From that day forward it healed, and troubled Samoa but little.
But shall the sequel be told?
How that, superstitiously averse to burying in the sea the dead limb of a body yet living; since in that case Samoa held, that he must very soon drown and follow it; and how, that equally dreading to keep the thing near him, he at last hung it aloft from the topmast-stay; where yet it was suspended, bandaged over and over in cerements.

The hand that must have locked many others in friendly clasp, or smote a foe, was no food, thought Samoa, for fowls of the air nor fishes of the sea.
Now, which was Samoa?
The dead arm swinging high as Haman?
Or the living trunk below?
Was the arm severed from the body, or the body from the arm?
The residual part of Samoa was alive, and therefore we say it was he.

But which of the writhing sections of a ten times severed worm, is the worm proper?
For myself, I ever regarded Samoa as but a large fragment of a man, not a man complete.

For was he not an entire limb out of pocket?
And the action at Teneriffe over, great Nelson himself--physiologically speaking--was but three-quarters of a man.

And the smoke of Waterloo blown by, what was Anglesea but the like?
After Saratoga, what Arnold?
To say nothing of Mutius Scaevola minus a hand, General Knox a thumb, and Hannibal an eye; and that old Roman grenadier, Dentatus, nothing more than a bruised and battered trunk, a knotty sort of hemlock of a warrior, hard to hack and hew into chips, though much marred in symmetry by battle-ax blows.