Chapter 19 - Page 2

to the heart the soul of all free-and-easy
honourable rovers.

I have said that I was wont to mount up aloft and muse; and thus
was it with me the night following the loss of the cooper. Ere my
watch in the top had expired, high up on the main-royal-yard I
reclined, the white jacket folded around me like Sir John Moore
in his frosted cloak.

Eight bells had struck, and my watchmates had hied to their
hammocks, and the other watch had gone to their stations, and the
_top_ below me was full of strangers, and still one hundred feet
above even _them_ I lay entranced; now dozing, now dreaming; now
thinking of things past, and anon of the life to come. Well-timed
was the latter thought, for the life to come was much nearer
overtaking me than I then could imagine. Perhaps I was half
conscious at last of a tremulous voice hailing the main-royal-
yard from the _top_. But if so, the consciousness glided away
from me, and left me in Lethe. But when, like lightning, the yard
dropped under me, and instinctively I clung with both hands to
the "_tie_," then I came to myself with a rush, and felt
something like a choking hand at my throat. For an instant I
thought the Gulf Stream in my head was whirling me away to
eternity; but the next moment I found myself standing; the yard
had descended to the _cup_; and shaking myself in my jacket, I
felt that I was unharmed and alive.

Who had done this? who had made this attempt on my life? thought
I, as I ran down the rigging.

"Here it comes!--Lord! Lord! here it comes! See, see! it is white
as a hammock."

"Who's coming?" I shouted, springing down into the top; "who's
white as a hammock?"

"Bless my soul, Bill it's only White-Jacket--that infernal White-
Jacket again!"

It seems they had spied a moving white spot there aloft, and,
sailor-like, had taken me for the ghost of the cooper; and after
hailing me, and bidding me descend, to test my corporeality, and
getting no answer, they had lowered the halyards in affright.

In a rage I tore off the jacket, and threw it on the deck.

"Jacket," cried I, "you must change your complexion! you must hie
to the dyers and be dyed, that I may live. I have but one poor
life, White-Jacket, and that life I cannot spare. I cannot
consent to die for _you_, but be dyed you must for me. You can
dye many times without injury; but I cannot die without
irreparable loss, and running the eternal risk."

So in the morning, jacket in hand, I repaired to the First
Lieutenant, and related the narrow escape I had had during the
night. I enlarged upon the general perils I ran in being taken
for a ghost, and earnestly