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Cetology.

kicks honors; and on no account kick back; for you can’t help yourself, wise Stubb.  Don’t you see that pyramid?’  With that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into the air.  I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my hammock!  Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask?”

“I don’t know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho’.”

“May be; may be.  But it’s made a wise man of me, Flask.  D’ye see Ahab standing there, sideways looking over the stern?  Well, the best thing you can do, Flask, is to let that old man alone; never speak to him, whatever he says.  Halloa! what’s that he shouts?  Hark!”

“Mast-head, there!  Look sharp, all of ye!  There are whales hereabouts!  If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!”

“What do you think of that now, Flask? ain’t there a small drop of something queer about that, eh?  A white whale—did ye mark that, man?  Look ye—there’s something special in the wind.  Stand by for it, Flask.  Ahab has that that’s bloody on his mind.  But, mum; he comes this way.”



CHAPTER XXXII.

cetology.

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored harborless immensities.  Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.