Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered.  Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.  One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.  Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?

In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.  You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.

In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—­ long avenues of green and gold.  And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms.  So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation’s final day.

And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses.  But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens.  Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.

CHAPTER 7

The Chapel

In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot.  I am sure that I did not.

Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this special errand.  The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist.  Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm.  Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows.  A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.  Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.  The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit.  Three of them ran something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote: 

Sacred
to the memory
of
John Talbot,
Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard
Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia,
November 1st, 1836. 
This tablet
Is erected to his Memory
by his sister.