It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about
the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and
teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out,
Wretched entertainment at the sign of 'The Trap!'
Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from
the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up,
saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it,
faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray,
and these words underneath--"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.
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