Moby Dick

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wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that
our wild whale-fishery contains so many of its most finished graduates,
and that scarce any race of mankind, except Sydney men, are so much
distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all diminish the
curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and
young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal
furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian
corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric
seas.

"'I see! I see!' impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha
upon his silvery ruffles. 'No need to travel! The world's one Lima. I
had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold
and holy as the hills.--But the story.'

"I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly
had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the