Moby Dick, or the Whale by Herman Melville 4-7 Free Adventure Audiobook Children's Library.
this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org this reading by stuart wills moby dick by herman melville chapters four through seven
chapter four the counter pain upon waking next morning about daylight i found queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner you had almost thought i had been his wife the counterpane was of patchwork full of odd little party-colored squares and triangles and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable cretan labyrinth of a figure no two parts of which were of one precise shade owing i suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times this same arm of his i say looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt indeed partly lying on it as the arm did when i first awoke i could hardly tell it from the quilt they so blended their hues together and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that i could tell that queequeg was hugging me my sensations were strange let me try to explain them when i was a child i well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me whether it was a reality or a dream i never could entirely settle the circumstance was this i had been cutting up some caper or other i think it was trying to crawl up the chimney as i had seen a little sweep do a few days previous and my stepmother who somehow or other was all the time whipping me or sending me to bed supperless my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon of the 21st june the longest day of the year in our hemisphere i felt dreadfully but there was no help for it so upstairs i went to my little room in the third floor undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets i lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before i could hope for a resurrection sixteen hours in bed the small of my back ached to think of it and it was so light too the sun shining in at the window and a great rattling of coaches in the streets and the sound of gay voices all over the house i felt worse and worse at last i got up dressed and softly going down in my stocking feet sought out my stepmother and suddenly threw myself at her feet beseeching her as a particular favor to give me a good slippering for my misbehavior anything indeed but condemning me to lie a bed for such an endurable length of time but she was the best and most conscientious of stepmothers and back i had to go to my room for several hours i lay there broad awake feeling a great deal worse than i have ever done since even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes at last i must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze and slowly waking from it half steeped in dreams i opened my eyes and the before sunlit room was now wrapped in outer darkness instantly i felt a shock running through all my frame nothing was to be seen and nothing was to be heard but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine my arm hung over the counter pain and the nameless unimaginable silent form or phantom to which the hand belonged seemed closely seated by my bedside for what seemed ages piled on ages i lay there frozen with the most awful fears not daring to drag away my hand yet ever thinking that if i could but stir it one single inch the horrid spell would be broken i knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me but waking in the morning i shudderingly remembered it all and for days and weeks and months afterwards i lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery nay to this very hour i often puzzle myself with it now take away the awful fear and my sensations at...