52 
MOBY DICK; OR 
His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying puff, Queequeg em- 
braced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the 
light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon 
were sleeping. 
CHAPTER XIII 
WHEELBARROW 
Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a 
barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade’s bill; using, how- 
ever, my comrade’s money. The grinning landlord, as well as the 
boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had 
sprung up between me and Queequeg — especially as Peter Coffin’s 
cock-and-bull stories had previously so much alarmed me about him. 
We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including 
my own poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg’ s canvas sack and hammock, 
away we went down to the Moss , the little Nantucket packet schooner 
moored at the wharf. As we were going along the people stared ; not at 
Queequeg so much — for they were used to seeing cannibals like him 
in their streets, — but at seeing him and me upon such confidential 
terms. But we heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by 
turns, and Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on 
his harpoon barbs. I asked him why he carried such a troublesome 
thing with him ashore, and whether all whaling ships did not find 
their own harpoons. To this, in substance, he replied, that though 
what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection for 
his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a 
mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In 
short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers’ 
meadows armed with their own scythes — though in no wise obliged to 
furnish them — even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, pre- 
ferred his own harpoon. 
Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story 
about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbour. 
The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry 
his heavy chest to his boarding-house. Not to seem ignorant about 
