us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders.
In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better
than try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given
us about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we
opened a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on
the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard,
and that done, then ask the first man we met where the place was;
these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first,
especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse--
our first point of departure--must be left on the larboard hand,
whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard.
However, by dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now
and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way,
we at last came to something which there was no mistaking.

Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses'
ears, swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front
of an old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the
other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows.
Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time,
but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving.
A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two
remaining horns; yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me.
It's ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first
whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel,
and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too!
Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?

I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled
woman with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch