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Oh , woe on woe ! Oh , Death , why canst thou not sometimes be timely ? Hadst thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him , then had the young widow had a delicious grief , and her orphans a truly venerable , legendary sire to dream of in their after years ; and all of them a care - killing competency . But Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother , on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family , and left the worse than useless old man standing , till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest . Why tell the whole ? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more and more between ; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last ; the wife sat frozen at the window , with tearless eyes , glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children ; the bellows fell ; the forge choked up with cinders ; the house was sold ; the mother dived down into the long church - yard grass ; her children twice followed her thither ; and the houseless , familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape ; his every woe unreverenced ; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls ! Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this ; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried ; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote , the Wild , the Watery , the Unshored ; therefore , to the death - longing eyes of such men , who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide , does the all - contributed and all - receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable , taking terrors , and wonderful , new - life adventures ; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics , the thousand mermaids sing to them — “ Come hither , broken - hearted ; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death ; here are wonders supernatural , without dying for them . Come hither ! bury thyself in a life which , to your now equally abhorred and abhorring , landed world , is more oblivious than death . Come hither ! put up thy gravestone , too , within the churchyard , and come hither , till we marry thee ! ” Hearkening to these voices , East and West , by early sunrise , and by fall of eve , the blacksmith’s soul responded , Aye , I come ! And so Perth went a - whaling . CHAPTER 113 . The Forge . With matted beard , and swathed in a bristling shark - skin apron , about mid - day , Perth was standing between his forge and anvil , the latter placed upon an iron - wood log , with one hand holding a pike - head in the coals , and with the other at his forge’s lungs , when Captain Ahab came along , carrying in his hand a small rusty - looking leathern bag . While yet a little distance from the forge , moody Ahab paused ; till at last , Perth , withdrawing his iron from the fire , began hammering it upon the anvil — the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights , some of which flew close to Ahab . “ Are these thy Mother Carey’s chickens , Perth ? they are always flying in thy wake ; birds of good omen , too , but not to all ; — look here , they burn ; but thou — thou liv’st among them without a scorch . ”
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