"'Seven hundred and seventy-seventh,' again said Bildad, without lifting his eyes; and then went on mumbling—'for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.'
"'I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,' said Peleg; 'do ye hear that, Bildad? The three hundredth lay, I say.'
"Bildad laid down his book, and, turning solemnly towards him, said, 'Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship—widows and orphans, many of them; and that, if we too abundantly reward the labors of this young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg.'
"'Thou Bildad!' roared Peleg, starting up, and clattering about the cabin, 'B—— t ye, Captain Bildad; if I had followed thy advice in these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn.'
"'Captain Peleg,' said Bildad steadily, 'thy conscience may be drawing ten inches of water or ten fathoms—I can't tell; but as thou art still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a leaky one, and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg,'"
"It is a canon with some critics that nothing should be introduced into a novel which it is physically impossible for the writer to have known: thus, he must not describe the conversation of miners in a pit if they all perish. Mr. Melville hardly steers clear of this rule, and he continually violates another, by beginning in the autobiographical form and changing ad libitum into the narrative. His catastrophe overrides all rule: not only is Ahab, with his boat's-crew, destroyed in his last desperate attack upon the white whale, but the Pequod herself sinks with all on board into the depths of the illimitable ocean. Such is the go-ahead method."
[A STORY WITHOUT A NAME][5]
WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE
BY G. P. R. JAMES, ESQ.