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Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to
it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.
    First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part
of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough with
congealed tendons - a wad of muscle - but still contains some oil. After being
severed from the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable oblongs ere
going to the mincer. They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble.
    Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the
whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often
participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most
refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of
an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground,
dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in
pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it.
I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something
as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have
tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison
season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine
vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.
    There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the
course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to
describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen,
and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably oozy, stringy
affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing,
and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured
membranes of the case, coalescing.
    Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but
sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the dark,
glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right
whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that
ignoble leviathan.
    Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's vocabulary. But
as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman's nipper is a short firm strip
of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of leviathan
