“Ay,” resumed the master’s mate, “I’ve seen the same thing again and again. However, the captain, who spent most of his time on shore, at the house of an old Parsee merchant, to whom he had letters from some port where he had touched in the Persian Gulf, checked me more than once, intimating that it was best to let them have their own way, until we got into the open seas again, which, he said—although I saw no indications of it—would be in a few days, as soon as he had finished some business which he had with the old Parsee. He had seemed all along to have something deeper in his eye, and, in fact, told me in confidence, the very next evening, that he had been offered a large sum in hand to land at a small port a short distance from Muscat, a beautiful Circassian slave of the Sultan’s, named Zuma, and the departure of the ship was only delayed until the woman could make her escape from the castle. This gave me some uneasiness, as I had heard that Zuma had passed from the old Parsee’s household into that of the Sultan; and apart from the difficulty of baffling the black eunuch who had charge of Syed Seeyd’s harem, I dreaded being involved in the plot I have alluded to, to depose that monarch in favor of his cousin, whose father Seeyd had put to death with his own hand at some castle near Rostak. Moreover, I had good reasons for knowing that my friend, the Arab chief, Halil ben Hamet, who was deeply engaged in the conspiracy, was the favorite lover of Zuma. However, as it was Catherton’s affair, of course I could do nothing but look about me the sharper, and see all ready to go to sea at the shortest warning.” At this moment some one interrupted the mate by calling out that the whale was off at last. “Something must have _gallied_ him,” said the man; “yonder he goes, head out, like a channel-packet steaming against wind.” “It was Darby Rattlesnake’s hanged ugly figure-head,” observed the gruff captain of the forecastle, who was standing within ear-shot of the group—“d—n me, if he be’n’t ugly enough to shear the whole coast of Greenland.” Having thus seriously hurt the feelings of the honest old tar, who was quietly looking out to windward, the petty officer winked at his fellows, screwing his own mahogany visage, polished as it was by the moonlight, into a miniature maelstrom of wrinkles, which commenced at the caverns of his fierce, pertinacious eyes, and wriggled gradually off at the tail of his beard.