Page:Moby-Dick (1851) US edition.djvu/613

Rh lows all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer, calking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let’s to it.”

 

The coffin laid upon two line-tabs, between the vice-bench and the open hatchway ; the Carpenter calking its seams ; the string of twisted oakum slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of his frock—Ahab comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip following him.

“, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand complies with my humor more genially than that boy.—Middle aisle of a church! What’s here?”

“Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck’s orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the hatchway!”

“Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.”

“Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does.”

“Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop?”

“I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?”

“Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?”

“Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they’ve set me now to turning it into something else.”

“Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling, monopolizing, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a jack-of-all-trades.”