"The feller is a regular wooden-head," declared Shadrach, hotly. "I was
willin' to be reasonable; I was willin' to give in that this Jonah man
might have been out of his head and, after he was hove overboard and
cast ashore, thought he'd been swallowed by a whale or somethin' or
'nother. I picked up a sailor once who'd drifted around in a boat for a
week and he couldn't remember nothin' of what happened after the first
day or so. If you'd told him he'd been swallowed by a mackerel he
wouldn't have said no. But I've helped kill a good many whales--yes, and
I've helped cut 'em up, too--and I know what they look like inside. No
man, whether his name was Jonah or Jehoshaphat, could have lived three
days in a whale's stomach. How'd he breathe in there, eh? Cal'late the
whale had ventilators and a skylight in his main deck? How'd the whale
live all that time with a man hoppin' 'round inside him? Think I'd live
if I--if I swallowed a live mouse or somethin'? No, sir-ee! Either
that mouse would die or I would, I bet you! I've seen a whole parcel
of things took out of a whale's insides and some of the things had been
alive once, too; but they wasn't alive then; they was in chunks and part
digested. Jonah wasn't digested, was he? And the whale wasn't dead
of dyspepsy neither. That's what I told that minister. 'You try it
yourself,' I says to him. 'There's whales enough back of the Crab Ledge,
twenty mile off Orham,' said I. 'You're liable to run in sight of 'em
most any fair day in summer. You go off there and jump overboard some
time and see what happens. First place, no whale would swallow you; next
place, if it did 'twould chew you or sift you fine first; and, third
place, if you was whole and alive that whale would be dead inside of
ten minutes. You try it and see.' Good fair offer, wasn't it? But did
he take it up? Not much. Said I was a scoffer and an infidel and didn't
know anything about Scripture! 'I know about whales, anyhow,' I told
him. And he slammed off and wouldn't speak to me again. Don't talk to