8 
MOBY DICK; OK 
and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the 
weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. “Ha, Ishmael,” mut- 
tered I, backing out, “wretched entertainment at the sign of ‘The 
Trap’ !” 
Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of outhanging light not far 
from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking 
up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, 
faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words 
underneath — “The Spouter-Inn : — Peter Coffin.” 
“Coffin ? — Spouter ? — Bather ominous in that particular connection,” 
thought I. “But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I 
suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there.” As the light 
looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the 
dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been 
carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging 
sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was 
the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee. 
It was a queer sort of place — a gable-ended old house, one side 
palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak 
corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howl- 
ing than ever it did about St. Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, never- 
theless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one indoors, with his feet 
on the hob quietly toasting for bed. “In judging of that tempestuous 
wind called Euroclydon,” says an old writer — of whose works I possess 
the only copy extant — “it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou 
lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the out- 
side, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the 
frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.” 
True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind — old 
black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and 
this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the 
chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and 
there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. What a fine 
frosty night ; how Orion glitters ; what northern lights ! Let them talk 
of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories ; give me 
the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals. 
