The Moby-Dick Bible
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Themes › Youthful Recklessness

Youthful Recklessness

1 passage in the novel carry this mark, in the order they appear.

The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems.

Another point of difference between the male and female schools is still more characteristic of the sexes.

Chapter 88, Schools and Schoolmasters · verse 13

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