A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit.

It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.

Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of 'The Trap!' Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath--"The Spouter Inn:--Peter Coffin." Coffin ?--Spouter ?--Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I.But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there.

As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.
It was a queer sort of place--a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly.

It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft.