 He looked like a man who had never cringed and never
had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his
forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive
than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was
his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it
reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular busts of him.
It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows,
which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded
on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
    Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half pretending meanwhile to be
looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence, never
troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared wholly occupied
with counting the pages of the marvellous book. Considering how sociably we had
been sleeping together the night previous, and especially considering the
affectionate arm I had found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I
thought this indifference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings;
at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing;
their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had
noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the
other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no
desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty
singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it.
Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn,
that is - which was the only way he could get there - thrown among people as
strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed
entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own
companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine
philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that.
But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so
living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself
out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must
have broken his digester.
    As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild
stage when, after its first intensity has
