The Good Taste of The Spouter-Inn

"Entering the gable-ended Spouter Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious artist , in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched...But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the pictures midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?"
- Herman Melville
Moby Dick