barnacled with tradition. He was shrewd, a suave bargainer, and as honest as the day is long. His English was fluent. To-night he was angry with the fates.
Skulking in the shadow of the wall which had so long baffled me, I looked across a sharp border of shade upon a chaos, the more striking for its lingering trim design. The long, straight paths were barnacled with weeds; the dense, fine hedges, once prim and angular, had fattened out of all shape or form; and on the velvet sward of other days you might have waded waist high in rotten hay.
Off the port bow Gregory saw a narrow pathway of quiet water fringed on one side by white-toothed swells, on the other by the barnacled feet of the point itself. He leaned over the rail and followed the course of the ribbon-like path which wound like a snake among the curling waves and jagged rocks. Could that be the channel the girl meant to take?
His head filled with vague and highly colored notions of a smugglers' cave, his narrow lungs filled with air, Bubbles dove, swam between two slimy barnacled piles, and came up presently in a dark, dank, stale, gurgling region, wonderfully cool after the blazing sunlight which he had just left.
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