The choking mascot, with an expiring effort, gagged, and shot the uninjured instrument, still swathed in its red envelope, from his mouth. The fallen god’s subjects were at hand also, a little bewildered over their deity’s predicament. When the reparation, on the part of the goat, was made, Goritz released him, kicked him, and the humiliated tuna turned tail and incontinently bolted for the nearest igloo, and—tell it not in Gath—the affair was construed as a “good sign.”
It was the eve of the day appointed for our northward advance. Captain Coogan invited the officers of another recently arrived whaler aboard, and spread a generous banquet for us, which involved the last resources of his larder and pantry, and really seemed sumptuous. I think we all felt a little overawed, or indeed a good deal so, by the tremendous exploit we were embarking on. That night the midnight sun shone strangely along the horizon upon the waste of northern ice, illimitable, roseate, inscrutable, the white cerement of a dead continent, and that dead continent the one we hoped to reach alive! Would we?
There were speeches, toasts, stories, impromptu songs (Goritz played well on a mandolin and sang some courage-inspiring ballads of Scandinavia, and Hopkins could “warble” as he called it, quite pleasingly) and we were wished “good luck” a thousand times. Still we felt the restraint of an overhanging mysterious fate, and all that Coogan or Isaac Stanwix, or Bell Phillips, or Jack Spent, or the newly arrived friends from Alaska, could contrive to express of cheer and encouragement—and the verbal part of the contrivance was rather limited and monotonous—failed to dispel our solemnity or the inner sense of serious misgiving. We laughed indeed when Hopkins told the story of the goat, the chronometer and the goat’s abrupt contrition under Goritz’s forcible persuasion. Hopkins concluded that it reminded him of an incident “at home” narrated as follows in verse:
“There was a man named Joseph Cable
Who bought a goat just for his stable,
One day the goat, prone to dine,
Ate a red shirt right off the line.
“Then Cable to the goat did say:
‘Your time has come; you’ll die this day’
And took him to the railroad track,