364 MOBY DICK; OR 
babies all over the world ; every baby an exotic. In good time, never- 
theless, as the ardour of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; 
as reflection lends her seldom pauses ; in short, as a general lassitude 
overtakes the sated Turk ; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the 
love for maidens ; our Ottoman enters upon the repentant, admonitory 
stage of life, forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, 
sulky old soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels 
saying his prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his juve- 
nile errors. 
Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so 
is the lord and master of that school technically known as the school- 
master. It is therefore not in strict character, however admirably 
satirical, that after going to school himself, he should then go abroad 
inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title, 
schoolmaster, would very naturally seem, derived from the name be- 
stowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man 
who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the 
memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country 
schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and 
what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of 
his pupils. 
The same secludedness and isolation to which the: schoolmaster 
whale betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged 
Sperm Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale — as a solitary 
Leviathan is called — proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss- 
bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature her- 
self ; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best 
of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets. 
The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, pre- 
viously mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For 
while those female whales are characteristically timid, the young 
males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pug- 
nacious of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to en- 
counter ; excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, some- 
times met, and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a 
penal gout. 
