59 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
59 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
3
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CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
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Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide,
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low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of
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the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large
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oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the
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unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent
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study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of
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the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its
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purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first
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you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New
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England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint
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of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and
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especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the
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entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however
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wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.
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But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber,
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portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the
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picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a
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nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive
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a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite,
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half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to
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it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what
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that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas,
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deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight
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gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a
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blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of
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the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to
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that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. _That_ once found
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out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint
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resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?
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In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own,
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partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with
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whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner
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in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its
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three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale,
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purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of
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impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
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The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish
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array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with
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glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots
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of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping
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round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed
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mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal
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and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking,
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horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances
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and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With
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this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan
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Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that
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harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—was flung in Javan seas, and run away
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with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The
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original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle
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sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last
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was found imbedded in the hump.
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