1 The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England.
2 But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her visitors.
3 At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted.
4 It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.
5 I account that man more honourable than that great captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.
6 There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery.
7 Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen in this famous town.
8 And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply.
9 As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale. 10 Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's midnight, on the road running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning, dilapidated barn.
11 If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.
12 Thinking that viewed in some particular lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration.
13 The same waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans.