"
"With what?" shouted I.
"With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world?"
"I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly,
"you'd better stop spinning that yarn to me--I'm not green."
"May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick,
"but I rayther guess you'll be done brown if that ere harpooneer
hears you a slanderin' his head."
"I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a passion again
at this unaccountable farrago of the landlord's.
"It's broke a'ready," said he.
"Broke," said I--"broke, do you mean?"
"Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess."
"Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
snowstorm--"landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand
one another, and that too without delay. I come to your house
and want a bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one;
that the other half belongs to a certain harpooneer.
And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist
in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending
to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you
design for my bedfellow--a sort of connexion, landlord, which is
an intimate and confidential one in the highest degree.
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