" 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."
"His spade, Mr. Dodd?"
"His whale-spade; it is as sharp as a razor;" and how the skipper dug
a hole in the whale as big as a well and four feet deep, and, after a
long search, gave a shout of triumph, and picked out some stuff that
looked like Gloucester cheese; and, when he had nearly filled his
basket with this stuff, he slacked the grappling-iron, and David
hauled him on board, and the carcass dropped astern, and the captain
sang out for rum, and drank a small tumbler neat, and would have
fainted away, spite of his precautions, but for the rum, and how a
heavenly perfume was now on deck fighting with that horrid odor; and
how the crew smelled it, and crept timidly up one by one, and how "the
Glo'ster cheese was a great favorite of yours, ladies. It was the king
of perfumes--amber-gas; there is some of it in all your richest
scents; and the knowing skipper had made a hundred guineas in the turn
of the hand. So knowledge is wealth, you see, and the sweet can be got
out of the sour by such as study nature.
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