In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts.  Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies.  Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives.  But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping.  In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh.  It makes a stranger stare.

But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical.  There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery.  They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance.  Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came.  In some things you would think them but a few hours old.  Look there! that chap strutting round the corner.  He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and a sheath-knife.  Here comes another with a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.

No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one—­I mean a downright bumpkin dandy—­a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands.  Now when a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport.  In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his canvas trowsers.  Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.

But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her visitors.  Not at all.  Still New Bedford is a queer place.  Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador.  As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony.  The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England.  It is a land of oil, true enough:  but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine.  The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs.  Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford.  Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?