 from his amorous
errors.
    Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is the
lord and master of that school technically known as the schoolmaster. It is
therefore not in strict character, however admirably satirical, that after going
to school himself, he should then go abroad inculcating not what he learned
there, but the folly of it. His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem
derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised
that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read
the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country schoolmaster
that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of those
occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.
    The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale betakes
himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged sperm whales. Almost
universally, a lone whale - as a solitary leviathan is called - proves an
ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near
him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters,
and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets.
    The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously
mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while those female
whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or forty-barrel bulls, as
they call them, are by far the most pugnacious of all leviathans, and
proverbially the most dangerous to encounter; excepting those wondrous
gray-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and these will fight you like grim
fiends exasperated by a penal gout.
    The forty-barrel bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a mob
of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round
the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would
insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon
relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three-fourths grown, break up,
and separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems.
    Another point of difference between the male and female schools is still
more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a forty-barrel bull - poor
devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike a member of the harem school, and
her companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering
so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey
