.. < chapter cxii 13  THE BLACKSMITH >


     The blacksmith availing himself of the mild,

summer-cool weather that now reigned in these latitudes, and in preparation

for the peculiarly active pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the

begrimed, blistered old blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to

the hold again, after concluding his contributory work for Ahab's leg, but

still retained it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being

now almost incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen

to do some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their

various weapons and boat furniture.  Often he would be surrounded by an eager

circle, all waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads, harpoons,

and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement, as he toiled.

Nevertheless, this old man's was a patient hammer wielded by a patient arm.

No murmur, no impatience, no petulence did come from him.  Silent, slow, and

solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled

away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the

heavy beating of his heart.  And so it was. --Most miserable!

.. <p 480 >

A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing yawing

in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the curiosity of

the mariners.  And to the importunity of their persisted questionings he had

finally given in; and so it came to pass that every one now knew the shameful


     story of his wretched fate.  Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's

midnight, on the road running between two country towns, the blacksmith

half-stupidly felt the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge

in a leaning, dilapidated barn.  The issue was, the loss of the extremities of

both feet.  Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four

acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth act

of the grief of his life's drama.  He was an old man, who, at the age of

nearly sixty, had postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow's technicals

called ruin.  He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to

do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving

wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a

cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove.  But one night, under cover of

darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate

burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything.  And

darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this

burglar into his family's heart.  It was the Bottle Conjuror!  Upon the opening

of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home.  Now,

for prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith's shop was in the

basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so that always


     had the young and loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness,

but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old

husband's hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors

and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and so, to stout

Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's infants were rocked to slumber.  Oh,

woe on woe!  Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely?  Hadst thou

taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him, then

had the young widow had a

.. <p 481 >

delicious grief, and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream

of in their after years; and all of them a care-killing competency.  But

Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil

solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse

than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him

easier to harvest.  Why tell the whole?  The blows of the basement hammer

every day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter

than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes,

glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell;


     the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down

into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither;

and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his

every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!  Death seems

the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a

launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first

salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery,


     the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still

have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the

all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole

plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures;

and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them

-- Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of

intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.

Come hither!  bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and

abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death.  Come hither!  put up


     thy grave-stone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry

thee!  Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sun-rise, and by

fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come!  And so Perth

went a-whaling.

.. <p 482 >

