Meanwhile Mr. Wallet and Mr. Brown were busy, cutting out the tongue. Mr. Wallet found, for the first time in his career, I guessed, that he had a working partner whom he was unable to hurry. Mr. Brown matched stroke for stroke, however fast Mr. Wallet worked; and his strokes were delivered with as great accuracy as Mr. Wallet’s, and with greater force. Remember that this was the first chance there had been on that voyage to match powers. I saw Mr. Wallet glance up with annoyance, and put on more speed. Mr. Brown met the increase in speed without turning a hair. Mr. Wallet nearly doubled his speed, and Mr. Brown again met it, driving his spade in with greater force than before. I had never, up to that time, seen a stamp mill, but I saw one at the Centennial, after my return from that voyage, and it reminded me so exactly of Mr. Wallet and Mr. Brown, cutting out that tongue, that I stood before it, and laughed aloud, much to the astonishment of the others who stood there. Both the men labored and sweated, but Mr. Wallet sweated more, while there was the flicker of a smile on Mr. Brown’s lips. {77} “Too fast for you?” Mr. Wallet asked. “Go as fast as you like,” said Mr. Brown. It was a great waste of energy, and too much of a strain for Mr. Wallet, who was then delivering strokes of his spade at the rate of fifty or more a minute, while the greatest normal rate is twelve to fifteen. Mr. Tilton and Mr. Snow were almost convulsed with laughter, so that their blows fell to eight or less, and there was no strength in them. I heard a snicker from one of the crew, and I could not forbear a snicker of my own. Mr. Wallet may not have heard the snickers; he affected not to, but he lowered his rate at once to fifteen a minute. They finished the cut on that side of the tongue before Mr. Tilton and Mr. Snow had quite done cutting the hole; and, without a word, Mr. Wallet transferred his attention to the uppermost hinge of the lower jaw, probably relying on his superior knowledge of the anatomy of the whale to enable him to get the better of Mr. Brown. Mr. Wallet’s knowledge, in that respect—and in that respect alone, as far as I was ever able to see—was very exact and complete. Mr. Brown’s, however, if not quite equal to Mr. Wallet’s, was sufficient for the occasion, and they finished their work like the artists they were, before the fourth and fifth mates had done that allotted to them. It was the duty of these men, when the hole was cut, to cut a semicircular scarf, or deep groove, above it, and to continue this scarf at each end of the semicircle, down past the hole, and past the side fin, making this scarf not perpendicular to the axis of the body, but slightly inclined to it, like the thread of a screw. The rearmost scarf—that toward the whale’s flukes—which is the only one which is continued after the carcass has made one revolution, describes a spiral about the carcass, and the blubber unrolls in a continuous strip, about three feet wide.