173 
THE WHITE WHALE 
Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that 
of the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, 
large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a 
thousand monarchs in his lofty, over-scorning carriage. He was 
the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those 
days were only fenced by the Pocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. 
At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star 
which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade 
of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings 
more resplendent than gold and silver-heaters could have furnished him. 
A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western 
world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the 
glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, 
bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching 
amid his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that end- 
lessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his 
circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White 
Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through 
his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always 
to the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. 
Xor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of 
this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so 
clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it 
which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain 
nameless terror. 
But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that acces- 
sory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and 
Albatross. 
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often 
shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin ! 
lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a 
solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have 
frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic 
fowl. 
But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will 
tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At 
last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern tally round 
its neck, with the ship’s time and place; and then letting it escape. 
