“‘There was,’ says the Yankee harpooner; ‘I cut it out.’

“‘Well!’ says Jem, ’that is the harpoon we were fast by to this very whale.  Where did you kill her?’

“‘In the Greenland seas.’  And he whips out his private log.  ’Here you are,’ says he; ’March 25, 1820, latitude so and so, killed a right whale; lost half the blubber, owing to the carcass sinking; cut an English harpoon out of her.’

“‘Avast there, mate!’ cried Jem, and he whips, out his log; ‘overhaul that.’  The other harpooner overhauled it.  ’Mates, look, here,’ says he; ’I reckon we hain’t fathomed the critters yet.  The Britisher struck her in the Pacific on the 5th of March, and we killed her off Greenland on the 25th, five thousand miles of water by the lowest reckoning.’  By this time there were a dozen heads jammed together, like bees swarming, over the two logs.  ’She got a wound in the Pacific!  “Hallo!” says she; “this is no sea for a lady to live in;” so she up helm, and right away across the pole into the Atlantic, and met her death.’”

“Your story has an interest you little suspect, young gentleman.  If this is true, the northwest passage is proved.”

“That has been proved a hundred times, sir, and in a hundred ways; the only riddle is to find it.  The man that tells you there is not a northwest passage is no sailor, and the fish that can’t find it is not a whale; for there is not a young suckling no bigger than this room that does not know that passage as well as a mid on his first voyage knows the way to the mizzen-top through lubber’s hole.  How tired you must be of whales, ladies?”

“Oh no.”

“Kill us one more, David.  I love bloodshed—­to hear of.”

“Well, now, I don’t think that can be Miss Fountain’s taste, to look at her.”

Then David. told them how he had fallen in with a sperm whale, dead of disease, floating as high as a frigate; how, with a very light breeze, the skipper had crept down toward her; how, at half a mile distance the stench of her was severe, but, as they neared her, awful; then so intolerable that the skipper gave the crew leave to go below and close the lee ports.  So there were but two men left on the brig’s deck, and a ship’s company that a hurricane would not have driven from their duty skulked before a foul smell; but such a smell! a smell that struck a chill and a loathing to the heart, and soul, and marrow-bone; a smell like the gases in a foul mine; “it would have suffocated us in a few moments if we had been shut up along with it.”  Then he told how the skipper and he stuffed their noses and ears with cotton steeped in aromatic vinegar, and their mouths with pig-tail (by which, as it subsequently appeared, Lucy understood pork or bacon in some form unknown to her narrow experience), and lighted short pipes, and breached the brig upon the putrescent monster, and grappled to it, and then the skipper jumped on it, a basket slung to his back, and a rope fast under his shoulders in case of accident, and drove his spade in behind the whale’s side-fin.”