496 MOBY DICK; OR 
not to touch him, or he noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and 
stood there. 
Ahah turned. 
“Starbuck !” 
“Sir.'” 
a Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. 
On such a day — very much such a sweetness as this — I struck my 
first whale — a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty — forty — forty 
years ago! — ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of 
privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! 
for forty years has Ahah forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years 
to make war on the horrors of the deep ! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out 
of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of 
this life I have led ; the desolation of solitude it has been ; the masoned, 
walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small en- 
trance to any sympathy from the green country without — oh, weari- 
ness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! — when I 
think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me be- 
fore — and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare — fit 
emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil ! — when the poorest lands- 
man has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s 
fresh bread to my mouldy crusts away, whole oceans away, from 
that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the 
next day, leaving hut one dent in my marriage pillow — wife ? wife ? — 
rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor 
girl when I married her, Starbuck ; and then, the madness, the frenzy, 
the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand 
lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly, chased his prey — more 
a demon than- a man ? — aye, aye ! what a forty years’ fool — fool — old 
fool, has old Ahab been ! Why this strife of the chase ? why weary and 
palsy the arms at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer 
or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that 
with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched 
from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that 
I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some 
ashes ! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck ? I feel 
