Moby Dick

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Mark!--St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you
pour out again.'

"Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make
a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like
Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile,
he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra,
ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this
effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly
sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features.
A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he
floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities.
Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of
these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful;
but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of
violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger
in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum, gentlemen, what the