On the wharves hundreds of coopers are employed coopering oil casks. Their continual strokes of hammer upon driver, united with the heavy rolling of the oil trucks, creating a Babel-like confusion from which a stranger is glad to escape. Whichever way we cast an eye we see oil casks or whalebone, harpoons or lances, or some one or other of the various et ceteras belonging to the whaleman’s pursuit; in fact, the yield of the whale supports New Bedford, and is the nucleus around which clusters all the manufactures of the city; and its vitality as a community must ever depend upon the number of vessels it sends out in pursuit of the whale. After gazing again and again at these objects, to me so interesting, I diverted myself by walking through the town, with no other object but to kill time--hours seeming days, and days months, that intervened between this time and the day fixed for our departure; in fact, I had become so infatuated with the idea of going to sea, that I viewed everything through a glass whose tint was blue--blue water always dancing and rippling before my mind’s eye. In my perambulations through this city of whalemen I found that it was laid out with something like care--the streets, like those of Philadelphia, at right angles; many of the houses neat and well built, and, with the exception of a part of one street near the river, wear a quiet and respectable aspect. One street is an exception to the rule, it being occupied by houses of ill-fame, where many a dollar, earned by exposure to the storm on a long voyage, has been filched from the hardy mariner by the harpies who occupy its tenements; and after what I had always read and heard of the puritanical exactness of our New England brethren, I confess that I was astonished that such a sink was permitted by the citizens of the Bay State to remain in existence for the unsophisticated seaman to be entrapped by. A liquor law had been passed by the legislature of the State of Massachusetts, and whilst I was in New Bedford was professedly in operation--but only professedly, as numbers of houses existed wherein liquor was sold, which, from their public location, must have been known to the authorities.