Moby Dick

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course--its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that;
free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and
chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of
necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though
thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the
last featuring blow at events.


Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so
strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball
of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds
whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was
that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward,
his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he
continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment
perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's
look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could