fellow. He had on a new blue woolen Havre frock, with a new silk
handkerchief round his neck, passed through one of the vertebral bones
of a shark, highly polished and carved. His trowsers were of clear white
duck, and he sported a handsome pair of pumps, and a tarpaulin hat
bright as a looking-glass, with a long black ribbon streaming behind,
and getting entangled every now and then in the rigging; and he had gold
anchors in his ears, and a silver ring on one of his fingers, which was
very much worn and bent from pulling ropes and other work on board ship.
I thought he might better have left his jewelry at home.

It was a long time before I could believe that this man was really from
Greenland, though he looked strange enough to me, then, to have come
from the moon; and he was full of stories about that distant country;
how they passed the winters there; and how bitter cold it was; and how
he used to go to bed and sleep twelve hours, and get up again and run
about, and go to bed again, and get up again--there was no telling how
many times, and all in one night; for in the winter time in his country,
he said, the nights were so many weeks long, that a Greenland baby was
sometimes three months old, before it could properly be said to be a day
old.

I had seen mention made of such things before, in books of voyages; but
that was only reading about them, just as you read the Arabian Nights,
which no one ever believes; for somehow, when I read about these
wonderful countries, I never used really to believe what I read, but
only thought it very strange, and a good deal too strange to be
altogether true; though I never thought the men who wrote the book meant
to tell lies. But I don't know exactly how to explain what I mean; but
this much I will say, that I never believed in Greenland till I saw this
Greenlander. And at first, hearing him talk about Greenland, only made