447 
THE WHITE WHALE 
house and garden ; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, 
and three blithe, ruddy children ; every Sunday went to a cheerful- 
looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of 
darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a 
desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of 
everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did igno- 
rantly conduct this burglar into his family’s heart. It was the Bottle 
Conjuror ! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, 
and shrivelled up his home. Uow, for prudent, most wise, and eco- 
nomic reasons, the blacksmith’s shop was in the basement of his dwell- 
ing, but with a separate entrance to it ; so that always had the young and 
loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness, but with 
vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old hus- 
band’s hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the 
floors and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and 
so, to stout Labour’s lullaby, the blacksmith’s infants were rocked to 
slumber. 
Oh, woe on woe ! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be 
timely? Hadst thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full 
ruin came upon him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, 
and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their 
after years; and all of them a care-killing competency. But Death 
plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily 
toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family,, and left the 
worse than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should 
make him easier to harvest. 
Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every 
day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew 
fainter than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tear- 
less eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; 
the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was 
sold ; the mother dived down into the long churchyard grass ; her chil- 
dren twice followed her thither ; and the houseless, familyless old man 
staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his 
grey head a scorn to flaxen curls ! 
Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but 
Death is only a launching into the reign of the strange Untried; it 
