"Melville, Herman - Moby-Dick or The White Whale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Melville Herman)

-- The Spouter-Inn: --Peter Coffin. Coffin? --Spouter? --Rather ominous in that
particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket,
they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the
light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked
..

quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it
might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the
swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here
was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee. It was a
queer sort of place --a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and
leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous
wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul's
tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any
one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. In judging
of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon, says an old writer --of whose
works I possess the only copy extant -- it maketh a marvellous difference,
whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on
the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where
the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only
glazier. True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind --old
black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this
body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the
crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too
late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone
is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus

there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking
off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags,
and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the
tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken
wrapper --(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty
night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their
oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege
of making my own summer with my own coals. But what thinks Lazarus? Can he
warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would
not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him
down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye
..

gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost? Now,
that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of
Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of
the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace
made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only
drinks the tepid tears of orphans. But no more of this blubbering now, we are
going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the
ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this Spouter may
be.
..

.. < chapter iii 14 THE SPOUTER-INN >

Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn,