“I had been on the water that morning, in company with an Arab chief of high rank, following in the wake of Muscat Tom, a large finback, which haunted the harbor, coming in regularly at sunrise, and making an offing at night, for fear that the current, which sets in shore at certain seasons, might catch him asleep. He was as tame as a bull of the pastures, and we used to arouse ourselves watching the fishermen paddling after him, to pick up the fish which he killed, as he drove through shoal after shoal—his mouth gaping like the after-hatchway, and the pouch under his jaw as full as a herring-net. Had he lived in the old days, they had certainly set up his shrine and paid adoration to him, as he scared away the sharks from the harbor, and did no mischief, beyond the playful capsizing of a boat when it pressed somewhat too closely on his track. There is no doubt, gentlemen, that the ancients would have made a very respectable sea-god of him. “It was rather a curious sight to see him lying at rest in the cove, spouting the brine in air, with the sun blazing on his back, while his gray pellucid eye moved sluggishly after you, as your boat shot past the angle of his jaws; or, stranger still, to watch him scooping up the affrighted fish in his bone-net, while the brine poured off of his enormous lips in two seething streams; and once and awhile, if you managed the thing right, you might catch a glimpse of his immense tongue, behind the long hairy slabs of bone, licking his prey down by the scores. It made me feel rather antediluvianish, at times, I confess. “However, as soon as we made out the starred flag at half-mast, in the offing, we left Tom to follow his game, and Halil, spreading out his turban to catch the breeze, while I plied the oars, we were speedily under her counter—a huge, lumbering ship of eight hundred tons, with six boats at the cranes, and ten short twelves mounted on a side, as a defence against the Toassemes. She was very deep, being full of sperm oil to the grindstone-tub; and although she was, as I hinted before, all in a lump, yet as her skipper had knocked his lubberly tryworks to pieces, set up his rigging, and crossed his lighter spars, besides giving her a fresh lick of tar and paint, she looked, as the Scotch quarter-master said of the fellow we fell in with off the Western Isles, ‘just no that bad, for a tallow-strainer.’ “I offered my services to pilot her in to a berth, and we were civilly received by her skipper, who, to tell the truth, was not exactly the man I expected to find on the weather side of her quarter-deck.