CHAPTER 4

The Counterpane


Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm
thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner.
You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was
of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles;
and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan
labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade--
owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun
and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times--
this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip
of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm
did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt,
they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense
of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.

My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was
a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me;
whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle.
The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other--
I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little
sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other,
was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,--
my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off
to bed, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon of the 21st June,