For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air.
[…] and perhaps also because what we know partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail.
If before the war better-skilled smeltermen had little recourse against deadheaders, during the war they joined with foremen, itself a telling alliance, in using patriotic expectations to discipline those they believed were illegitimate deadheaders.
It goes on and gets rather graphic as Jimmy, under the impression that he’s speaking to someone at The Herald, pleads to be unembedded.