“The fluid was mysteriously expelled from me.  I breathed as freely of the water as a moment before I had breathed of the air!  A weight was lifted from my brain, which had before been crushing it, and my temples grew suddenly cool.  A spiracle had developed at the apex of my cranium, and I exuded water through a cavity or ‘blow-hole’ in the top of my head, like the cetacea around me!”

The naturalist here paused and ran his hand through his hair.  The shining something among his gray locks revealed itself as a plate of silver, circular in shape, covering what had evidently been an opening in the skull.  He looked less like a man than ever, and when, consulting a glutinous old chronometer, like a jellyfish, he found that his hour was passing, he begged so earnestly to be allowed to finish his “Introduction,” that I gave him leave.  A boy coming in with copy so frightened him, however, that I thought he was going to turn upon his stomach, and swim away through the window.

“I became sensible directly of three organic changes:  my heels clave together, my feet flattened, and my toes turned out, like a caudal fin; my integument grew thick and hard, and my blood thin and chill.  But these conditions being novel to me, and my fears only equalled by my wonder as yet, I was paralyzed, and continued to sink.  I had descended about one hundred fathoms, and was experiencing a strange oppression, as of the forcing together of my bones, when I heard a sonorous voice close below me say!  ’If you go any deeper, you will sustain a pressure of twenty atmospheres, and may not get back at all.’”

I looked beneath, and to my horror a huge whale was coming upward with extended jaws.  His half-human eyes were turned benignantly upon me; but he was evidently in pain, and from a point in his back, where a broken harpoon still remained, gouts of blood curdled upward, coloring the water.  His vocal power lay in his spiracle, and he said again: 

“‘I should have been asphyxiated in five minutes.’

“‘Who is it that speaks?’ I faltered.  ’Leviathan, king of the sea, be merciful!’

“’I am called New England Tom by the creatures of the upper element,’ answered the whale, ’although falsely thought to be of the family of the Spermaceti; but though my exploits have recommended me to my species, I am not equal to the high title you have given me. That is possessed by you and our sovereign Jonah only!’

“The conviction rushed upon me that I had, indeed, ’dominion over the fish’!

“‘I have suffered this wound for your majesty’s sake,’ said the whale again; ’for I had been deputed to wait in this latitude for your arrival, and convey you to our sovereign.  But though I am now in the third century of my age, I can survive a dozen such prickings, and if I chose could shiver the Crimson Dragon with a blow of my tail, as in 1804 I stove the Essex, and made driftwood of her spars.’