"Broke," said I--"broke, do you mean?"

"Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess."

"Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
snowstorm--"landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand
one another, and that too without delay. I come to your house
and want a bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one;
that the other half belongs to a certain harpooneer.
And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist
in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending
to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you
design for my bedfellow--a sort of connexion, landlord, which is
an intimate and confidential one in the highest degree.
I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this
harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe
to spend the night with him. And in the first place, you will
be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head,
which if true I take to be good evidence that this harpooneer
is stark mad, and I've no idea of sleeping with a madman;
and you, sir, you I mean, landlord, you, sir, by trying to induce
me to do so knowingly would thereby render yourself liable
to a criminal prosecution."

"Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a
purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then.
But be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin'
you of has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up
a lot of 'balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know),
and he's sold all on 'em but one, and that one he's trying to sell