“The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a telescope; There I saw him, on the Line, last season.”

“And he took that arm off, did he?” asked Ahab, now sliding down from the capstan, and resting on the Englishman’s shoulder, as he did so.

“Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?”

“Spin me the yarn,” said Ahab; “how was it?”

“It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,” began the Englishman.  “I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.  Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and milling round so that my boat’s crew could only trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale.  Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all crows’ feet and wrinkles.”

“It was he, it was he!” cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended breath.

“And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.  Aye, aye—­ they were mine—­my irons,” cried Ahab, exultingly—­“but on!”

“Give me a chance, then,” said the Englishman, good-humoredly.  “Well, this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!

“Aye, I see!—­wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—­an old trick—­ I know him.”

“How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do not know; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow; but we didn’t know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other whale’s; that went off to windward, all fluking.  Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was—­ the noblest and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life—­I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling rage he seemed to be in.  And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat’s crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped into my first mate’s boat—­Mr. Mounttop’s here (by the way, Captain—­Mounttop; Mounttop—­the captain);—­ as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop’s boat, which, d’ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it.  But, Lord, look you, sir—­hearts and souls alive, man—­the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat—­both eyes out—­all befogged and bedeadened with black foam—­the whale’s tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple.  No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the second iron, to toss it overboard—­down comes the tail like