“Form two and two!  Let’s make a General of him!  Ho, where’s his harpoon?  Lay it across here.—­Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza!  Oh for a game cock now to sit upon his head and crow!  Queequeg dies game!—­mind ye that; Queequeg dies game!—­ take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game!  I say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward; died all a’shiver;—­out upon Pip!  Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he’s a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward!  Tell them he jumped from a whale-boat!  I’d never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail him General, if he were once more dying here.  No, no! shame upon all cowards—­ shame upon them!  Let’em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat.  Shame! shame!”

During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream.  Pip was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.

But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now that his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon there seemed no need of the carpenter’s box; and thereupon, when some expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the cause of his sudden convalescence was this;—­ at a critical moment, he had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone; and therefore had changed his mind about dying:  he could not die yet, he averred.  They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign will and pleasure.  He answered, certainly.  In a word, it was Queequeg’s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him:  nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.

Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized; that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day.  So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a fight.

With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there.  Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body.  And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous