Hark! — Moby-Dick

It is the middle watch, the moon is fair, and the men stand in a cordon from a fresh-water butt in the waist to the scuttle-butt near the taffrail, passing buckets to fill it. Most of them are on the quarter-deck, so they will not speak and they will not rustle a foot. The buckets move in a silence broken only by the flap of a sail and the steady hum of the keel.

Archy, whose post is near the after-hatches, whispers to his neighbour Cabaco, a Cholo, that he heard a noise. Cabaco tells him to take the bucket and asks what noise he means. Archy hears it again under the hatches: a cough, then a sound like two or three sleepers turning over. Cabaco damns the cough, blames the three soaked biscuits Archy ate for supper, and tells him to look to the bucket. He also names Archy as the chap who once heard an old Quakeress's knitting-needles hum fifty miles at sea from Nantucket.

Archy lets him grin. He has sharp ears, he says, and somebody is down in the after-hold who has not yet been seen on deck. He suspects the old Mogul knows something of it. One morning watch he heard Stubb tell Flask that something of that sort was in the wind. Cabaco's answer is still the bucket.