30 
MOBY DICK; OR 
patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent than in Yew 
Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy 
scoria of a country? 
Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder 
lofty mansion, and your question will he answered. Yes; all these 
brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and 
Indian Oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up 
hither from the bottom of the sea. 
In Yew Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their 
daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises apiece. 
You must go to Yew Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, 
they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly 
burn their lengths in spermaceti candles. 
In summer time, the town is sweet to see ; full of fine maples — long 
avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful 
and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelahra-wise, proffer the passer-by 
their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent 
is art; which in many a district of Yew Bedford has superinduced 
bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks. 
And the women of Yew Bedford, they bloom like their own red 
roses. But roses only bloom in summer ; whereas the fine carnation of 
their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere 
match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me 
the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them 
miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas 
instead of the Puritanic sands. 
CHAPTER VII 
THE CHAPEL 
In this same Yew Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and 
few are the moody fishermen, shortly hound for the Indian Ocean or 
Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I 
did not. 
Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this 
special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driv- 
