104 
MOBY DICK; OR 
for the year. Good-humoured, easy, and careless, he presided over his 
whale boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his 
crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable 
arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the 
snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock 
of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a 
whistling tinker his hammer* He would hum over his old rigadig 
tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long 
usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy-chair. 
What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever 
thought of it at all, might he a question ; hut, if he ever did chance to 
cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good 
sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and 
bestir themselves there, about something which he would find out when 
he obeyed the order, and not sooner. 
What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going, un- 
fearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a 
world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs ; 
what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humour of his — 
that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black 
little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would 
almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his 
nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready 
loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever, 
he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from 
the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to he in 
readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his 
legs into his trousers, he put his pipe into his mouth. 
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of 
his peculiar disposition ; for every one knows that this earthly air, 
whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries 
of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it ; and as in time of 
the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to 
their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb’s 
tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent. 
The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha’s Vine- 
yard; a short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning 
