23 
THE WHITE WHALE 
this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth 
of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade — owing 
I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and 
shade, his shirt-sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times — this 
same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that 
same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did 
when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so 
blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight 
and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me. 
My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When 
I was a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that 
befell me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely 
settle. The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper 
or other — I think is was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had 
seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, 
somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to 
bed supperless, — my stepmother dragged me by the legs out of the 
chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o’clock in 
the afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemi- 
sphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so upstairs 
I went to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly 
as possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the 
sheets. 
I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must 
elapse before I could hope to get out of bed again. Sixteen hours 
in bed! the small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so 
light too; the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of 
coaches in the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house. 
I felt worse and worse — at last I got up, dressed, and softly going 
down in my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly 
threw myself at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to 
give me a good slippering for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but 
condemning me to lie abed such an unendurable length of time. But 
she was the best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I 
had to go to my room. Bor several hours I lay there broad awake, 
feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the 
greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a 
