All I had was twenty cents, but I put it up like a man, though with secret regret at the enormous store of candy it could have bought.

The liquor mounted in the heads of all of us, and the talk of Scotty and the harpooner was upon running the Easting down, gales off the Horn and pamperos off the Plate, lower topsail breezes, southerly busters, North Pacific gales, and of smashed whaleboats in the Arctic ice.
"You can't swim in that ice water," said the harpooner confidentially to me.

"You double up in a minute and go down.

When a whale smashes your boat, the thing to do is to get your belly across an oar, so that when the cold doubles you you'll float." "Sure," I said, with a grateful nod and an air of certitude that I, too, would hunt whales and be in smashed boats in the Arctic Ocean.

And, truly, I registered his advice as singularly valuable information, and filed it away in my brain, where it persists to this day.
But I couldn't talk--at first.