432 
MOBY DICK; OR 
peared, an all-ramifying heartlessness ; — yet was it oddly daslied at 
times, with an old, crutch-like antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, 
not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness ; such 
as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch on 
the bearded forecastle of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old carpenter 
had been a lifelong wanderer, whose much rolling to and fro not only 
had gathered no moss, hut what is more, had rubbed off whatever 
small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him ? He 
was a stripped abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised 
as a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference to this 
world or the next. You might almost say, that this strange uncom- 
promisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his nu- 
merous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or by in- 
stinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any inter- 
mixture of all of these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf 
and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure manipulator; 
his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into 
the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning but 
still highly useful multum in parvo , Sheffield contrivances, assuming 
the exterior — though a little swelled — of a common pocket-knife; but 
containing, not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers, 
corkscrews, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, counter-sinkers. 
So, if his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, 
all they had to do was to open that part of him, and the screw 
was fast; or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they 
were. 
Yet, as previously hinted, this omni-tooled, open-and-shut carpenter, 
was after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have 
a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow 
anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksil- 
ver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was ; 
and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And 
this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him ; this 
it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquising; but only 
like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquises; or 
rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquiser on guard there, 
and talking all the time to keep himself awake. 
