Animals: Moping Moby

Last fortnight many a resident of Newport, fashionable Rhode Island resort town, saw something few landlubbers ever see: a white whale. All week the great mammal hung close to shore, often displayed a 25-ft. expanse of white back.

When the white whale left, some observers thought it had headed up-coast toward New Bedford, whale-conscious Massachusetts town. Others thought it went across Narragansett Bay toward Block Island. Fanciful New Englanders said it might be the ghost of famed Moby Dick, returning to visit the region which he and Author Herman Melville put into...

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