This done, the carpenter received orders to have the leg
completed that night; and to provide all the fittings for it,
independent of those pertaining to the distrusted one in use.
Moreover, the ship's forge was ordered to be hoisted out of its
temporary idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate the affair,
the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the forging
of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.
CHAPTER 107
The Carpenter
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take
high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur,
and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass,
and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates,
both contemporary and hereditary. But most humble though he was,
and far from furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction;
the Pequod's carpenter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes
in person on this stage.
Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging
to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-hand, practical extent,
alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own;
the carpenter's pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk
of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do
with wood as an auxiliary material.
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