THE WHITE WHALE 
CHAPTER III 
9 
THE SPOUTER-INN 
Entering that gabled-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, 
low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of 
the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very 
large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that 
in the unequal cross-light? by which you viewed it, it was only by 
diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful in- 
quiry of the neighbours, that you could any way arrive at an under- 
standing of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and 
shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, 
in the time of the Ne w England hags, had endeavoured to delineate 
chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and 
oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little win- 
dow towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion 
that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted. 
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, por- 
tentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture 
over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. 
A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man 
distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimagi- 
nable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily 
took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting 
meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas ! deceptive idea would dart 
you through. — It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale. — It’s the un- 
natural combat of the four primal elements. — It’s a blasted heath. — It’s 
a Hyperborean winter scene. — It’s the breaking-up of the ice-bound 
stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one por- 
tentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and 
all the rest were plain. But stop ; does it not bear a faint resemblance 
to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself? 
In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, 
partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with 
whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape- 
Homer in a great hurricane; the half -foundered ship weltering there 
