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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of By The Sea, by Heman White Chaplin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: By The Sea
+       1887
+
+Author: Heman White Chaplin
+
+Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #23001]
+Last Updated: March 8, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BY THE SEA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SEA
+
+1887
+
+By Heman White Chaplin
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+On the southeastern coast of Massachusetts is a small village with
+which I was once familiarly acquainted. It differs little in its general
+aspect from other hamlets scattered along that shore. It has its one
+long, straggling street, plain and homelike, from which at two or three
+different points a winding lane leads off and ends abruptly in the
+water.
+
+Fifty years ago the village had a business activity of its own. There
+still remain the vestiges of a wharf at a point where once was a
+hammering ship-yard. Here and there, in bare fields along the sea,
+are the ruins of vats and windmills,--picturesque remains of ancient
+salt-works.
+
+There is no visible sign left now of the noisy life of the ship-yards,
+except a marble stone beneath a willow in the burying-ground on the
+hill, which laments the untimely death of a youth of nineteen, killed in
+1830 in the launching of a brig. But traces of the salt-works everywhere
+remain, in frequent sheds and small barns which are wet and dry, as
+the saying is, all the time, and will not hold paint. They are built of
+salt-boards.
+
+There were a good many of the people of the village and its adjoining
+country who interested me very greatly. I am going to tell you a simple
+event which happened in one of its families, deeply affecting its little
+history.
+
+James Parsons was a man perhaps sixty years of age, strongly built,
+gray-haired, cleanshaven except for the conventional seaman's fringe of
+beard below the chin, and always exquisitely neat. Whether you met him
+in his best suit, on Sunday morning, or in his old clothes, going to
+his oyster-beds or his cranberry-marsh, it was always the same. He was
+usually in his shirt-sleeves in summer. His white cotton shirt, with
+its easy collar and wristbands, seemed always to have just come from the
+ironing-board. “It ain't no trouble at all to keep James clean,” I have
+heard Mrs. Parsons say, in her funny little way; “he picks his way round
+for all the world just like a pussycat, and never gets no spots on him,
+nowhere.”
+
+You saw at once, upon the slightest acquaintance with James, that while
+he was of the same general civilization as his neighbors, he was of
+a different type. In his narrowness, there was a peculiar breadth and
+vigor which characterized him. He had about him the atmosphere of a
+wider ocean.
+
+His early reminiscences were all of that picturesque and adventurous
+life which prevailed along our coasts to within forty years, and his
+conversation was suggestive of it He held a silver medal from the Humane
+Society for conspicuous bravery in the rescue of the crew of a ship
+stranded in winter in a storm of sleet off Post Hill Bar. He had a
+war-hatchet, for which he had negotiated face to face with a naked
+cannibal in the South Sea. He was familiar with the Hoogly.
+
+His language savored always of the sea. His hens “turned in,” at night.
+He was full of sayings and formulas of a maritime nature; there was
+one which always seemed to me to have something of a weird and mystic
+character: “South moon brings high water on Coast Island Bar.” In
+describing the transactions of domestic life, he used words more
+properly applicable to the movements of large ships. He would speak of a
+saucepan as if it weighed a hundred tons. He never tossed or threw even
+the slightest object; he hove it. “Why, father!” said Mrs. Parsons,
+surprised at seeing him for a moment untidy; “what have you ben doing?
+Your boots and trousers-legs is all white!” “Yes,” said Mr. Parsons,
+apologetically, looking down upon his dusty garments, “I just took that
+bucket of ashes and hove 'em into the henhouse.”
+
+The word “heave,” in fact, was always upon his tongue. It applied to
+everything. “How was this road straightened out?” I asked him one day;
+“did the town vote to do it?” “No, no,” he said quickly; “there was n't
+never no vote. The se-lec'men just come along one day, and got us all
+together, and hove in and hove out; and we altered our fences to suit.”
+
+I remember hearing him testify as a witness to a will. It appeared
+that the testator was sick in bed when he signed the instrument. He was
+suffering greatly, and when he was to sign, it was necessary to lift him
+with the ex-tremest care, to turn him to the light-stand. “State what
+was done next,” the lawyer asked of James. “Captain Frost was laying on
+his left side,” said James. “Two of us took a holt of him and rolled him
+over.”
+
+He had probably not the least suspicion that his language had a maritime
+flavor. I asked him one night, as we coasted along toward home, “What do
+seafaring men call the track of light that the moon makes on the water?
+They must have some name for it” “No, no,” he said, “they don't have no
+name for it; they just call it 'the wake of the moon.'”
+
+James's learning had been chiefly gained from the outside world and not
+from books. I have heard him lay it down as a fact that the word “Bible”
+ had its etymology from the word “by-bill” (hand-bill). “It was writ,”
+ he said, “in small parcels, and they was passed around by them that writ
+'em, like by-bills; and so when they hove it all into one, they called
+it the Bible.'”
+
+But while James had little learning himself, he appreciated it highly in
+others. I had occasion to ask him once why it was that the son of one
+of his neighbors, in closing up his father's estate, had not settled his
+accounts regularly in the probate court. “Oh, I know how that was,” he
+replied; “he settled 'em the other way. You see, he went to the college
+at Woonsocket, and he learned there how to settle accounts the other
+way: and that's the way he settled 'em.” And then he added, “When Alvin
+left the college, they giv' him a book that tells how to do all kinds
+of business, and what you want to do so's to make money; and Alvin has
+always followed them rules. The consequence is, he's made money, and
+what he 's made, he 's kep' it. I suppose he's worth not less than
+sixteen hundred dollars.”
+
+Sometimes he would venture a remark of a gallant nature. “They don't
+generally git the lights in the hall so as to suit me,” he once said.
+“I don't want it too light, because then it hurts my eyes; but I want it
+light enough so as 't I can see the women!”
+
+James was a large, strong man, but Mrs. Parsons, although she was little
+and slight, and was always ailing, constantly assumed the rôle of her
+husband's nurse and protector, not only in household matters, but in
+other affairs of life. Whenever she had visitors,--and she and James
+were hospitable in the extreme,--she was pretty sure to end up, sooner
+or later, if James were present, with some droll criticism of him, as
+much to his delight as to hers.
+
+James sometimes liked to affect a certain harshness of demeanor; but the
+disguise was a transparent one. How well do I remember the time--oh,
+so long ago!--when for some reason or other I happened to have his boat
+instead of my own, one day, with one of the boys of the village, to go
+to Matamet, twelve miles off, to visit certain lobster-pots which we had
+set. We were delayed there by breaking our boom, in jibing. We should
+have been at home at noon; at seven in the evening we were not yet in
+sight. When we got in, rather crestfallen at our disaster, particularly
+as the boat was wanted for the next day, James met us at the pier. We
+were boys then, and his tongue was free. As he stood there on the shore,
+bare-headed, hastily summoned from his house, with his hair blowing in
+the wind, waving his hands and addressing first us and then a knot of
+men who stood smoking by, no words of censure were too harsh, no
+comment on our carelessness too cutting, no laments too keen over the
+irreparable loss of that particular boom. The next time I could take my
+own boat, if I were going to get cast away. And I remember well how he
+ended his tirade. “I did n't care nothing about you two,” he said. “If
+you want to git drownded, git drownded; it ain't nothing to me. All I
+was afraid of was that you 'd gone and capsized my boat, and would
+n't never turn up to tell where you sunk her. But as for you--” and he
+laughed a laugh of heartless indifference.
+
+But ten minutes later, and right before his face, at his own front gate,
+Mrs. Parsons betrayed him. “I never see father so worried,” she said,
+“sence the time he heard about Thomas; why, he 's spent the whole
+afternoon as nervous as a hawk, going up on the hill with his
+spy-glass; and I don't feel so sure but what he was crying. He said he
+did n't care nothing about the boat,--'What 's that old boat!' says he;
+but if you boys was drownded out of her, he would n't never git over
+it.” At which James, being so unmasked, laughed in a shamefaced way,
+and shook us by the shoulders. He had a son who carried on some sort
+of half-maritime business on one of the wharves, in the city, and lived
+over his shop. When James went at intervals to visit him, he made his
+way at once from the railway station to the nearest wharf; then he
+followed the line of the water around to the shop. Where jib-booms
+project out over the sidewalk, one feels so thoroughly at home! From the
+shop he would make short adventurous excursions up Commercial Street and
+State Street, sometimes going no farther than the nautical-instrument
+store on the corner of Broad Street, sometimes venturing to Washington
+Street, or even moving for a short distance up or down in the current of
+that gay thoroughfare. He loved to comment satirically on the city, with
+a broad humorous sense of his own strangeness there. “The city folks
+don't seem to have nothing to do,” he said. “They seem to be all out,
+walking up and down the streets. Come noon, I thought there'd be some
+let-up for dinner; but they did n't seem to want nothing to eat; they
+kep' right on walking.”
+
+I must not leave James Parsons without telling you of two whale's teeth
+which stand on his parlor mantel-piece; he ornamented them himself,
+copying the designs from cheap foreign prints. One of them is what he
+calls “the meeting-house.” It is the high altar of the Cathedral of
+Seville. On the other is “the wild-beast tamer.” A man with a feeble,
+wishy-washy expression holds by each hand a fierce, but subjugated
+tiger. His legs dangle loosely in the air. There is nothing to suggest
+what upholds him in his mighty contest.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Now we must turn from James Parsons to a man of a different type, or
+rather of a different variety of the same type; for they descend
+alike from original founders of the town, and, like most of their
+fellow-townsmen, are both of unqualified Pilgrim stock.
+
+To get to Captain Joseph Pelham's house, you have to drive along a range
+of hills for some miles, skirting the sea; then you come, half-way, to a
+bright modern village with trees along the main street, with houses and
+fences kept painted up, for the most part, but here and there relieved
+by an unpainted dwelling of a past generation.
+
+Here you have an option. You may either pursue your road through the
+high-lying prosperous street, with peeps of salt water to the right,
+or you may turn sharply off at a little store and descend to the lower
+road. It is always a struggle to choose.
+
+The road to the beach descends a sharp, gravelly hill, and crosses a
+bridge. Then you come out on a waste of salt-marsh, threaded by the
+creek, broken by wild, fantastic sand-hills, grown over by beach-grass
+which will cut your fingers like a knife. You drive close along
+the white, precipitous beach; you pass the long, shaky pier, with
+half-decayed fish-houses at the other end, and picturesque heaps of
+fish-cars, seines, and barrels. Then the road, following the shore a
+little longer, climbs the hill and enters the woods. Two miles more and
+you come out to fields with mossy fences, and occasional houses.
+
+The houses begin to be more frequent. All at once you enter the main
+street of W------.
+
+In a moment you see that you have come into a new atmosphere. There is a
+large modern church among the older ones. There are large, fine houses,
+some old-fashioned, others new. By some miraculous intervention Queen
+Anne has not as yet made her appearance. There are handsome, well-filled
+stores, going into no little refinement in stock. There is, of course,
+a small brick library, built by the bounty of a New Yorker who was born
+here. There is a brick national bank, and a face brick block occupied
+above by Freemasons, orders of Red Men, Knights Templars, and the Pool
+of Siloam Lodge, I. O. O. F., and below by a savings bank and a local
+marine insurance company.
+
+It is here that we shall find Captain Joseph Pelham. If a stranger has
+occasion to inquire for the leading men of the place he is always first
+referred to him. It is he who heads every list and is the chairman
+of every meeting. When a certain public man, commanding but a small
+following here, appeared, upon his campaign tour, and found no one
+to escort him to the platform and preside, so that he was obliged to
+justify his appearance here by the Scripture passage, “They that are
+whole need not a physician, but they that are sick;” at the moment
+of entering the hall, closely packed with curious opponents, disposed
+perhaps to be derisive when the situation for the visitor was
+embarrassing in the extreme,--it was Captain Joseph Pelham who, though
+the bitterest opponent of them all, rose from his seat, gave the speaker
+his arm, escorted him to the platform, presented him with grave courtesy
+to the audience, and sat beside him through the entire discourse.
+
+While Captain Pelham continued to go to sea, and after that, until he
+was made president of the insurance company, he lived a mile or two out
+of the town, in a house he had inherited. It is picturesquely situated,
+on a bare hill, with a wide view of the inland and the ocean. As
+you look down from its south windows, the cluster of houses nestling
+together at the shore below stand sharply out against the water. It is
+one of those white houses common in our older towns,--two-storied, long
+on the street, with the front door in the middle. Of the interior it is
+enough to say that its owner had sailed for thirty years to Hong-Kong,
+Calcutta and Madras. It had a prevailing odor of teak and lacquer. In
+the front hall was a vast china cane-holder; a turretted Calcutta hat
+hung on the hat-tree; a heavy, varnished Chinese umbrella stood in a
+corner; a long and handsome settee from Java stood against the wall.
+In the parlors, on either hand, were Chinese tables shutting up like
+telescopes, elaborate rattan chairs of different kinds, and numberless
+other things of this sort, which had plainly been honestly come by, and
+not bought.
+
+Then, if you met the Captain's favor, he would show you with becoming
+pride some family relics, and tell you about them. They came mostly
+from his paternal grandfather, who was a shipmaster too, had commanded a
+privateer in the Revolution, and made a fortune. There were a number
+of pieces of handsome furniture,--these you could see for yourself What
+would be shown you, with a half-diffident air, would be: a silver mug;
+two Revere tablespoons; a few tiny teaspoons marked F.; a handsome sword
+and scabbard; a yellow satin waistcoat and small-clothes; portraits,
+not artistic, but effective, of his grandfather, in a velvet coat and
+knee-breeches, with a long spyglass in his hand, and of his grandmother,
+a strong, matter-of-fact looking woman, handsomely dressed.
+
+But the thing which the Captain secretly treasured most, but brought out
+last, was his grandmother's Dutch Bible. It is a curious old book; you
+can see it still if you wish. It has an elaborate frontispiece. Sixteen
+cuts of leading incidents in Scripture history conduct you by gentle
+stages, from Eden, through the offering of Isaac, to the close of the
+Evangelists, and surround Dr. Martin Luther, who, in a gown, holds back
+the curtains of a pillared alcove, to show you, through two windows, an
+Old and a New Testament landscape, and a lady sitting beneath a canopy,
+with an open volume. The covers are of thick bevelled board covered with
+leather. There was once a heavy clasp. The edges are richly gilded, and
+figures are pricked in the gilding. It is very handsomely printed.
+It was in the possession, in 1760, of a young New England girl, the
+Captain's grandmother. There is a story about it,--a story too long to
+tell here. Suffice it to say that the Captain's ancestor, who settled
+early in New England, came from Leyden shortly after Mr. John Robinson.
+A hundred years later and more, in the oddest way, an acquaintance
+sprang up with certain Dutch connections, and in the course of it this
+Bible, then new and elegant, found its way over the sea as a gift to
+young Mistress Preston. In New England, and as a relic of the early
+ties of our people with Holland, momentarily renewed after a century had
+passed away, it is probably unique. It was a last farewell from Holland
+to her English children, before she parted company with them forever.
+
+I have told you about this house, as I recall it, although Captain
+Pelham had now ceased to live there, because it was there alone that he
+seemed completely at home. Furnished as it was from the four quarters
+of the globe, everything seemed to fit in with his ways. He supplemented
+the Chinese tables, and they supplemented him. But when he ceased to
+go to sea, in late middle life, and settled down at home upon his
+competency, and began a little later to become interested in public
+matters; when he was at last made president of the insurance company,
+a director in the bank, and a trustee in the savings bank, and when
+affairs were left more and more to his control, it became convenient for
+him to get into town; and his wife and daughter were perhaps ambitious
+for the change.
+
+So he had sold his house by the sea, and had bought a large and somewhat
+pretentious one on the main street, with a cast-iron summer arbor, and
+a bay-window closed in for a conservatory. He had furnished it from the
+city with new Brussels carpet, with a parlor set, a sitting-room set,
+a dining-room set, and chamber sets; and the antique things which had
+given his former home an air of charming picturesqueness were for the
+most part tucked away in unnoticed corners.
+
+The Captain never seemed to me to have become quite naturalized in his
+new home. He never belonged to the furniture, or the furniture to him.
+The place where you saw him best in these later days was in the office
+of his insurance company, or in the little business-room of one of the
+banks, surrounded by a knot of more substantial townsmen, or talking
+patiently with some small farmer or seafaring man seeking for insurance
+or a loan. One of the most marked features of his character was a
+certain patience and considerateness which made all borrowers apply by
+preference to him. He would sit down at his little table with a plain
+man whose affairs were in disorder, and listen with close attention
+to his application for a loan. Somehow the man would find himself
+disclosing all the particulars of his distress. Then Captain Pelham, in
+his quiet way, would go over the whole matter with him; would plan
+with him on his concerns; would try to see if it were not possible to
+postpone a little the payment of debts and to hasten the collection of
+claims; to get a part of the money for a short time from a son in Boston
+or a married daughter in New Bedford; and so, by pulling and hauling, to
+weather the Cape.
+
+I must say a word about his position in town matters. He had been at sea
+the greater part of the time from sixteen to fifty-two. During that time
+he had had absolutely no concern with political affairs. He had never
+voted: for he had never, as it had happened, been ashore at the time of
+an election. And yet before he had been at home six years he was one
+of the selectmen of the town and overseer of the poor, and had
+become familiar with the details of Massachusetts town government,
+superficially so simple, in fact so complex. It was a large town, of no
+small wealth. Lying as it did along the seaboard, where havoc was always
+being made by disasters of the sea, there was not only a larger number
+than in an inland town of persons actually quartered in the poorhouse,
+but there were many broken families who had to be helped in their own
+homes. And it was to me an interesting fact that in dealing with two
+score households of this class, Captain Pel-ham, who had spent most of
+his time at sea, was able to display the utmost tact and judgment. He
+applied to their affairs that same plain kindliness and sound sense
+which he showed in the matter of discounts at the bank.
+
+While the friendships of Captain Pelham were chiefly in his own town,
+his acquaintance was not confined to it. In his own quiet, unpretending
+way he was something of a man of the world. He was known in the marine
+insurance offices in the large cities. He had been familiar all his
+life with large affairs; he had commanded valuable ships, loaded with
+fortunes in teas and silks, in the days when an India captain was a
+merchant.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+You will ask me why it is that I have been telling you about these men,
+and what it is that connects them.
+
+It was now ten years since Captain Pelham's only son, himself at
+twenty-two the master of a vessel, had married a daughter of James
+Parsons,--a tall, impulsive, and warm-hearted girl,--one of those girls
+to whom children always cling. Both James Parsons's daughters had proved
+attractive and had married well. It had been a disappointment in Captain
+Pelham's household, perhaps, that this son, their especial pride, should
+not have married into one of the wealthy families in his own village. At
+first there had been a little visiting to and fro; it had lasted but a
+little time, and then the two households had settled down, as the way is
+in the country, to follow each its own natural course of living. George
+Pelham's wife had always lived in an odd little house, all doors and
+windows, near by her father, in her native village.
+
+It was from Porto Cabello that that message came,--yellow fever--a short
+sickness--a burial in a stranger's grave. George Pelham's wife had been
+for two or three years of less than her usual strength. It was not long
+after that news came,--came so suddenly, with no warning,--that she
+began to fade away; and after ten months she died.
+
+I remember seeing her a week or two before her death. Her bed had
+been set up in her little parlor for the convenience of those who were
+attending upon her. She lay on her back, bolstered up. The paleness of
+her face was intensified by her coal-black hair, lying back heavy on
+the pillow. Her hands were thin and transparent, and I remember well the
+straining look in her eyes as she talked with me about the boy whom she
+was going to leave.
+
+She was living, as I have said, close by her father. It was natural that
+in the last few days of her illness the child should be taken to her
+father's house, and when she died and the funeral was over, it was there
+that he returned.
+
+Picture now to yourself a boy toward nine years old, symmetrically made,
+firm and hard. His head is round, his features are good, his hair is
+fine and lies down close. He is clothed in a neat print jacket, with
+a collar and a little handkerchief at the neck, and a pair of short
+trousers buttoned on to the jacket. He is barefoot. He is tanned but not
+burnt. His complexion is of a rich dark brown. He is always fresh and
+clean. But the great charm about him is the expression of infinite fun
+and mirth that is always upon his face. Never for a moment while he is
+awake is his face still. Always the same, yet always shifting, with a
+thousand varying shades of roguish joy. Quick, bright, full of boyish
+repartee, full of shouts and laughter. And the same incessant life which
+plays upon his face shows itself in every movement of his limbs. Never
+for a moment is he still unless he has some work upon his hands. He has
+his little routine of tasks, regularly assigned, which he goes through
+with the most amusing good-humor and attention. It is his duty to see
+that the skiffs are not jammed under the wharf on the rising tide; to
+sweep out the “Annie” when she comes in, and to set her cabin to rights;
+to set away the dishes after meals, and to feed the chickens. Aside from
+a few such tasks, his time in summer is his own. The rest of the year he
+goes to the “primary,” and serves to keep the whole room in a state of
+mirth. He has the happy gift that to put every one in high spirits he
+has only to be present. Such an incessant flow of life you rarely see.
+His manners are good, and he comes honestly by them.
+
+There is an amusing union in him of the baby and the man. While the
+children of his age at the summer hotel walk about for the most part
+with their nurses, he is turned loose upon the shore, and has been,
+from his cradle. He can dive and swim and paddle and float and “go
+steamboat.” He can row a boat that is not too heavy, and up to the limit
+of his strength he can steer a sail-boat with substantial skill. He
+knows the currents, the tides, and the shoals about his shore, and the
+nearer landmarks. He knows that to find the threadlike entrance to
+the bay you bring the flag-staff over Cart-wright's barn. He has vague
+theories of his own as to the annual shifting of the channel. He knows
+where to take the city children to look for tinkle-shells and mussels.
+He knows what winds bring in the scallops from their beds. He knows
+where to dig for clams, and where to tread for quahaugs without
+disturbing the oysters. He has a good deal of fragmentary lore of the
+sea.
+
+Every morning you will hear his cry, a sort of yodel, or bird-call,
+peculiar to him, with which he bursts forth upon the world. Then you
+will hear, perhaps, loud peals of laughter at something that has excited
+his sense of the absurd,--contagious laughter, full of innocent fun.
+
+Then he will appear, perhaps, with his wooden dinner-bucket,--he is
+going off with his grandfather for the day,--and will yodel to the old
+man as a signal to make haste. Then you will hear him consulting with
+some one upon the weather.
+
+All this time he will be going; through various evolutions, swinging in
+the hammock, sitting on the fence, opening his bucket to show you what
+he has to eat, closing the bucket and sitting down upon the cover,
+or turning somersaults upon the grass. Then he will encamp under an
+apple-tree to wait until his grandfather appears, enlivening the time by
+a score of minute excursions after hens and cats. Then he will go into
+the house again, and rock while the old man finishes his coffee, sure
+of a greeting, confident in a sense of entire good-fellowship, until
+the meal is finished, and James Parsons is ready to take his coat and
+a red-bladed oar, and set out. Then the boy is like a setter off for
+a walk,--all sorts of whimsical expressions in his face, of absolute
+delight; every form of extravagance in his bearing. The only trouble
+is, one has to laugh too much; but with all this, something so manly, so
+companionable.
+
+He is no little of a philosopher in his way. He has been a great deal
+with older people, and has caught the habit of discussion of affairs, or
+rather, perhaps, of unconsciously reflecting forth discussions which he
+has heard. He has an infinite curiosity upon all matters of human life.
+He likes, within limits, to discuss character.
+
+In the boat his chief delights are to talk, to eat cookies, and to
+steer. When it is not blowing too hard for him to stand at the tiller,
+he will steer for an hour together, watching with the most constant care
+the trembling of the leach.
+
+It makes no difference to him at what hour he returns,--from oystering
+or from the cranberry-bog. If it is in the middle of the afternoon, good
+and well. Instantly upon landing he will collect a troop of urchins; in
+an incredibly short space of time there will be a heap of little clothes
+upon the bank; in a moment a procession of small naked figures will go
+running down to the wharf, diving, one after the other. If distance
+or tide or a calm keeps him out late, so much the better. In that case
+there is the romance of coasting along the shore by night; of counting
+and distinguishing the lights; of guessing the nearness to land from the
+dull roar of the sea breaking on the beach. “Don't you think,” he will
+sometimes say, “that we are nearer shore than we think we are?”
+
+It is amusing sometimes, on a distant voyage of fifteen or twenty miles,
+after seed oysters, when a landing is made at some little port, to see
+him drop the mariner at once and become a child, with a burning
+desire to find a shop where he can buy animal-crackers. Finding such
+a place,--and usually it is not difficult,--he will lay in a supply of
+lions and tigers, and then go marching about with great delight, with
+mockery in his eyes, keenly appreciating the satire involved in eating
+the head off a cooky lion, incapable of resistance.
+
+No picture of Joe would be complete which left out his dog. Kit was a
+black, fine-haired creature, smaller than a collie, but of much the same
+gentle disposition,--a present from Captain Pelham. When Kit was first
+presented to the boy he domesticated himself at once, and in a week it
+was impossible to tell, from his relations with the household, which was
+boy and which was dog. They were both boys and they were both dogs.
+Kit had an unqualified sense of being at home, and of being beloved
+and indispensable. It was long before he became a sailor. When, at the
+outset, it was attempted to make a man of him by taking him when they
+went out to fish, the failure seemed to be complete. He was a little
+sea-sick. Then he was sad, and sighed and groaned as dogs never do on
+shore. He would not lie still, but was nervous and feverish. Once he
+leaped out of the boat and made for shore, and had to be pursued and
+rescued, exhausted and half-drowned. Still, whenever he had to be left
+at home, it was a struggle every time to reconcile him and leave him.
+Once he pursued a boat which he mistook for James's along the shore of
+the bay, half down to Benson's Narrows, got involved in the creeks which
+the tide was beginning to fill, and had to be brought ingloriously home
+by a farmer, made fast on the top of a load of sweet, salt hay.
+
+He would tease like a child to be allowed to go. He would listen with
+an unsatisfied and appealing look while Joe, with an exuberant but
+regretful air, explained to him in detail the reasons which made it
+impossible for him to go. But in a few months, as the dog grew older,
+he prevailed, and although he would generally retire into the shelter of
+the cabin, he was nevertheless the boy's almost inseparable companion
+on the water as on the shore. The relation between the two was always
+touching. It evidently never crossed the dog's mind that he was not a
+younger brother.
+
+Now, to complete the picture of James Par-sons's household, add in this
+boy; for while it is but just now that he is strictly of it, he has been
+for years its mirth and life.
+
+I remember that quiet household before it knew him,--cosey, homelike,
+with a pervading air even then of genial humor, but with long hours of
+silence and repose,--geraniums and the click of knitting-needles in the
+sitting-room; faint odors of a fragrant pipe from the shed kitchen; no
+stir of boisterous fun, except when some bronzed, solemn joker, with his
+wife, came in for a formal call, and solemnity gave way, by a gradual
+descent, to merriment. Joe had given no new departure, only an impulse.
+“James used to behave himself quite well,” Mrs. Parsons would say,
+archly raising her eyebrows, “before Joe's time; but now there 's two
+boys of 'em together, and the one as bad as the other, and I can't do
+nothing with 'em. And then,”--with a mock gesture of despair,--“that
+dog!”
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+While Joe's mother was lying ill, and after it had become certain
+that she would soon leave this world forever, the question had been
+freely-discussed as to what her boy's future should be. In Captain
+Joseph Pelham's mind there was only-one answer to this question,--that
+the lad should come to him. He bore the Captain's name; he represented
+the Captain's son; he should take a place now in the Captain's home.
+
+It was now about three weeks since Joe's mother had been buried. The
+stone had not yet been cut and set over her grave. But the Captain
+thought it time to drive over to James Parsons's and take the boy. That
+James would make any serious opposition perhaps never entered his
+mind. It was a bright, charming afternoon; with his shining horse, in a
+bright, well-varnished buggy, the Captain drove over the seven miles of
+winding roads through the woods, and along the sea, to the village where
+James Parsons lived. He tied his horse to the hitching-post in front of
+the broad cottage house, went down the path to the L door, knocked, and
+went in.
+
+James was sitting in a large room which served in winter as a kitchen
+and in summer as a sort of sitting-room, smoking a pipe and gazing
+vacantly into the pine-branches in the open fireplace before him. He had
+been out all day on his marsh, but he had been home a couple of hours.
+His wife--kindly soul--received Captain Pelham at the door, wiping her
+hands upon her apron, and modestly showed him into the sitting-room;
+then she retired to her tasks in the shed kitchen. She moved about
+mechanically for a moment; then she ran hastily out into the lean-to
+wood-shed, shut the door behind her, sat down on the worn floor where
+it gives way with a step to the floor of earth by the wood-pile, hid her
+face in her apron, and burst into tears.
+
+Joe was at the wharf with his comrades playing at war.
+
+Now, if there ever was a hospitable man,--a man who gave a welcome,--a
+rough but merry welcome to every one who entered his doors, it was
+James Parsons. He had a homely, jocose saying that you must either
+make yourself at home or go home. But on this occasion he rose with a
+somewhat forced and awkward air, laid his pipe down on the mantel-piece,
+and nodded to the Captain with an air of embarrassed inquiry. Then he
+bethought himself, and asked the Captain to sit down. The Captain took
+the nearest chair, beside the table, where Mrs. Parsons had lately been
+sitting at her work. James's chair was directly opposite. The table was
+between them.
+
+James rose and went to the mantel-piece, scratched a match upon his
+boot-heel, and undertook to light his pipe. It did not light; he did not
+notice it, but put the pipe in his mouth as if it were lighted.
+
+It occurred to Captain Pelham now, for the first time, absorbed as he
+had been with exclusive thoughts of the boy, that he should first say
+something to this old man about the daughter whom he had lost: and he
+made some expressions of sympathy. The old man nodded, but said nothing.
+
+There was silence for two or three minutes.
+
+The subject in order now was inevitably the boy. Captain Pelham opened
+his lips to claim him; but, almost to his own surprise, he found himself
+making some common remark about the affairs of the neighborhood. It came
+in harsh and forced, as if it were a fragment of conversation floated in
+by the breeze from the street outside. Then the Captain waited a moment,
+looking out of the window.
+
+James took his pipe from his mouth and leaned his elbows on the table.
+“Why don't you go take him?” he suddenly said: “he's probably down to
+the wharf. Ef you have got the claim to him, why don't you go take him?
+You 've got your team here,--drive right down there and put him in and
+drive off; if you 've got the right to him, why don't you go take him?
+But ef you 've come for my consent, you can set there till the chair
+rots beneath you.”
+
+With this, James rose and took the felt hat which was lying by him on
+the table, and saying not another word, went out of the door. He went
+down to the shore, and affected to busy himself with his boat.
+
+There was nothing for Captain Pelham to do but to take his hat, untie
+his horse, and drive home.
+
+The Captain well knew that nobody in the world had a legal right to the
+child until a guardian should be appointed. A plain and simple path was
+open before him: it was his only path. James Parsons had proved wilful
+and wrong-headed; there was nothing now but to take out letters as
+guardian of the boy. Then James would acquiesce without a word.
+
+Immediately after breakfast the Captain went down the street. He opened
+his letters and attended to the first routine of business; then he went
+across the way and up a flight of stairs to a lawyer's office.
+
+If you had happened to read the county papers at about this time, you
+would have seen among the legal notices two petitions, identical in
+form,--the one by Joseph Pelham, the other by James Parsons,--each
+applying for guardianship of Joseph Pelham, the younger of that name,
+with an order upon each petition for all persons interested to come
+in on the first Tuesday of the following month and show cause why the
+petitioner's demand should not be granted.
+
+The county court-house was a new brick building, of modest size, fifteen
+miles from W------, and twenty miles from the village where James
+Parsons lived.
+
+There were fifteen or twenty people from different towns in attendance
+when the court opened on the important first Tuesday. As one after
+another transacted his affairs and went away, others would come in.
+Three or four lawyers sat at tables talking with clients, or stood
+about the judge's desk. There was a sprinkling of women in new mourning.
+Printed papers, filled out with names and dates,--petitions and
+bonds and executors' accounts,--were being handed in to the judge and
+receiving his signature of approval.
+
+The routine business was transacted first. It was almost noon when the
+judge was at last free to attend to contested matters. There was a small
+audience by that time,--only ten or a dozen people, some of whom were
+waiting for train-time, while others, who had come upon their own
+affairs, lingered now from curiosity.
+
+The judge was a tall, spare, old-fashioned man; he had held the office
+for above thirty years. He was a man of much native force, of sound
+learning within the range of his judicial duties, and of strong
+common-sense. He was often employed by Captain Pelham in his own
+affairs, and more particularly in bank and insurance matters,--for the
+probate judges are free to practise at the bar in matters not connected
+with their judicial duties,--and Captain Pelham had always retained
+him in important cases as counsel for the town. He had a large
+practice throughout the county; he knew its people, their ideas, their
+traditions, and their feelings. He understood their social organization
+to the core.
+
+“Now,” said the judge, laying aside some papers upon which he had been
+writing, and taking off his glasses, “we will take up the two petitions
+for guardianship of Joseph Pelham.”
+
+Captain Pelham and the lawyer whom he had employed took seats at a small
+table before the judge; James Parsons timidly took a seat at another.
+His petition had been filled out for him by one of his neighbors: he had
+no counsel.
+
+Captain Pelham's lawyer rose; he had been impressed by the Captain with
+the importance of the matter, and he was about to make a formal opening.
+But the judge interrupted him. “I think,” he said, “that we may assume
+that I know in a general way about these two petitioners. I shall
+assume, unless something is shown to the contrary, that they are both
+men of respectable character, and have proper homes for a boy to grow up
+in. And I suppose there is no controversy that Captain Pelham is a man
+of some considerable means, and that the other petitioner is a man of
+small property.
+
+“Now,” he went on, leaning forward with his elbow on his desk, and
+gently waving his glasses with his right hand, “did the father of this
+boy ever express any wish as to what should be done with him in case his
+mother should die?” Nobody answered. “It would be of no legal effect,”
+ he said, “but it would have weight with me. Now, is there any evidence
+as to what his mother wanted? A boy's mother can tell best about these
+things, if she is a sensible woman. Mr. Baker,” he said to Captain
+Pelham's lawyer, “have you any evidence as to what his mother wanted to
+have done with him?”
+
+Mr. Baker conversed for a moment with Captain Pelham and then called him
+to the stand.
+
+Captain Pelham testified as to his frequent visits to the boy's mother,
+and to her unbroken friendly relations with him. She had never said in
+so many words what she wanted to have done for the boy, but he always
+understood that she meant to have the child come to him; he could not
+say, however, that she had said anything expressly to that effect.
+
+James sat before him not many feet away, in his old-fashioned broadcloth
+coat with a velvet collar. He cross-examined Captain Pelham a little.
+
+“She did n't never tell you,” he said, “that she was going to give you
+the boy, did she?”
+
+“No, sir;” said Captain Pelham.
+
+“How often did your wife come over to see her?”
+
+“I could n't tell you, sir,” said the Captain.
+
+“Not very often, did she?”
+
+“I think not,” the Captain admitted.
+
+“The boy's mother did n't never talk much about Mis' Captain Pelham, did
+she?”
+
+“I don't remember that she did.”
+
+“She did n't never have her over to talk with her about what she was
+going to do with the boy, did she?”
+
+“I don't know that she did,” said the Captain. “She is here; you can ask
+her.”
+
+“You didn't never hear of her leaving no word with Mis' Captain Pelham
+about taking care of the boy, did you?”
+
+“I can't say that I did,” said Captain Pelham.
+
+The old man nodded his head with a satisfied air. His cross-examination
+was done.
+
+The Captain retired from the witness-stand; his lawyer whispered with
+him a moment and then went over and whispered for two or three minutes
+with Mrs. Pelham; then he said he had no more evidence to offer.
+
+“Mr. Parsons,” said the judge, “do you wish to testify?”
+
+James went to the witness-stand and was sworn.
+
+“Did n't your daughter ever talk about what she wanted done with the
+boy?”
+
+“Talk about it?” said James. “Why, she didn't talk about nothing else.
+She used to have it all over every time we went in. It was all about how
+mother 'n me must do this with him and do that with him,--how he was to
+go to school, what room he was going to sleep in to our house, and all
+that.”
+
+Mr. Baker desired to make no cross-examination, and James's wife was
+called, and testified in her quaint way to the same effect.
+
+By a keen, homely instinct James had half consciously foreseen what
+would be the controlling element of the case; and while he had not
+formulated it to himself he had brought with him one of his neighbors,
+who had watched with his daughter through the last nights of her
+life. She was one of the poorest women of the village. Her husband was
+shiftless, and was somewhat given to drink. She had a large family, with
+little to bring them up on. Her life had been one long struggle. She was
+extremely poorly dressed, and although she was neat, there was an air of
+unthrift or discouragement about her dress. She wore an oversack which
+evidently had originally been made for some one else; it lacked one
+button. She was faded and worn and homely; but the moment she spoke
+she impressed you as a woman of conscience. She had talked in the long
+watches of the night with the boy's mother, and she confirmed what James
+and his wife had said. There could be no question what the mother had
+desired.
+
+Mr. Baker ventured out upon the thin ice of cross-examination.
+
+“She must have talked about her father-in-law, Captain Pelham?” he said.
+
+“Oh, yes,” said the woman, “often.”
+
+“She seemed to be attached to him?”
+
+“Yes, indeed,” said the woman, quickly; “she was always telling how good
+he was to her; I have heard her say there was n't no better man in the
+world.”
+
+“She must have talked about what he could do for the boy?”
+
+“Yes,” said the woman. “She expected him to do for Joe.”
+
+“Did n't she ever say,” and the lawyer looked round at James,--“did n't
+you ever hear her say that she was worried sometimes for fear her father
+would not be careful enough about the boy?”
+
+The woman hesitated a moment. “Yes,” she said, “I have heard her say so,
+but that 's what every mother says.”
+
+“What reason did you ever hear her give,” the lawyer asked, “why she
+would rather have him stay over there than to go and be brought up by
+his grandfather Pelham?”
+
+The woman looked around timidly at the judge. “Be I obliged to answer?”
+ she said.
+
+The judge nodded.
+
+The woman looked toward Captain Pelham with an embarrassed air. He was
+the best friend she had in the world.
+
+“I rather not say nothing about that,” she said; “it 's no account,
+anyway.”
+
+“Oh, tell us what she said,” said Mr. Baker.
+
+He felt that he had made some progress up to that point with his
+cross-examination.
+
+“Well, it was n't much,” said the woman; “it was only like this. I have
+heard her say that Miss Captain Pelham was a good woman and meant to do
+what was right, but she was n't a woman that knew how to mother a little
+boy.” And here the witness began to cry.
+
+The judge moved slightly in his chair.
+
+There was more or less rambling talk about the way the boy was allowed
+to run loose on the shore, and some suggestions were made in the way of
+conversational argument about his being allowed to go barefoot, and to
+go in swimming when he pleased; but the judge seemed to pay very little
+attention to that. “That 's the way we were all brought up,” he said.
+“It is good for the boy; he 'll learn to take care of himself, and his
+mother knew all about it.
+
+“It is plain enough,” he said at last, “that there would be some
+advantages to the boy in going to live with Captain Pelham; but there
+is one thing that has been overlooked which would probably have been
+suggested if the petitioner Parsons had had counsel. It has been assumed
+that the boy would be cut loose in future from his grandfather Pelham
+unless he was put under his guardianship; but that is n't so. All his
+grandparents will look out for him, and when he gets older, and wants to
+go into business, here or elsewhere, Captain Pelham will look after him
+just the same as if he were his guardian. The other grandfather has n't
+got the means to advance him. I am not at all afraid about that,” he
+said; “the only question here is, where he shall be deposited for the
+next five or six years. Either place is good enough. His father had a
+right to fix it by will if he had chosen to; but he did n't, and I think
+we must consider it a matter for the women to settle: they know best
+about such things. It is plain that his mother thought it would be best
+for him to stay where he is, and she knew best. He 's wonted there, and
+wants to stay.”
+
+Then he took up his pen and wrote on Captain Pelham's petition an order
+of dismissal. On the other he filled out and signed the decree granting
+guardianship to James Parsons, and approved the bond. Then he handed the
+papers to the register and called the next case.
+
+From this day on, little was seen of Captain Pelham at James's house.
+Sometimes he would stop in his buggy and take the boy off with him for
+a little stay; but Joe soon wearied of formality, and grew restless
+for James, for his grandmother Parsons, for the free life of the little
+wharf and the shore. Life always opened fresh to him on his return.
+
+Once and only once Captain Pelham entered James's door-yard. James was
+sitting in an armchair under an apple-tree by the well, smoking and
+reading the paper. The Captain began, this time, with no introduction.
+
+“Fred Gooding,” he said, “tells me you are talking of letting Joe go out
+with Pitts in his boat You know Pitts is no fit man.”
+
+“You tell Fred Gooding he don't know what he 's talking about,” said
+James, as he rose from his chair, holding the paper in his hand. “What
+I told Pitts was just the contr'y,--the boy should n't go along o' him.”
+ Then his anger began to rise. “But what right you got,” he demanded, “to
+interfere? 'T ain 't none of your business who I let him go along of.
+It's me that's the boy's guardeen.”
+
+“Very well,” said the Captain. “Only I tell you fairly,--the first
+time I get word of anything, I 'll go to the probate court and have you
+removed!”
+
+James followed him down the path with derisive laughter. “Why don't you
+go to the probate court?” he said; “you hed great luck before!” And
+as the Captain drove away, James shouted after him, “Go to the probate
+court! Go to the probate court!”
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+There is a low, pleasant boat-shop, close on the shore of a little arm
+of the sea. The tide ebbs and flows before its wide double doors, and
+sometimes rises so high as to flow the sills; then you have to walk
+across in front of the shop on a plank, laid upon iron ballast. There is
+a little wharf or pier close at hand, the outer end of which is always
+going to be repaired. There are two or three other shops near by, and
+about them is the pleasant litter of a boat-yard. In the cove before
+them lie at their moorings in the late afternoon a fleet of fifteen or
+twenty fishing and pleasure boats, all cat-rigged, all of one general
+build, wide, shoal, with one broad sail, all painted white, by the
+custom of the place, and all or nearly all kept neat and clean: they are
+all likely enough to be called upon now and then for sailing-parties.
+Often of a bright afternoon in summer the sails will all be up, as the
+boats swing at their floats: then you have all the effect of a regatta
+in still life.
+
+The shop faces down the bay of which this inlet is the foot, and as you
+look out from your seat within, on a wooden stool, the great door frames
+in a landscape of peaceful beauty. The opening to the sea is closed to
+the view. Simply you can see the two white sand-cliffs through which
+it makes. The bay is a mile in length, perhaps, and of half that width.
+From its white, sandy shores rise gentle hills, bare to the sun or
+covered with a low growth of woods. To the right are low-lying pastures
+and marshes, with here and there a grazing cow. At the head of the
+bay the valley of a stream can be faintly distinguished, while in the
+distance there is a faint suggestion of a few scattered houses on the
+upper waters. At one or two points masts of boats rise from the grass of
+the inland, and sometimes a sail is seen threading its slow way amid the
+trees.
+
+The shop is a favorite resort. You may go there in the early morning,
+in the late forenoon, or in the afternoon; whenever you go you will
+find there more or less company. There is a sort of social, hospitable
+atmosphere about the place which is attractive in the extreme. Sometimes
+there is a good deal of conversation; sometimes there is a comfortable
+silence of good-fellowship. There is more or less knitting there and
+crocheting; often in the afternoon the women from near by take their
+work there to enjoy the view, and the fresh air which draws up there as
+nowhere else.
+
+There is a good deal of religious discussion there, although the
+atmosphere of the shop is not entirely religious, as you may see by some
+of the papers lying about, and the cuts pasted up on the walls. Chief is
+a picture representing a scene in the life of the prophet Jonah. Jonah
+and the seamen are drawing lots to see who shall be cast over. Jonah has
+just drawn the ace of spades.
+
+There are various other pictures on the walls,--prints of famous yachts,
+charts, advertisements of regattas, sailing rules of yacht-clubs.
+Nowhere is the science of boat-building and boat-sailing studied with
+greater closeness than in that shop. Many a successful racer has
+been built there. There are models of boats pinned up against the
+wall,--models which to the common eye hardly vary at all, but to a
+trained perception differ widely. There are oars lying about the shop,
+oil-skin suits, a compass, charts, in round tin cases, boat hardware,
+and coils of new rope.
+
+The little pier has its periods of activity and life, like the great
+world outside. At three or four o'clock, in the gray dawn, fishermen
+appear, singly, or two by two; there is often then a failure of wind,
+and they have to get out to sea by heavy rowing or by the drift of the
+tide. Then there is silence for some hours, and when the world awakes
+the cove is nearly deserted. At seven o'clock begins the life of the
+shop. Amateur fishermen appear,--boarders from New York or visiting sons
+from Brockton. Later still, little parties come down,--a knot of
+young fellows and laughing girls with bright-colored wraps, bound on a
+sailing-party to Katameset, with a matron, and with some well-salted
+man to steer the boat, perhaps in slippers and a dressing-gown. They
+go singing out to sea. Then come a party of bathers,--ladies and little
+children, with towels and blue suits, and all the paraphernalia of pails
+and wooden shovels. Then will come perhaps a couple of girls, to sketch.
+They will encamp anywhere upon the shore, call into their service some
+small amphibious creature to tip a skiff up on its side to make an
+effective scene, and proceed with the wonders of their art. Soon the
+bathers return. They have been only a little way down the narrows, and
+come back to dinner at one. The fishermen come in from three to four,
+unless they happen to be becalmed; there is a bustle then of getting out
+ice; of slitting and weighing and packing fish, and loading them into
+wagons to be carted to the railway. Then there is a lull until the
+sailing-parties return, perhaps at five, perhaps at six, perhaps not
+until the turn of the tide or the evening breeze brings them home.
+
+All the time the quiet life of the boat-shop goes on,--its labor, its
+discussions on politics and religion, its criticism of yachts. All
+day long small boys play about the pier, race in skiffs or in such
+insignificant sailing-craft as may be available, and every half-hour, at
+the initiative of some infant leader, all doff their little print waists
+and short trousers and “go in,” regardless of the sketchers on the
+shore.
+
+It was a bright, fresh day. The air was as clear as crystal. Joe had
+been gone since dawn with Henry Price. The wind had been blowing hard
+from the north for a dozen hours, and, as the saying is, had kicked up
+a sea. On the shoal the waves were rolling heavily, and since three
+o'clock the tide had been running against the wind, and the seas had
+been broken every way. But to Henry Price, and with that boat, rough
+seas, from March to November, were only what a rude mountain road would
+be to you or me. If his wife, toward afternoon, shading her eyes at the
+south door, ever felt anxious about him, it was a woman's foolish fear;
+it was only because she thought with concern of that--internal neuralgia
+was it?--which her husband brought back from the war; which seized him
+at rare intervals and enfeebled him for days. He made light of it, and
+never spoke of it out of the house. There was no better boatman on that
+shore. Let alone that one possibility of weakness, and the ocean had a
+hard man to deal with when it dealt with him.
+
+They had been gone all day. It had been rough, and they would come in
+wet. This wind would not die down; they were sure to make a quick run,
+and would be in before dark.
+
+It was late in the afternoon. James was sitting in the shop with one or
+two companions, engaged in a loud discussion. He had been discoursing
+upon all his favorite themes. He had been declaiming upon the dangers
+from Catholic supremacy and the subserviency of the Irish vote to the
+Church of Rome, and upon the absolute necessity of the supremacy of the
+Democratic party; upon the Apocalypse and the seven seals. He had
+been maintaining the literal infallibility of the Scriptures, and the
+necessity of treating some portions as legendary. It would be hard to
+say what inconsistent views he had not set forth within the space of
+the past hour; and all this with the utmost intensity, and yet with
+the utmost good-humor, always ready to acknowledge a point against
+himself,--the more readily if entirely fallacious,--with a burst of
+hearty laughter.
+
+At last there was a pause. Something had called out of doors the two
+or three men who were within. There was nothing to disturb the peaceful
+beauty of the afternoon. It was blowing hard outside, but this was a
+sheltered spot, and the wind was little felt.
+
+As James sat there silent, with no one at hand but the owner of the
+shop, who was busy upon the keel of a new boat, a fisherman came in and
+took a seat, with an affectation of ease and nonchalance; in a moment
+another followed; two or three more came in, then others.
+
+The carpenter stopped his work, and shading his eyes with his hand,
+seemed to be looking down the bay.
+
+There was a dead silence for a few moments. Then James spoke. But it was
+not the voice of James. It was not that cheery and hearty voice which
+had just been filling the shop with mirth. It was a voice harsh, forced,
+mechanical,--the voice of a man paralyzed with terror.
+
+“Why don't you tell me?” he said; “is it Henry, or--is it the boy?”
+
+But no one spoke.
+
+“You don't need to tell me nothing,” he said, in the same strange tone
+of paralysis and fear, “I knowed it when Bassett first come in. I
+knowed it when the rest come in and closed in round me and did n't say
+nothing.”
+
+He sat still a moment. Then he rose abruptly and turned to the landward
+door. He stumbled over a stool which was in his way, and would have
+fallen but that one of the men sprang forward and held him. He plunged
+hastily out of the door. Just outside, in the shade of a small wild
+cherry-tree, was a bucket of clams which he had dug; across the bucket
+was an old hoe worn down to nothing. He stopped and mechanically took up
+the pail and hoe. Bassett stood by the door and looked after him as he
+went along the foot-path toward his home. There was a scantling fence
+close by. He went over it in his old habitual fashion: first he set over
+the bucket of clams and the hoe; then one leg went over and then the
+other; he sat for an instant on the top slat and then slid down. He took
+up his burden and went his way over the fields. In a moment he was lost
+to sight behind a bit of rising ground. Then he reappeared, making his
+way over the fields at his own heavy gait, until he was lost to sight
+behind a clump of trees close to his own door.
+
+They did not find Henry and the boy that night. It was not until the
+next day that the bodies were washed ashore. One of the searchers,
+walking along the beach in the early dawn, found them both. He came upon
+Henry first; he was lying on the sand upon his face. A little farther
+on, gently swayed by the rising tide, lay Joe and his dog. Joe lay on
+his side, precisely as if asleep; the dog was in his arms.
+
+The boy lies in the burying-ground on the hill, near the stone and the
+weeping-willow which mourn the youth who met his untimely death in 1830,
+in the launching of the brig. There is a rose-bush at the grave, and few
+bright days pass in summer that there is not a bunch of homely flowers
+laid at its foot. It is the spot to which all Mrs. Parsons's thoughts
+now tend, and her perpetual pilgrimage. It is too far for her to walk
+both there and back; but often a neighbor is going that way, with
+a lug-wagon or an open cart or his family carriage,--it makes no
+difference which,--and it is easy to get a ride. It is a good-humored
+village. Everybody stands ready to do a favor, and nobody hesitates to
+ask one. Often on a bright afternoon Mrs. Parsons will watch from her
+front window the “teams” that pass, going to the bay. When she sees
+one which is likely to go in the right direction on its return from the
+bay,--everybody knows in which direction she will wish to go,--she will
+run hastily to the door, and hail it.
+
+“Whoa! Sh-h! Whoa! How d'do, Mis' Parsons?”
+
+“Be you going straight home when you come back? Well, then, if it won't
+really be no trouble at all, I 'll be at the gap when you come by; I
+won't keep you waiting a minute. It 's such a nice, sunshiny afternoon,
+I thought I 'd like to go up and sit awhile, and take some posies.”
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of By The Sea, by Heman White Chaplin
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of By The Sea, by Heman White Chaplin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: By The Sea
+       1887
+
+Author: Heman White Chaplin
+
+Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #23001]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BY THE SEA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SEA
+
+1887
+
+By Heman White Chaplin
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+On the southeastern coast of Massachusetts is a small village with
+which I was once familiarly acquainted. It differs little in its general
+aspect from other hamlets scattered along that shore. It has its one
+long, straggling street, plain and homelike, from which at two or three
+different points a winding lane leads off and ends abruptly in the
+water.
+
+Fifty years ago the village had a business activity of its own. There
+still remain the vestiges of a wharf at a point where once was a
+hammering ship-yard. Here and there, in bare fields along the sea,
+are the ruins of vats and windmills,--picturesque remains of ancient
+salt-works.
+
+There is no visible sign left now of the noisy life of the ship-yards,
+except a marble stone beneath a willow in the burying-ground on the
+hill, which laments the untimely death of a youth of nineteen, killed in
+1830 in the launching of a brig. But traces of the salt-works everywhere
+remain, in frequent sheds and small barns which are wet and dry, as
+the saying is, all the time, and will not hold paint. They are built of
+salt-boards.
+
+There were a good many of the people of the village and its adjoining
+country who interested me very greatly. I am going to tell you a simple
+event which happened in one of its families, deeply affecting its little
+history.
+
+James Parsons was a man perhaps sixty years of age, strongly built,
+gray-haired, cleanshaven except for the conventional seaman's fringe of
+beard below the chin, and always exquisitely neat. Whether you met him
+in his best suit, on Sunday morning, or in his old clothes, going to
+his oyster-beds or his cranberry-marsh, it was always the same. He was
+usually in his shirt-sleeves in summer. His white cotton shirt, with
+its easy collar and wristbands, seemed always to have just come from the
+ironing-board. "It ain't no trouble at all to keep James clean," I have
+heard Mrs. Parsons say, in her funny little way; "he picks his way round
+for all the world just like a pussycat, and never gets no spots on him,
+nowhere."
+
+You saw at once, upon the slightest acquaintance with James, that while
+he was of the same general civilization as his neighbors, he was of
+a different type. In his narrowness, there was a peculiar breadth and
+vigor which characterized him. He had about him the atmosphere of a
+wider ocean.
+
+His early reminiscences were all of that picturesque and adventurous
+life which prevailed along our coasts to within forty years, and his
+conversation was suggestive of it He held a silver medal from the Humane
+Society for conspicuous bravery in the rescue of the crew of a ship
+stranded in winter in a storm of sleet off Post Hill Bar. He had a
+war-hatchet, for which he had negotiated face to face with a naked
+cannibal in the South Sea. He was familiar with the Hoogly.
+
+His language savored always of the sea. His hens "turned in," at night.
+He was full of sayings and formulas of a maritime nature; there was
+one which always seemed to me to have something of a weird and mystic
+character: "South moon brings high water on Coast Island Bar." In
+describing the transactions of domestic life, he used words more
+properly applicable to the movements of large ships. He would speak of a
+saucepan as if it weighed a hundred tons. He never tossed or threw even
+the slightest object; he hove it. "Why, father!" said Mrs. Parsons,
+surprised at seeing him for a moment untidy; "what have you ben doing?
+Your boots and trousers-legs is all white!" "Yes," said Mr. Parsons,
+apologetically, looking down upon his dusty garments, "I just took that
+bucket of ashes and hove 'em into the henhouse."
+
+The word "heave," in fact, was always upon his tongue. It applied to
+everything. "How was this road straightened out?" I asked him one day;
+"did the town vote to do it?" "No, no," he said quickly; "there was n't
+never no vote. The se-lec'men just come along one day, and got us all
+together, and hove in and hove out; and we altered our fences to suit."
+
+I remember hearing him testify as a witness to a will. It appeared
+that the testator was sick in bed when he signed the instrument. He was
+suffering greatly, and when he was to sign, it was necessary to lift him
+with the ex-tremest care, to turn him to the light-stand. "State what
+was done next," the lawyer asked of James. "Captain Frost was laying on
+his left side," said James. "Two of us took a holt of him and rolled him
+over."
+
+He had probably not the least suspicion that his language had a maritime
+flavor. I asked him one night, as we coasted along toward home, "What do
+seafaring men call the track of light that the moon makes on the water?
+They must have some name for it" "No, no," he said, "they don't have no
+name for it; they just call it 'the wake of the moon.'"
+
+James's learning had been chiefly gained from the outside world and not
+from books. I have heard him lay it down as a fact that the word "Bible"
+had its etymology from the word "by-bill" (hand-bill). "It was writ,"
+he said, "in small parcels, and they was passed around by them that writ
+'em, like by-bills; and so when they hove it all into one, they called
+it the Bible.'"
+
+But while James had little learning himself, he appreciated it highly in
+others. I had occasion to ask him once why it was that the son of one
+of his neighbors, in closing up his father's estate, had not settled his
+accounts regularly in the probate court. "Oh, I know how that was," he
+replied; "he settled 'em the other way. You see, he went to the college
+at Woonsocket, and he learned there how to settle accounts the other
+way: and that's the way he settled 'em." And then he added, "When Alvin
+left the college, they giv' him a book that tells how to do all kinds
+of business, and what you want to do so's to make money; and Alvin has
+always followed them rules. The consequence is, he's made money, and
+what he 's made, he 's kep' it. I suppose he's worth not less than
+sixteen hundred dollars."
+
+Sometimes he would venture a remark of a gallant nature. "They don't
+generally git the lights in the hall so as to suit me," he once said.
+"I don't want it too light, because then it hurts my eyes; but I want it
+light enough so as 't I can see the women!"
+
+James was a large, strong man, but Mrs. Parsons, although she was little
+and slight, and was always ailing, constantly assumed the r�le of her
+husband's nurse and protector, not only in household matters, but in
+other affairs of life. Whenever she had visitors,--and she and James
+were hospitable in the extreme,--she was pretty sure to end up, sooner
+or later, if James were present, with some droll criticism of him, as
+much to his delight as to hers.
+
+James sometimes liked to affect a certain harshness of demeanor; but the
+disguise was a transparent one. How well do I remember the time--oh,
+so long ago!--when for some reason or other I happened to have his boat
+instead of my own, one day, with one of the boys of the village, to go
+to Matamet, twelve miles off, to visit certain lobster-pots which we had
+set. We were delayed there by breaking our boom, in jibing. We should
+have been at home at noon; at seven in the evening we were not yet in
+sight. When we got in, rather crestfallen at our disaster, particularly
+as the boat was wanted for the next day, James met us at the pier. We
+were boys then, and his tongue was free. As he stood there on the shore,
+bare-headed, hastily summoned from his house, with his hair blowing in
+the wind, waving his hands and addressing first us and then a knot of
+men who stood smoking by, no words of censure were too harsh, no
+comment on our carelessness too cutting, no laments too keen over the
+irreparable loss of that particular boom. The next time I could take my
+own boat, if I were going to get cast away. And I remember well how he
+ended his tirade. "I did n't care nothing about you two," he said. "If
+you want to git drownded, git drownded; it ain't nothing to me. All I
+was afraid of was that you 'd gone and capsized my boat, and would
+n't never turn up to tell where you sunk her. But as for you--" and he
+laughed a laugh of heartless indifference.
+
+But ten minutes later, and right before his face, at his own front gate,
+Mrs. Parsons betrayed him. "I never see father so worried," she said,
+"sence the time he heard about Thomas; why, he 's spent the whole
+afternoon as nervous as a hawk, going up on the hill with his
+spy-glass; and I don't feel so sure but what he was crying. He said he
+did n't care nothing about the boat,--'What 's that old boat!' says he;
+but if you boys was drownded out of her, he would n't never git over
+it." At which James, being so unmasked, laughed in a shamefaced way,
+and shook us by the shoulders. He had a son who carried on some sort
+of half-maritime business on one of the wharves, in the city, and lived
+over his shop. When James went at intervals to visit him, he made his
+way at once from the railway station to the nearest wharf; then he
+followed the line of the water around to the shop. Where jib-booms
+project out over the sidewalk, one feels so thoroughly at home! From the
+shop he would make short adventurous excursions up Commercial Street and
+State Street, sometimes going no farther than the nautical-instrument
+store on the corner of Broad Street, sometimes venturing to Washington
+Street, or even moving for a short distance up or down in the current of
+that gay thoroughfare. He loved to comment satirically on the city, with
+a broad humorous sense of his own strangeness there. "The city folks
+don't seem to have nothing to do," he said. "They seem to be all out,
+walking up and down the streets. Come noon, I thought there'd be some
+let-up for dinner; but they did n't seem to want nothing to eat; they
+kep' right on walking."
+
+I must not leave James Parsons without telling you of two whale's teeth
+which stand on his parlor mantel-piece; he ornamented them himself,
+copying the designs from cheap foreign prints. One of them is what he
+calls "the meeting-house." It is the high altar of the Cathedral of
+Seville. On the other is "the wild-beast tamer." A man with a feeble,
+wishy-washy expression holds by each hand a fierce, but subjugated
+tiger. His legs dangle loosely in the air. There is nothing to suggest
+what upholds him in his mighty contest.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Now we must turn from James Parsons to a man of a different type, or
+rather of a different variety of the same type; for they descend
+alike from original founders of the town, and, like most of their
+fellow-townsmen, are both of unqualified Pilgrim stock.
+
+To get to Captain Joseph Pelham's house, you have to drive along a range
+of hills for some miles, skirting the sea; then you come, half-way, to a
+bright modern village with trees along the main street, with houses and
+fences kept painted up, for the most part, but here and there relieved
+by an unpainted dwelling of a past generation.
+
+Here you have an option. You may either pursue your road through the
+high-lying prosperous street, with peeps of salt water to the right,
+or you may turn sharply off at a little store and descend to the lower
+road. It is always a struggle to choose.
+
+The road to the beach descends a sharp, gravelly hill, and crosses a
+bridge. Then you come out on a waste of salt-marsh, threaded by the
+creek, broken by wild, fantastic sand-hills, grown over by beach-grass
+which will cut your fingers like a knife. You drive close along
+the white, precipitous beach; you pass the long, shaky pier, with
+half-decayed fish-houses at the other end, and picturesque heaps of
+fish-cars, seines, and barrels. Then the road, following the shore a
+little longer, climbs the hill and enters the woods. Two miles more and
+you come out to fields with mossy fences, and occasional houses.
+
+The houses begin to be more frequent. All at once you enter the main
+street of W------.
+
+In a moment you see that you have come into a new atmosphere. There is a
+large modern church among the older ones. There are large, fine houses,
+some old-fashioned, others new. By some miraculous intervention Queen
+Anne has not as yet made her appearance. There are handsome, well-filled
+stores, going into no little refinement in stock. There is, of course,
+a small brick library, built by the bounty of a New Yorker who was born
+here. There is a brick national bank, and a face brick block occupied
+above by Freemasons, orders of Red Men, Knights Templars, and the Pool
+of Siloam Lodge, I. O. O. F., and below by a savings bank and a local
+marine insurance company.
+
+It is here that we shall find Captain Joseph Pelham. If a stranger has
+occasion to inquire for the leading men of the place he is always first
+referred to him. It is he who heads every list and is the chairman
+of every meeting. When a certain public man, commanding but a small
+following here, appeared, upon his campaign tour, and found no one
+to escort him to the platform and preside, so that he was obliged to
+justify his appearance here by the Scripture passage, "They that are
+whole need not a physician, but they that are sick;" at the moment
+of entering the hall, closely packed with curious opponents, disposed
+perhaps to be derisive when the situation for the visitor was
+embarrassing in the extreme,--it was Captain Joseph Pelham who, though
+the bitterest opponent of them all, rose from his seat, gave the speaker
+his arm, escorted him to the platform, presented him with grave courtesy
+to the audience, and sat beside him through the entire discourse.
+
+While Captain Pelham continued to go to sea, and after that, until he
+was made president of the insurance company, he lived a mile or two out
+of the town, in a house he had inherited. It is picturesquely situated,
+on a bare hill, with a wide view of the inland and the ocean. As
+you look down from its south windows, the cluster of houses nestling
+together at the shore below stand sharply out against the water. It is
+one of those white houses common in our older towns,--two-storied, long
+on the street, with the front door in the middle. Of the interior it is
+enough to say that its owner had sailed for thirty years to Hong-Kong,
+Calcutta and Madras. It had a prevailing odor of teak and lacquer. In
+the front hall was a vast china cane-holder; a turretted Calcutta hat
+hung on the hat-tree; a heavy, varnished Chinese umbrella stood in a
+corner; a long and handsome settee from Java stood against the wall.
+In the parlors, on either hand, were Chinese tables shutting up like
+telescopes, elaborate rattan chairs of different kinds, and numberless
+other things of this sort, which had plainly been honestly come by, and
+not bought.
+
+Then, if you met the Captain's favor, he would show you with becoming
+pride some family relics, and tell you about them. They came mostly
+from his paternal grandfather, who was a shipmaster too, had commanded a
+privateer in the Revolution, and made a fortune. There were a number
+of pieces of handsome furniture,--these you could see for yourself What
+would be shown you, with a half-diffident air, would be: a silver mug;
+two Revere tablespoons; a few tiny teaspoons marked F.; a handsome sword
+and scabbard; a yellow satin waistcoat and small-clothes; portraits,
+not artistic, but effective, of his grandfather, in a velvet coat and
+knee-breeches, with a long spyglass in his hand, and of his grandmother,
+a strong, matter-of-fact looking woman, handsomely dressed.
+
+But the thing which the Captain secretly treasured most, but brought out
+last, was his grandmother's Dutch Bible. It is a curious old book; you
+can see it still if you wish. It has an elaborate frontispiece. Sixteen
+cuts of leading incidents in Scripture history conduct you by gentle
+stages, from Eden, through the offering of Isaac, to the close of the
+Evangelists, and surround Dr. Martin Luther, who, in a gown, holds back
+the curtains of a pillared alcove, to show you, through two windows, an
+Old and a New Testament landscape, and a lady sitting beneath a canopy,
+with an open volume. The covers are of thick bevelled board covered with
+leather. There was once a heavy clasp. The edges are richly gilded, and
+figures are pricked in the gilding. It is very handsomely printed.
+It was in the possession, in 1760, of a young New England girl, the
+Captain's grandmother. There is a story about it,--a story too long to
+tell here. Suffice it to say that the Captain's ancestor, who settled
+early in New England, came from Leyden shortly after Mr. John Robinson.
+A hundred years later and more, in the oddest way, an acquaintance
+sprang up with certain Dutch connections, and in the course of it this
+Bible, then new and elegant, found its way over the sea as a gift to
+young Mistress Preston. In New England, and as a relic of the early
+ties of our people with Holland, momentarily renewed after a century had
+passed away, it is probably unique. It was a last farewell from Holland
+to her English children, before she parted company with them forever.
+
+I have told you about this house, as I recall it, although Captain
+Pelham had now ceased to live there, because it was there alone that he
+seemed completely at home. Furnished as it was from the four quarters
+of the globe, everything seemed to fit in with his ways. He supplemented
+the Chinese tables, and they supplemented him. But when he ceased to
+go to sea, in late middle life, and settled down at home upon his
+competency, and began a little later to become interested in public
+matters; when he was at last made president of the insurance company,
+a director in the bank, and a trustee in the savings bank, and when
+affairs were left more and more to his control, it became convenient for
+him to get into town; and his wife and daughter were perhaps ambitious
+for the change.
+
+So he had sold his house by the sea, and had bought a large and somewhat
+pretentious one on the main street, with a cast-iron summer arbor, and
+a bay-window closed in for a conservatory. He had furnished it from the
+city with new Brussels carpet, with a parlor set, a sitting-room set,
+a dining-room set, and chamber sets; and the antique things which had
+given his former home an air of charming picturesqueness were for the
+most part tucked away in unnoticed corners.
+
+The Captain never seemed to me to have become quite naturalized in his
+new home. He never belonged to the furniture, or the furniture to him.
+The place where you saw him best in these later days was in the office
+of his insurance company, or in the little business-room of one of the
+banks, surrounded by a knot of more substantial townsmen, or talking
+patiently with some small farmer or seafaring man seeking for insurance
+or a loan. One of the most marked features of his character was a
+certain patience and considerateness which made all borrowers apply by
+preference to him. He would sit down at his little table with a plain
+man whose affairs were in disorder, and listen with close attention
+to his application for a loan. Somehow the man would find himself
+disclosing all the particulars of his distress. Then Captain Pelham, in
+his quiet way, would go over the whole matter with him; would plan
+with him on his concerns; would try to see if it were not possible to
+postpone a little the payment of debts and to hasten the collection of
+claims; to get a part of the money for a short time from a son in Boston
+or a married daughter in New Bedford; and so, by pulling and hauling, to
+weather the Cape.
+
+I must say a word about his position in town matters. He had been at sea
+the greater part of the time from sixteen to fifty-two. During that time
+he had had absolutely no concern with political affairs. He had never
+voted: for he had never, as it had happened, been ashore at the time of
+an election. And yet before he had been at home six years he was one
+of the selectmen of the town and overseer of the poor, and had
+become familiar with the details of Massachusetts town government,
+superficially so simple, in fact so complex. It was a large town, of no
+small wealth. Lying as it did along the seaboard, where havoc was always
+being made by disasters of the sea, there was not only a larger number
+than in an inland town of persons actually quartered in the poorhouse,
+but there were many broken families who had to be helped in their own
+homes. And it was to me an interesting fact that in dealing with two
+score households of this class, Captain Pel-ham, who had spent most of
+his time at sea, was able to display the utmost tact and judgment. He
+applied to their affairs that same plain kindliness and sound sense
+which he showed in the matter of discounts at the bank.
+
+While the friendships of Captain Pelham were chiefly in his own town,
+his acquaintance was not confined to it. In his own quiet, unpretending
+way he was something of a man of the world. He was known in the marine
+insurance offices in the large cities. He had been familiar all his
+life with large affairs; he had commanded valuable ships, loaded with
+fortunes in teas and silks, in the days when an India captain was a
+merchant.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+You will ask me why it is that I have been telling you about these men,
+and what it is that connects them.
+
+It was now ten years since Captain Pelham's only son, himself at
+twenty-two the master of a vessel, had married a daughter of James
+Parsons,--a tall, impulsive, and warm-hearted girl,--one of those girls
+to whom children always cling. Both James Parsons's daughters had proved
+attractive and had married well. It had been a disappointment in Captain
+Pelham's household, perhaps, that this son, their especial pride, should
+not have married into one of the wealthy families in his own village. At
+first there had been a little visiting to and fro; it had lasted but a
+little time, and then the two households had settled down, as the way is
+in the country, to follow each its own natural course of living. George
+Pelham's wife had always lived in an odd little house, all doors and
+windows, near by her father, in her native village.
+
+It was from Porto Cabello that that message came,--yellow fever--a short
+sickness--a burial in a stranger's grave. George Pelham's wife had been
+for two or three years of less than her usual strength. It was not long
+after that news came,--came so suddenly, with no warning,--that she
+began to fade away; and after ten months she died.
+
+I remember seeing her a week or two before her death. Her bed had
+been set up in her little parlor for the convenience of those who were
+attending upon her. She lay on her back, bolstered up. The paleness of
+her face was intensified by her coal-black hair, lying back heavy on
+the pillow. Her hands were thin and transparent, and I remember well the
+straining look in her eyes as she talked with me about the boy whom she
+was going to leave.
+
+She was living, as I have said, close by her father. It was natural that
+in the last few days of her illness the child should be taken to her
+father's house, and when she died and the funeral was over, it was there
+that he returned.
+
+Picture now to yourself a boy toward nine years old, symmetrically made,
+firm and hard. His head is round, his features are good, his hair is
+fine and lies down close. He is clothed in a neat print jacket, with
+a collar and a little handkerchief at the neck, and a pair of short
+trousers buttoned on to the jacket. He is barefoot. He is tanned but not
+burnt. His complexion is of a rich dark brown. He is always fresh and
+clean. But the great charm about him is the expression of infinite fun
+and mirth that is always upon his face. Never for a moment while he is
+awake is his face still. Always the same, yet always shifting, with a
+thousand varying shades of roguish joy. Quick, bright, full of boyish
+repartee, full of shouts and laughter. And the same incessant life which
+plays upon his face shows itself in every movement of his limbs. Never
+for a moment is he still unless he has some work upon his hands. He has
+his little routine of tasks, regularly assigned, which he goes through
+with the most amusing good-humor and attention. It is his duty to see
+that the skiffs are not jammed under the wharf on the rising tide; to
+sweep out the "Annie" when she comes in, and to set her cabin to rights;
+to set away the dishes after meals, and to feed the chickens. Aside from
+a few such tasks, his time in summer is his own. The rest of the year he
+goes to the "primary," and serves to keep the whole room in a state of
+mirth. He has the happy gift that to put every one in high spirits he
+has only to be present. Such an incessant flow of life you rarely see.
+His manners are good, and he comes honestly by them.
+
+There is an amusing union in him of the baby and the man. While the
+children of his age at the summer hotel walk about for the most part
+with their nurses, he is turned loose upon the shore, and has been,
+from his cradle. He can dive and swim and paddle and float and "go
+steamboat." He can row a boat that is not too heavy, and up to the limit
+of his strength he can steer a sail-boat with substantial skill. He
+knows the currents, the tides, and the shoals about his shore, and the
+nearer landmarks. He knows that to find the threadlike entrance to
+the bay you bring the flag-staff over Cart-wright's barn. He has vague
+theories of his own as to the annual shifting of the channel. He knows
+where to take the city children to look for tinkle-shells and mussels.
+He knows what winds bring in the scallops from their beds. He knows
+where to dig for clams, and where to tread for quahaugs without
+disturbing the oysters. He has a good deal of fragmentary lore of the
+sea.
+
+Every morning you will hear his cry, a sort of yodel, or bird-call,
+peculiar to him, with which he bursts forth upon the world. Then you
+will hear, perhaps, loud peals of laughter at something that has excited
+his sense of the absurd,--contagious laughter, full of innocent fun.
+
+Then he will appear, perhaps, with his wooden dinner-bucket,--he is
+going off with his grandfather for the day,--and will yodel to the old
+man as a signal to make haste. Then you will hear him consulting with
+some one upon the weather.
+
+All this time he will be going; through various evolutions, swinging in
+the hammock, sitting on the fence, opening his bucket to show you what
+he has to eat, closing the bucket and sitting down upon the cover,
+or turning somersaults upon the grass. Then he will encamp under an
+apple-tree to wait until his grandfather appears, enlivening the time by
+a score of minute excursions after hens and cats. Then he will go into
+the house again, and rock while the old man finishes his coffee, sure
+of a greeting, confident in a sense of entire good-fellowship, until
+the meal is finished, and James Parsons is ready to take his coat and
+a red-bladed oar, and set out. Then the boy is like a setter off for
+a walk,--all sorts of whimsical expressions in his face, of absolute
+delight; every form of extravagance in his bearing. The only trouble
+is, one has to laugh too much; but with all this, something so manly, so
+companionable.
+
+He is no little of a philosopher in his way. He has been a great deal
+with older people, and has caught the habit of discussion of affairs, or
+rather, perhaps, of unconsciously reflecting forth discussions which he
+has heard. He has an infinite curiosity upon all matters of human life.
+He likes, within limits, to discuss character.
+
+In the boat his chief delights are to talk, to eat cookies, and to
+steer. When it is not blowing too hard for him to stand at the tiller,
+he will steer for an hour together, watching with the most constant care
+the trembling of the leach.
+
+It makes no difference to him at what hour he returns,--from oystering
+or from the cranberry-bog. If it is in the middle of the afternoon, good
+and well. Instantly upon landing he will collect a troop of urchins; in
+an incredibly short space of time there will be a heap of little clothes
+upon the bank; in a moment a procession of small naked figures will go
+running down to the wharf, diving, one after the other. If distance
+or tide or a calm keeps him out late, so much the better. In that case
+there is the romance of coasting along the shore by night; of counting
+and distinguishing the lights; of guessing the nearness to land from the
+dull roar of the sea breaking on the beach. "Don't you think," he will
+sometimes say, "that we are nearer shore than we think we are?"
+
+It is amusing sometimes, on a distant voyage of fifteen or twenty miles,
+after seed oysters, when a landing is made at some little port, to see
+him drop the mariner at once and become a child, with a burning
+desire to find a shop where he can buy animal-crackers. Finding such
+a place,--and usually it is not difficult,--he will lay in a supply of
+lions and tigers, and then go marching about with great delight, with
+mockery in his eyes, keenly appreciating the satire involved in eating
+the head off a cooky lion, incapable of resistance.
+
+No picture of Joe would be complete which left out his dog. Kit was a
+black, fine-haired creature, smaller than a collie, but of much the same
+gentle disposition,--a present from Captain Pelham. When Kit was first
+presented to the boy he domesticated himself at once, and in a week it
+was impossible to tell, from his relations with the household, which was
+boy and which was dog. They were both boys and they were both dogs.
+Kit had an unqualified sense of being at home, and of being beloved
+and indispensable. It was long before he became a sailor. When, at the
+outset, it was attempted to make a man of him by taking him when they
+went out to fish, the failure seemed to be complete. He was a little
+sea-sick. Then he was sad, and sighed and groaned as dogs never do on
+shore. He would not lie still, but was nervous and feverish. Once he
+leaped out of the boat and made for shore, and had to be pursued and
+rescued, exhausted and half-drowned. Still, whenever he had to be left
+at home, it was a struggle every time to reconcile him and leave him.
+Once he pursued a boat which he mistook for James's along the shore of
+the bay, half down to Benson's Narrows, got involved in the creeks which
+the tide was beginning to fill, and had to be brought ingloriously home
+by a farmer, made fast on the top of a load of sweet, salt hay.
+
+He would tease like a child to be allowed to go. He would listen with
+an unsatisfied and appealing look while Joe, with an exuberant but
+regretful air, explained to him in detail the reasons which made it
+impossible for him to go. But in a few months, as the dog grew older,
+he prevailed, and although he would generally retire into the shelter of
+the cabin, he was nevertheless the boy's almost inseparable companion
+on the water as on the shore. The relation between the two was always
+touching. It evidently never crossed the dog's mind that he was not a
+younger brother.
+
+Now, to complete the picture of James Par-sons's household, add in this
+boy; for while it is but just now that he is strictly of it, he has been
+for years its mirth and life.
+
+I remember that quiet household before it knew him,--cosey, homelike,
+with a pervading air even then of genial humor, but with long hours of
+silence and repose,--geraniums and the click of knitting-needles in the
+sitting-room; faint odors of a fragrant pipe from the shed kitchen; no
+stir of boisterous fun, except when some bronzed, solemn joker, with his
+wife, came in for a formal call, and solemnity gave way, by a gradual
+descent, to merriment. Joe had given no new departure, only an impulse.
+"James used to behave himself quite well," Mrs. Parsons would say,
+archly raising her eyebrows, "before Joe's time; but now there 's two
+boys of 'em together, and the one as bad as the other, and I can't do
+nothing with 'em. And then,"--with a mock gesture of despair,--"that
+dog!"
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+While Joe's mother was lying ill, and after it had become certain
+that she would soon leave this world forever, the question had been
+freely-discussed as to what her boy's future should be. In Captain
+Joseph Pelham's mind there was only-one answer to this question,--that
+the lad should come to him. He bore the Captain's name; he represented
+the Captain's son; he should take a place now in the Captain's home.
+
+It was now about three weeks since Joe's mother had been buried. The
+stone had not yet been cut and set over her grave. But the Captain
+thought it time to drive over to James Parsons's and take the boy. That
+James would make any serious opposition perhaps never entered his
+mind. It was a bright, charming afternoon; with his shining horse, in a
+bright, well-varnished buggy, the Captain drove over the seven miles of
+winding roads through the woods, and along the sea, to the village where
+James Parsons lived. He tied his horse to the hitching-post in front of
+the broad cottage house, went down the path to the L door, knocked, and
+went in.
+
+James was sitting in a large room which served in winter as a kitchen
+and in summer as a sort of sitting-room, smoking a pipe and gazing
+vacantly into the pine-branches in the open fireplace before him. He had
+been out all day on his marsh, but he had been home a couple of hours.
+His wife--kindly soul--received Captain Pelham at the door, wiping her
+hands upon her apron, and modestly showed him into the sitting-room;
+then she retired to her tasks in the shed kitchen. She moved about
+mechanically for a moment; then she ran hastily out into the lean-to
+wood-shed, shut the door behind her, sat down on the worn floor where
+it gives way with a step to the floor of earth by the wood-pile, hid her
+face in her apron, and burst into tears.
+
+Joe was at the wharf with his comrades playing at war.
+
+Now, if there ever was a hospitable man,--a man who gave a welcome,--a
+rough but merry welcome to every one who entered his doors, it was
+James Parsons. He had a homely, jocose saying that you must either
+make yourself at home or go home. But on this occasion he rose with a
+somewhat forced and awkward air, laid his pipe down on the mantel-piece,
+and nodded to the Captain with an air of embarrassed inquiry. Then he
+bethought himself, and asked the Captain to sit down. The Captain took
+the nearest chair, beside the table, where Mrs. Parsons had lately been
+sitting at her work. James's chair was directly opposite. The table was
+between them.
+
+James rose and went to the mantel-piece, scratched a match upon his
+boot-heel, and undertook to light his pipe. It did not light; he did not
+notice it, but put the pipe in his mouth as if it were lighted.
+
+It occurred to Captain Pelham now, for the first time, absorbed as he
+had been with exclusive thoughts of the boy, that he should first say
+something to this old man about the daughter whom he had lost: and he
+made some expressions of sympathy. The old man nodded, but said nothing.
+
+There was silence for two or three minutes.
+
+The subject in order now was inevitably the boy. Captain Pelham opened
+his lips to claim him; but, almost to his own surprise, he found himself
+making some common remark about the affairs of the neighborhood. It came
+in harsh and forced, as if it were a fragment of conversation floated in
+by the breeze from the street outside. Then the Captain waited a moment,
+looking out of the window.
+
+James took his pipe from his mouth and leaned his elbows on the table.
+"Why don't you go take him?" he suddenly said: "he's probably down to
+the wharf. Ef you have got the claim to him, why don't you go take him?
+You 've got your team here,--drive right down there and put him in and
+drive off; if you 've got the right to him, why don't you go take him?
+But ef you 've come for my consent, you can set there till the chair
+rots beneath you."
+
+With this, James rose and took the felt hat which was lying by him on
+the table, and saying not another word, went out of the door. He went
+down to the shore, and affected to busy himself with his boat.
+
+There was nothing for Captain Pelham to do but to take his hat, untie
+his horse, and drive home.
+
+The Captain well knew that nobody in the world had a legal right to the
+child until a guardian should be appointed. A plain and simple path was
+open before him: it was his only path. James Parsons had proved wilful
+and wrong-headed; there was nothing now but to take out letters as
+guardian of the boy. Then James would acquiesce without a word.
+
+Immediately after breakfast the Captain went down the street. He opened
+his letters and attended to the first routine of business; then he went
+across the way and up a flight of stairs to a lawyer's office.
+
+If you had happened to read the county papers at about this time, you
+would have seen among the legal notices two petitions, identical in
+form,--the one by Joseph Pelham, the other by James Parsons,--each
+applying for guardianship of Joseph Pelham, the younger of that name,
+with an order upon each petition for all persons interested to come
+in on the first Tuesday of the following month and show cause why the
+petitioner's demand should not be granted.
+
+The county court-house was a new brick building, of modest size, fifteen
+miles from W------, and twenty miles from the village where James
+Parsons lived.
+
+There were fifteen or twenty people from different towns in attendance
+when the court opened on the important first Tuesday. As one after
+another transacted his affairs and went away, others would come in.
+Three or four lawyers sat at tables talking with clients, or stood
+about the judge's desk. There was a sprinkling of women in new mourning.
+Printed papers, filled out with names and dates,--petitions and
+bonds and executors' accounts,--were being handed in to the judge and
+receiving his signature of approval.
+
+The routine business was transacted first. It was almost noon when the
+judge was at last free to attend to contested matters. There was a small
+audience by that time,--only ten or a dozen people, some of whom were
+waiting for train-time, while others, who had come upon their own
+affairs, lingered now from curiosity.
+
+The judge was a tall, spare, old-fashioned man; he had held the office
+for above thirty years. He was a man of much native force, of sound
+learning within the range of his judicial duties, and of strong
+common-sense. He was often employed by Captain Pelham in his own
+affairs, and more particularly in bank and insurance matters,--for the
+probate judges are free to practise at the bar in matters not connected
+with their judicial duties,--and Captain Pelham had always retained
+him in important cases as counsel for the town. He had a large
+practice throughout the county; he knew its people, their ideas, their
+traditions, and their feelings. He understood their social organization
+to the core.
+
+"Now," said the judge, laying aside some papers upon which he had been
+writing, and taking off his glasses, "we will take up the two petitions
+for guardianship of Joseph Pelham."
+
+Captain Pelham and the lawyer whom he had employed took seats at a small
+table before the judge; James Parsons timidly took a seat at another.
+His petition had been filled out for him by one of his neighbors: he had
+no counsel.
+
+Captain Pelham's lawyer rose; he had been impressed by the Captain with
+the importance of the matter, and he was about to make a formal opening.
+But the judge interrupted him. "I think," he said, "that we may assume
+that I know in a general way about these two petitioners. I shall
+assume, unless something is shown to the contrary, that they are both
+men of respectable character, and have proper homes for a boy to grow up
+in. And I suppose there is no controversy that Captain Pelham is a man
+of some considerable means, and that the other petitioner is a man of
+small property.
+
+"Now," he went on, leaning forward with his elbow on his desk, and
+gently waving his glasses with his right hand, "did the father of this
+boy ever express any wish as to what should be done with him in case his
+mother should die?" Nobody answered. "It would be of no legal effect,"
+he said, "but it would have weight with me. Now, is there any evidence
+as to what his mother wanted? A boy's mother can tell best about these
+things, if she is a sensible woman. Mr. Baker," he said to Captain
+Pelham's lawyer, "have you any evidence as to what his mother wanted to
+have done with him?"
+
+Mr. Baker conversed for a moment with Captain Pelham and then called him
+to the stand.
+
+Captain Pelham testified as to his frequent visits to the boy's mother,
+and to her unbroken friendly relations with him. She had never said in
+so many words what she wanted to have done for the boy, but he always
+understood that she meant to have the child come to him; he could not
+say, however, that she had said anything expressly to that effect.
+
+James sat before him not many feet away, in his old-fashioned broadcloth
+coat with a velvet collar. He cross-examined Captain Pelham a little.
+
+"She did n't never tell you," he said, "that she was going to give you
+the boy, did she?"
+
+"No, sir;" said Captain Pelham.
+
+"How often did your wife come over to see her?"
+
+"I could n't tell you, sir," said the Captain.
+
+"Not very often, did she?"
+
+"I think not," the Captain admitted.
+
+"The boy's mother did n't never talk much about Mis' Captain Pelham, did
+she?"
+
+"I don't remember that she did."
+
+"She did n't never have her over to talk with her about what she was
+going to do with the boy, did she?"
+
+"I don't know that she did," said the Captain. "She is here; you can ask
+her."
+
+"You didn't never hear of her leaving no word with Mis' Captain Pelham
+about taking care of the boy, did you?"
+
+"I can't say that I did," said Captain Pelham.
+
+The old man nodded his head with a satisfied air. His cross-examination
+was done.
+
+The Captain retired from the witness-stand; his lawyer whispered with
+him a moment and then went over and whispered for two or three minutes
+with Mrs. Pelham; then he said he had no more evidence to offer.
+
+"Mr. Parsons," said the judge, "do you wish to testify?"
+
+James went to the witness-stand and was sworn.
+
+"Did n't your daughter ever talk about what she wanted done with the
+boy?"
+
+"Talk about it?" said James. "Why, she didn't talk about nothing else.
+She used to have it all over every time we went in. It was all about how
+mother 'n me must do this with him and do that with him,--how he was to
+go to school, what room he was going to sleep in to our house, and all
+that."
+
+Mr. Baker desired to make no cross-examination, and James's wife was
+called, and testified in her quaint way to the same effect.
+
+By a keen, homely instinct James had half consciously foreseen what
+would be the controlling element of the case; and while he had not
+formulated it to himself he had brought with him one of his neighbors,
+who had watched with his daughter through the last nights of her
+life. She was one of the poorest women of the village. Her husband was
+shiftless, and was somewhat given to drink. She had a large family, with
+little to bring them up on. Her life had been one long struggle. She was
+extremely poorly dressed, and although she was neat, there was an air of
+unthrift or discouragement about her dress. She wore an oversack which
+evidently had originally been made for some one else; it lacked one
+button. She was faded and worn and homely; but the moment she spoke
+she impressed you as a woman of conscience. She had talked in the long
+watches of the night with the boy's mother, and she confirmed what James
+and his wife had said. There could be no question what the mother had
+desired.
+
+Mr. Baker ventured out upon the thin ice of cross-examination.
+
+"She must have talked about her father-in-law, Captain Pelham?" he said.
+
+"Oh, yes," said the woman, "often."
+
+"She seemed to be attached to him?"
+
+"Yes, indeed," said the woman, quickly; "she was always telling how good
+he was to her; I have heard her say there was n't no better man in the
+world."
+
+"She must have talked about what he could do for the boy?"
+
+"Yes," said the woman. "She expected him to do for Joe."
+
+"Did n't she ever say," and the lawyer looked round at James,--"did n't
+you ever hear her say that she was worried sometimes for fear her father
+would not be careful enough about the boy?"
+
+The woman hesitated a moment. "Yes," she said, "I have heard her say so,
+but that 's what every mother says."
+
+"What reason did you ever hear her give," the lawyer asked, "why she
+would rather have him stay over there than to go and be brought up by
+his grandfather Pelham?"
+
+The woman looked around timidly at the judge. "Be I obliged to answer?"
+she said.
+
+The judge nodded.
+
+The woman looked toward Captain Pelham with an embarrassed air. He was
+the best friend she had in the world.
+
+"I rather not say nothing about that," she said; "it 's no account,
+anyway."
+
+"Oh, tell us what she said," said Mr. Baker.
+
+He felt that he had made some progress up to that point with his
+cross-examination.
+
+"Well, it was n't much," said the woman; "it was only like this. I have
+heard her say that Miss Captain Pelham was a good woman and meant to do
+what was right, but she was n't a woman that knew how to mother a little
+boy." And here the witness began to cry.
+
+The judge moved slightly in his chair.
+
+There was more or less rambling talk about the way the boy was allowed
+to run loose on the shore, and some suggestions were made in the way of
+conversational argument about his being allowed to go barefoot, and to
+go in swimming when he pleased; but the judge seemed to pay very little
+attention to that. "That 's the way we were all brought up," he said.
+"It is good for the boy; he 'll learn to take care of himself, and his
+mother knew all about it.
+
+"It is plain enough," he said at last, "that there would be some
+advantages to the boy in going to live with Captain Pelham; but there
+is one thing that has been overlooked which would probably have been
+suggested if the petitioner Parsons had had counsel. It has been assumed
+that the boy would be cut loose in future from his grandfather Pelham
+unless he was put under his guardianship; but that is n't so. All his
+grandparents will look out for him, and when he gets older, and wants to
+go into business, here or elsewhere, Captain Pelham will look after him
+just the same as if he were his guardian. The other grandfather has n't
+got the means to advance him. I am not at all afraid about that," he
+said; "the only question here is, where he shall be deposited for the
+next five or six years. Either place is good enough. His father had a
+right to fix it by will if he had chosen to; but he did n't, and I think
+we must consider it a matter for the women to settle: they know best
+about such things. It is plain that his mother thought it would be best
+for him to stay where he is, and she knew best. He 's wonted there, and
+wants to stay."
+
+Then he took up his pen and wrote on Captain Pelham's petition an order
+of dismissal. On the other he filled out and signed the decree granting
+guardianship to James Parsons, and approved the bond. Then he handed the
+papers to the register and called the next case.
+
+From this day on, little was seen of Captain Pelham at James's house.
+Sometimes he would stop in his buggy and take the boy off with him for
+a little stay; but Joe soon wearied of formality, and grew restless
+for James, for his grandmother Parsons, for the free life of the little
+wharf and the shore. Life always opened fresh to him on his return.
+
+Once and only once Captain Pelham entered James's door-yard. James was
+sitting in an armchair under an apple-tree by the well, smoking and
+reading the paper. The Captain began, this time, with no introduction.
+
+"Fred Gooding," he said, "tells me you are talking of letting Joe go out
+with Pitts in his boat You know Pitts is no fit man."
+
+"You tell Fred Gooding he don't know what he 's talking about," said
+James, as he rose from his chair, holding the paper in his hand. "What
+I told Pitts was just the contr'y,--the boy should n't go along o' him."
+Then his anger began to rise. "But what right you got," he demanded, "to
+interfere? 'T ain 't none of your business who I let him go along of.
+It's me that's the boy's guardeen."
+
+"Very well," said the Captain. "Only I tell you fairly,--the first
+time I get word of anything, I 'll go to the probate court and have you
+removed!"
+
+James followed him down the path with derisive laughter. "Why don't you
+go to the probate court?" he said; "you hed great luck before!" And
+as the Captain drove away, James shouted after him, "Go to the probate
+court! Go to the probate court!"
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+There is a low, pleasant boat-shop, close on the shore of a little arm
+of the sea. The tide ebbs and flows before its wide double doors, and
+sometimes rises so high as to flow the sills; then you have to walk
+across in front of the shop on a plank, laid upon iron ballast. There is
+a little wharf or pier close at hand, the outer end of which is always
+going to be repaired. There are two or three other shops near by, and
+about them is the pleasant litter of a boat-yard. In the cove before
+them lie at their moorings in the late afternoon a fleet of fifteen or
+twenty fishing and pleasure boats, all cat-rigged, all of one general
+build, wide, shoal, with one broad sail, all painted white, by the
+custom of the place, and all or nearly all kept neat and clean: they are
+all likely enough to be called upon now and then for sailing-parties.
+Often of a bright afternoon in summer the sails will all be up, as the
+boats swing at their floats: then you have all the effect of a regatta
+in still life.
+
+The shop faces down the bay of which this inlet is the foot, and as you
+look out from your seat within, on a wooden stool, the great door frames
+in a landscape of peaceful beauty. The opening to the sea is closed to
+the view. Simply you can see the two white sand-cliffs through which
+it makes. The bay is a mile in length, perhaps, and of half that width.
+From its white, sandy shores rise gentle hills, bare to the sun or
+covered with a low growth of woods. To the right are low-lying pastures
+and marshes, with here and there a grazing cow. At the head of the
+bay the valley of a stream can be faintly distinguished, while in the
+distance there is a faint suggestion of a few scattered houses on the
+upper waters. At one or two points masts of boats rise from the grass of
+the inland, and sometimes a sail is seen threading its slow way amid the
+trees.
+
+The shop is a favorite resort. You may go there in the early morning,
+in the late forenoon, or in the afternoon; whenever you go you will
+find there more or less company. There is a sort of social, hospitable
+atmosphere about the place which is attractive in the extreme. Sometimes
+there is a good deal of conversation; sometimes there is a comfortable
+silence of good-fellowship. There is more or less knitting there and
+crocheting; often in the afternoon the women from near by take their
+work there to enjoy the view, and the fresh air which draws up there as
+nowhere else.
+
+There is a good deal of religious discussion there, although the
+atmosphere of the shop is not entirely religious, as you may see by some
+of the papers lying about, and the cuts pasted up on the walls. Chief is
+a picture representing a scene in the life of the prophet Jonah. Jonah
+and the seamen are drawing lots to see who shall be cast over. Jonah has
+just drawn the ace of spades.
+
+There are various other pictures on the walls,--prints of famous yachts,
+charts, advertisements of regattas, sailing rules of yacht-clubs.
+Nowhere is the science of boat-building and boat-sailing studied with
+greater closeness than in that shop. Many a successful racer has
+been built there. There are models of boats pinned up against the
+wall,--models which to the common eye hardly vary at all, but to a
+trained perception differ widely. There are oars lying about the shop,
+oil-skin suits, a compass, charts, in round tin cases, boat hardware,
+and coils of new rope.
+
+The little pier has its periods of activity and life, like the great
+world outside. At three or four o'clock, in the gray dawn, fishermen
+appear, singly, or two by two; there is often then a failure of wind,
+and they have to get out to sea by heavy rowing or by the drift of the
+tide. Then there is silence for some hours, and when the world awakes
+the cove is nearly deserted. At seven o'clock begins the life of the
+shop. Amateur fishermen appear,--boarders from New York or visiting sons
+from Brockton. Later still, little parties come down,--a knot of
+young fellows and laughing girls with bright-colored wraps, bound on a
+sailing-party to Katameset, with a matron, and with some well-salted
+man to steer the boat, perhaps in slippers and a dressing-gown. They
+go singing out to sea. Then come a party of bathers,--ladies and little
+children, with towels and blue suits, and all the paraphernalia of pails
+and wooden shovels. Then will come perhaps a couple of girls, to sketch.
+They will encamp anywhere upon the shore, call into their service some
+small amphibious creature to tip a skiff up on its side to make an
+effective scene, and proceed with the wonders of their art. Soon the
+bathers return. They have been only a little way down the narrows, and
+come back to dinner at one. The fishermen come in from three to four,
+unless they happen to be becalmed; there is a bustle then of getting out
+ice; of slitting and weighing and packing fish, and loading them into
+wagons to be carted to the railway. Then there is a lull until the
+sailing-parties return, perhaps at five, perhaps at six, perhaps not
+until the turn of the tide or the evening breeze brings them home.
+
+All the time the quiet life of the boat-shop goes on,--its labor, its
+discussions on politics and religion, its criticism of yachts. All
+day long small boys play about the pier, race in skiffs or in such
+insignificant sailing-craft as may be available, and every half-hour, at
+the initiative of some infant leader, all doff their little print waists
+and short trousers and "go in," regardless of the sketchers on the
+shore.
+
+It was a bright, fresh day. The air was as clear as crystal. Joe had
+been gone since dawn with Henry Price. The wind had been blowing hard
+from the north for a dozen hours, and, as the saying is, had kicked up
+a sea. On the shoal the waves were rolling heavily, and since three
+o'clock the tide had been running against the wind, and the seas had
+been broken every way. But to Henry Price, and with that boat, rough
+seas, from March to November, were only what a rude mountain road would
+be to you or me. If his wife, toward afternoon, shading her eyes at the
+south door, ever felt anxious about him, it was a woman's foolish fear;
+it was only because she thought with concern of that--internal neuralgia
+was it?--which her husband brought back from the war; which seized him
+at rare intervals and enfeebled him for days. He made light of it, and
+never spoke of it out of the house. There was no better boatman on that
+shore. Let alone that one possibility of weakness, and the ocean had a
+hard man to deal with when it dealt with him.
+
+They had been gone all day. It had been rough, and they would come in
+wet. This wind would not die down; they were sure to make a quick run,
+and would be in before dark.
+
+It was late in the afternoon. James was sitting in the shop with one or
+two companions, engaged in a loud discussion. He had been discoursing
+upon all his favorite themes. He had been declaiming upon the dangers
+from Catholic supremacy and the subserviency of the Irish vote to the
+Church of Rome, and upon the absolute necessity of the supremacy of the
+Democratic party; upon the Apocalypse and the seven seals. He had
+been maintaining the literal infallibility of the Scriptures, and the
+necessity of treating some portions as legendary. It would be hard to
+say what inconsistent views he had not set forth within the space of
+the past hour; and all this with the utmost intensity, and yet with
+the utmost good-humor, always ready to acknowledge a point against
+himself,--the more readily if entirely fallacious,--with a burst of
+hearty laughter.
+
+At last there was a pause. Something had called out of doors the two
+or three men who were within. There was nothing to disturb the peaceful
+beauty of the afternoon. It was blowing hard outside, but this was a
+sheltered spot, and the wind was little felt.
+
+As James sat there silent, with no one at hand but the owner of the
+shop, who was busy upon the keel of a new boat, a fisherman came in and
+took a seat, with an affectation of ease and nonchalance; in a moment
+another followed; two or three more came in, then others.
+
+The carpenter stopped his work, and shading his eyes with his hand,
+seemed to be looking down the bay.
+
+There was a dead silence for a few moments. Then James spoke. But it was
+not the voice of James. It was not that cheery and hearty voice which
+had just been filling the shop with mirth. It was a voice harsh, forced,
+mechanical,--the voice of a man paralyzed with terror.
+
+"Why don't you tell me?" he said; "is it Henry, or--is it the boy?"
+
+But no one spoke.
+
+"You don't need to tell me nothing," he said, in the same strange tone
+of paralysis and fear, "I knowed it when Bassett first come in. I
+knowed it when the rest come in and closed in round me and did n't say
+nothing."
+
+He sat still a moment. Then he rose abruptly and turned to the landward
+door. He stumbled over a stool which was in his way, and would have
+fallen but that one of the men sprang forward and held him. He plunged
+hastily out of the door. Just outside, in the shade of a small wild
+cherry-tree, was a bucket of clams which he had dug; across the bucket
+was an old hoe worn down to nothing. He stopped and mechanically took up
+the pail and hoe. Bassett stood by the door and looked after him as he
+went along the foot-path toward his home. There was a scantling fence
+close by. He went over it in his old habitual fashion: first he set over
+the bucket of clams and the hoe; then one leg went over and then the
+other; he sat for an instant on the top slat and then slid down. He took
+up his burden and went his way over the fields. In a moment he was lost
+to sight behind a bit of rising ground. Then he reappeared, making his
+way over the fields at his own heavy gait, until he was lost to sight
+behind a clump of trees close to his own door.
+
+They did not find Henry and the boy that night. It was not until the
+next day that the bodies were washed ashore. One of the searchers,
+walking along the beach in the early dawn, found them both. He came upon
+Henry first; he was lying on the sand upon his face. A little farther
+on, gently swayed by the rising tide, lay Joe and his dog. Joe lay on
+his side, precisely as if asleep; the dog was in his arms.
+
+The boy lies in the burying-ground on the hill, near the stone and the
+weeping-willow which mourn the youth who met his untimely death in 1830,
+in the launching of the brig. There is a rose-bush at the grave, and few
+bright days pass in summer that there is not a bunch of homely flowers
+laid at its foot. It is the spot to which all Mrs. Parsons's thoughts
+now tend, and her perpetual pilgrimage. It is too far for her to walk
+both there and back; but often a neighbor is going that way, with
+a lug-wagon or an open cart or his family carriage,--it makes no
+difference which,--and it is easy to get a ride. It is a good-humored
+village. Everybody stands ready to do a favor, and nobody hesitates to
+ask one. Often on a bright afternoon Mrs. Parsons will watch from her
+front window the "teams" that pass, going to the bay. When she sees
+one which is likely to go in the right direction on its return from the
+bay,--everybody knows in which direction she will wish to go,--she will
+run hastily to the door, and hail it.
+
+"Whoa! Sh-h! Whoa! How d'do, Mis' Parsons?"
+
+"Be you going straight home when you come back? Well, then, if it won't
+really be no trouble at all, I 'll be at the gap when you come by; I
+won't keep you waiting a minute. It 's such a nice, sunshiny afternoon,
+I thought I 'd like to go up and sit awhile, and take some posies."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of By The Sea, by Heman White Chaplin
+
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      By The Sea By Heman White Chaplin
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of By The Sea, by Heman White Chaplin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: By The Sea
+       1887
+
+Author: Heman White Chaplin
+
+Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #23001]
+Last Updated: March 8, 2018
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BY THE SEA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      BY THE SEA
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Heman White Chaplin
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> IV. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> V. </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the southeastern coast of Massachusetts is a small village with which I
+      was once familiarly acquainted. It differs little in its general aspect
+      from other hamlets scattered along that shore. It has its one long,
+      straggling street, plain and homelike, from which at two or three
+      different points a winding lane leads off and ends abruptly in the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fifty years ago the village had a business activity of its own. There
+      still remain the vestiges of a wharf at a point where once was a hammering
+      ship-yard. Here and there, in bare fields along the sea, are the ruins of
+      vats and windmills,&mdash;picturesque remains of ancient salt-works.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no visible sign left now of the noisy life of the ship-yards,
+      except a marble stone beneath a willow in the burying-ground on the hill,
+      which laments the untimely death of a youth of nineteen, killed in 1830 in
+      the launching of a brig. But traces of the salt-works everywhere remain,
+      in frequent sheds and small barns which are wet and dry, as the saying is,
+      all the time, and will not hold paint. They are built of salt-boards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were a good many of the people of the village and its adjoining
+      country who interested me very greatly. I am going to tell you a simple
+      event which happened in one of its families, deeply affecting its little
+      history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James Parsons was a man perhaps sixty years of age, strongly built,
+      gray-haired, cleanshaven except for the conventional seaman's fringe of
+      beard below the chin, and always exquisitely neat. Whether you met him in
+      his best suit, on Sunday morning, or in his old clothes, going to his
+      oyster-beds or his cranberry-marsh, it was always the same. He was usually
+      in his shirt-sleeves in summer. His white cotton shirt, with its easy
+      collar and wristbands, seemed always to have just come from the
+      ironing-board. &ldquo;It ain't no trouble at all to keep James clean,&rdquo; I have
+      heard Mrs. Parsons say, in her funny little way; &ldquo;he picks his way round
+      for all the world just like a pussycat, and never gets no spots on him,
+      nowhere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      You saw at once, upon the slightest acquaintance with James, that while he
+      was of the same general civilization as his neighbors, he was of a
+      different type. In his narrowness, there was a peculiar breadth and vigor
+      which characterized him. He had about him the atmosphere of a wider ocean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His early reminiscences were all of that picturesque and adventurous life
+      which prevailed along our coasts to within forty years, and his
+      conversation was suggestive of it He held a silver medal from the Humane
+      Society for conspicuous bravery in the rescue of the crew of a ship
+      stranded in winter in a storm of sleet off Post Hill Bar. He had a
+      war-hatchet, for which he had negotiated face to face with a naked
+      cannibal in the South Sea. He was familiar with the Hoogly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His language savored always of the sea. His hens &ldquo;turned in,&rdquo; at night. He
+      was full of sayings and formulas of a maritime nature; there was one which
+      always seemed to me to have something of a weird and mystic character:
+      &ldquo;South moon brings high water on Coast Island Bar.&rdquo; In describing the
+      transactions of domestic life, he used words more properly applicable to
+      the movements of large ships. He would speak of a saucepan as if it
+      weighed a hundred tons. He never tossed or threw even the slightest
+      object; he hove it. &ldquo;Why, father!&rdquo; said Mrs. Parsons, surprised at seeing
+      him for a moment untidy; &ldquo;what have you ben doing? Your boots and
+      trousers-legs is all white!&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Mr. Parsons, apologetically,
+      looking down upon his dusty garments, &ldquo;I just took that bucket of ashes
+      and hove 'em into the henhouse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The word &ldquo;heave,&rdquo; in fact, was always upon his tongue. It applied to
+      everything. &ldquo;How was this road straightened out?&rdquo; I asked him one day;
+      &ldquo;did the town vote to do it?&rdquo; &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; he said quickly; &ldquo;there was n't
+      never no vote. The se-lec'men just come along one day, and got us all
+      together, and hove in and hove out; and we altered our fences to suit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember hearing him testify as a witness to a will. It appeared that
+      the testator was sick in bed when he signed the instrument. He was
+      suffering greatly, and when he was to sign, it was necessary to lift him
+      with the ex-tremest care, to turn him to the light-stand. &ldquo;State what was
+      done next,&rdquo; the lawyer asked of James. &ldquo;Captain Frost was laying on his
+      left side,&rdquo; said James. &ldquo;Two of us took a holt of him and rolled him
+      over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had probably not the least suspicion that his language had a maritime
+      flavor. I asked him one night, as we coasted along toward home, &ldquo;What do
+      seafaring men call the track of light that the moon makes on the water?
+      They must have some name for it&rdquo; &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;they don't have no
+      name for it; they just call it 'the wake of the moon.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      James's learning had been chiefly gained from the outside world and not
+      from books. I have heard him lay it down as a fact that the word &ldquo;Bible&rdquo;
+       had its etymology from the word &ldquo;by-bill&rdquo; (hand-bill). &ldquo;It was writ,&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;in small parcels, and they was passed around by them that writ 'em,
+      like by-bills; and so when they hove it all into one, they called it the
+      Bible.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But while James had little learning himself, he appreciated it highly in
+      others. I had occasion to ask him once why it was that the son of one of
+      his neighbors, in closing up his father's estate, had not settled his
+      accounts regularly in the probate court. &ldquo;Oh, I know how that was,&rdquo; he
+      replied; &ldquo;he settled 'em the other way. You see, he went to the college at
+      Woonsocket, and he learned there how to settle accounts the other way: and
+      that's the way he settled 'em.&rdquo; And then he added, &ldquo;When Alvin left the
+      college, they giv' him a book that tells how to do all kinds of business,
+      and what you want to do so's to make money; and Alvin has always followed
+      them rules. The consequence is, he's made money, and what he 's made, he
+      's kep' it. I suppose he's worth not less than sixteen hundred dollars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes he would venture a remark of a gallant nature. &ldquo;They don't
+      generally git the lights in the hall so as to suit me,&rdquo; he once said. &ldquo;I
+      don't want it too light, because then it hurts my eyes; but I want it
+      light enough so as 't I can see the women!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      James was a large, strong man, but Mrs. Parsons, although she was little
+      and slight, and was always ailing, constantly assumed the rôle of her
+      husband's nurse and protector, not only in household matters, but in other
+      affairs of life. Whenever she had visitors,&mdash;and she and James were
+      hospitable in the extreme,&mdash;she was pretty sure to end up, sooner or
+      later, if James were present, with some droll criticism of him, as much to
+      his delight as to hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James sometimes liked to affect a certain harshness of demeanor; but the
+      disguise was a transparent one. How well do I remember the time&mdash;oh,
+      so long ago!&mdash;when for some reason or other I happened to have his
+      boat instead of my own, one day, with one of the boys of the village, to
+      go to Matamet, twelve miles off, to visit certain lobster-pots which we
+      had set. We were delayed there by breaking our boom, in jibing. We should
+      have been at home at noon; at seven in the evening we were not yet in
+      sight. When we got in, rather crestfallen at our disaster, particularly as
+      the boat was wanted for the next day, James met us at the pier. We were
+      boys then, and his tongue was free. As he stood there on the shore,
+      bare-headed, hastily summoned from his house, with his hair blowing in the
+      wind, waving his hands and addressing first us and then a knot of men who
+      stood smoking by, no words of censure were too harsh, no comment on our
+      carelessness too cutting, no laments too keen over the irreparable loss of
+      that particular boom. The next time I could take my own boat, if I were
+      going to get cast away. And I remember well how he ended his tirade. &ldquo;I
+      did n't care nothing about you two,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you want to git
+      drownded, git drownded; it ain't nothing to me. All I was afraid of was
+      that you 'd gone and capsized my boat, and would n't never turn up to tell
+      where you sunk her. But as for you&mdash;&rdquo; and he laughed a laugh of
+      heartless indifference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But ten minutes later, and right before his face, at his own front gate,
+      Mrs. Parsons betrayed him. &ldquo;I never see father so worried,&rdquo; she said,
+      &ldquo;sence the time he heard about Thomas; why, he 's spent the whole
+      afternoon as nervous as a hawk, going up on the hill with his spy-glass;
+      and I don't feel so sure but what he was crying. He said he did n't care
+      nothing about the boat,&mdash;'What 's that old boat!' says he; but if you
+      boys was drownded out of her, he would n't never git over it.&rdquo; At which
+      James, being so unmasked, laughed in a shamefaced way, and shook us by the
+      shoulders. He had a son who carried on some sort of half-maritime business
+      on one of the wharves, in the city, and lived over his shop. When James
+      went at intervals to visit him, he made his way at once from the railway
+      station to the nearest wharf; then he followed the line of the water
+      around to the shop. Where jib-booms project out over the sidewalk, one
+      feels so thoroughly at home! From the shop he would make short adventurous
+      excursions up Commercial Street and State Street, sometimes going no
+      farther than the nautical-instrument store on the corner of Broad Street,
+      sometimes venturing to Washington Street, or even moving for a short
+      distance up or down in the current of that gay thoroughfare. He loved to
+      comment satirically on the city, with a broad humorous sense of his own
+      strangeness there. &ldquo;The city folks don't seem to have nothing to do,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;They seem to be all out, walking up and down the streets. Come
+      noon, I thought there'd be some let-up for dinner; but they did n't seem
+      to want nothing to eat; they kep' right on walking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I must not leave James Parsons without telling you of two whale's teeth
+      which stand on his parlor mantel-piece; he ornamented them himself,
+      copying the designs from cheap foreign prints. One of them is what he
+      calls &ldquo;the meeting-house.&rdquo; It is the high altar of the Cathedral of
+      Seville. On the other is &ldquo;the wild-beast tamer.&rdquo; A man with a feeble,
+      wishy-washy expression holds by each hand a fierce, but subjugated tiger.
+      His legs dangle loosely in the air. There is nothing to suggest what
+      upholds him in his mighty contest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Now we must turn from James Parsons to a man of a different type, or
+      rather of a different variety of the same type; for they descend alike
+      from original founders of the town, and, like most of their
+      fellow-townsmen, are both of unqualified Pilgrim stock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To get to Captain Joseph Pelham's house, you have to drive along a range
+      of hills for some miles, skirting the sea; then you come, half-way, to a
+      bright modern village with trees along the main street, with houses and
+      fences kept painted up, for the most part, but here and there relieved by
+      an unpainted dwelling of a past generation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here you have an option. You may either pursue your road through the
+      high-lying prosperous street, with peeps of salt water to the right, or
+      you may turn sharply off at a little store and descend to the lower road.
+      It is always a struggle to choose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The road to the beach descends a sharp, gravelly hill, and crosses a
+      bridge. Then you come out on a waste of salt-marsh, threaded by the creek,
+      broken by wild, fantastic sand-hills, grown over by beach-grass which will
+      cut your fingers like a knife. You drive close along the white,
+      precipitous beach; you pass the long, shaky pier, with half-decayed
+      fish-houses at the other end, and picturesque heaps of fish-cars, seines,
+      and barrels. Then the road, following the shore a little longer, climbs
+      the hill and enters the woods. Two miles more and you come out to fields
+      with mossy fences, and occasional houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The houses begin to be more frequent. All at once you enter the main
+      street of W&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment you see that you have come into a new atmosphere. There is a
+      large modern church among the older ones. There are large, fine houses,
+      some old-fashioned, others new. By some miraculous intervention Queen Anne
+      has not as yet made her appearance. There are handsome, well-filled
+      stores, going into no little refinement in stock. There is, of course, a
+      small brick library, built by the bounty of a New Yorker who was born
+      here. There is a brick national bank, and a face brick block occupied
+      above by Freemasons, orders of Red Men, Knights Templars, and the Pool of
+      Siloam Lodge, I. O. O. F., and below by a savings bank and a local marine
+      insurance company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is here that we shall find Captain Joseph Pelham. If a stranger has
+      occasion to inquire for the leading men of the place he is always first
+      referred to him. It is he who heads every list and is the chairman of
+      every meeting. When a certain public man, commanding but a small following
+      here, appeared, upon his campaign tour, and found no one to escort him to
+      the platform and preside, so that he was obliged to justify his appearance
+      here by the Scripture passage, &ldquo;They that are whole need not a physician,
+      but they that are sick;&rdquo; at the moment of entering the hall, closely
+      packed with curious opponents, disposed perhaps to be derisive when the
+      situation for the visitor was embarrassing in the extreme,&mdash;it was
+      Captain Joseph Pelham who, though the bitterest opponent of them all, rose
+      from his seat, gave the speaker his arm, escorted him to the platform,
+      presented him with grave courtesy to the audience, and sat beside him
+      through the entire discourse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While Captain Pelham continued to go to sea, and after that, until he was
+      made president of the insurance company, he lived a mile or two out of the
+      town, in a house he had inherited. It is picturesquely situated, on a bare
+      hill, with a wide view of the inland and the ocean. As you look down from
+      its south windows, the cluster of houses nestling together at the shore
+      below stand sharply out against the water. It is one of those white houses
+      common in our older towns,&mdash;two-storied, long on the street, with the
+      front door in the middle. Of the interior it is enough to say that its
+      owner had sailed for thirty years to Hong-Kong, Calcutta and Madras. It
+      had a prevailing odor of teak and lacquer. In the front hall was a vast
+      china cane-holder; a turretted Calcutta hat hung on the hat-tree; a heavy,
+      varnished Chinese umbrella stood in a corner; a long and handsome settee
+      from Java stood against the wall. In the parlors, on either hand, were
+      Chinese tables shutting up like telescopes, elaborate rattan chairs of
+      different kinds, and numberless other things of this sort, which had
+      plainly been honestly come by, and not bought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, if you met the Captain's favor, he would show you with becoming
+      pride some family relics, and tell you about them. They came mostly from
+      his paternal grandfather, who was a shipmaster too, had commanded a
+      privateer in the Revolution, and made a fortune. There were a number of
+      pieces of handsome furniture,&mdash;these you could see for yourself What
+      would be shown you, with a half-diffident air, would be: a silver mug; two
+      Revere tablespoons; a few tiny teaspoons marked F.; a handsome sword and
+      scabbard; a yellow satin waistcoat and small-clothes; portraits, not
+      artistic, but effective, of his grandfather, in a velvet coat and
+      knee-breeches, with a long spyglass in his hand, and of his grandmother, a
+      strong, matter-of-fact looking woman, handsomely dressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the thing which the Captain secretly treasured most, but brought out
+      last, was his grandmother's Dutch Bible. It is a curious old book; you can
+      see it still if you wish. It has an elaborate frontispiece. Sixteen cuts
+      of leading incidents in Scripture history conduct you by gentle stages,
+      from Eden, through the offering of Isaac, to the close of the Evangelists,
+      and surround Dr. Martin Luther, who, in a gown, holds back the curtains of
+      a pillared alcove, to show you, through two windows, an Old and a New
+      Testament landscape, and a lady sitting beneath a canopy, with an open
+      volume. The covers are of thick bevelled board covered with leather. There
+      was once a heavy clasp. The edges are richly gilded, and figures are
+      pricked in the gilding. It is very handsomely printed. It was in the
+      possession, in 1760, of a young New England girl, the Captain's
+      grandmother. There is a story about it,&mdash;a story too long to tell
+      here. Suffice it to say that the Captain's ancestor, who settled early in
+      New England, came from Leyden shortly after Mr. John Robinson. A hundred
+      years later and more, in the oddest way, an acquaintance sprang up with
+      certain Dutch connections, and in the course of it this Bible, then new
+      and elegant, found its way over the sea as a gift to young Mistress
+      Preston. In New England, and as a relic of the early ties of our people
+      with Holland, momentarily renewed after a century had passed away, it is
+      probably unique. It was a last farewell from Holland to her English
+      children, before she parted company with them forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have told you about this house, as I recall it, although Captain Pelham
+      had now ceased to live there, because it was there alone that he seemed
+      completely at home. Furnished as it was from the four quarters of the
+      globe, everything seemed to fit in with his ways. He supplemented the
+      Chinese tables, and they supplemented him. But when he ceased to go to
+      sea, in late middle life, and settled down at home upon his competency,
+      and began a little later to become interested in public matters; when he
+      was at last made president of the insurance company, a director in the
+      bank, and a trustee in the savings bank, and when affairs were left more
+      and more to his control, it became convenient for him to get into town;
+      and his wife and daughter were perhaps ambitious for the change.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he had sold his house by the sea, and had bought a large and somewhat
+      pretentious one on the main street, with a cast-iron summer arbor, and a
+      bay-window closed in for a conservatory. He had furnished it from the city
+      with new Brussels carpet, with a parlor set, a sitting-room set, a
+      dining-room set, and chamber sets; and the antique things which had given
+      his former home an air of charming picturesqueness were for the most part
+      tucked away in unnoticed corners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Captain never seemed to me to have become quite naturalized in his new
+      home. He never belonged to the furniture, or the furniture to him. The
+      place where you saw him best in these later days was in the office of his
+      insurance company, or in the little business-room of one of the banks,
+      surrounded by a knot of more substantial townsmen, or talking patiently
+      with some small farmer or seafaring man seeking for insurance or a loan.
+      One of the most marked features of his character was a certain patience
+      and considerateness which made all borrowers apply by preference to him.
+      He would sit down at his little table with a plain man whose affairs were
+      in disorder, and listen with close attention to his application for a
+      loan. Somehow the man would find himself disclosing all the particulars of
+      his distress. Then Captain Pelham, in his quiet way, would go over the
+      whole matter with him; would plan with him on his concerns; would try to
+      see if it were not possible to postpone a little the payment of debts and
+      to hasten the collection of claims; to get a part of the money for a short
+      time from a son in Boston or a married daughter in New Bedford; and so, by
+      pulling and hauling, to weather the Cape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I must say a word about his position in town matters. He had been at sea
+      the greater part of the time from sixteen to fifty-two. During that time
+      he had had absolutely no concern with political affairs. He had never
+      voted: for he had never, as it had happened, been ashore at the time of an
+      election. And yet before he had been at home six years he was one of the
+      selectmen of the town and overseer of the poor, and had become familiar
+      with the details of Massachusetts town government, superficially so
+      simple, in fact so complex. It was a large town, of no small wealth. Lying
+      as it did along the seaboard, where havoc was always being made by
+      disasters of the sea, there was not only a larger number than in an inland
+      town of persons actually quartered in the poorhouse, but there were many
+      broken families who had to be helped in their own homes. And it was to me
+      an interesting fact that in dealing with two score households of this
+      class, Captain Pel-ham, who had spent most of his time at sea, was able to
+      display the utmost tact and judgment. He applied to their affairs that
+      same plain kindliness and sound sense which he showed in the matter of
+      discounts at the bank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the friendships of Captain Pelham were chiefly in his own town, his
+      acquaintance was not confined to it. In his own quiet, unpretending way he
+      was something of a man of the world. He was known in the marine insurance
+      offices in the large cities. He had been familiar all his life with large
+      affairs; he had commanded valuable ships, loaded with fortunes in teas and
+      silks, in the days when an India captain was a merchant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      You will ask me why it is that I have been telling you about these men,
+      and what it is that connects them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was now ten years since Captain Pelham's only son, himself at
+      twenty-two the master of a vessel, had married a daughter of James
+      Parsons,&mdash;a tall, impulsive, and warm-hearted girl,&mdash;one of
+      those girls to whom children always cling. Both James Parsons's daughters
+      had proved attractive and had married well. It had been a disappointment
+      in Captain Pelham's household, perhaps, that this son, their especial
+      pride, should not have married into one of the wealthy families in his own
+      village. At first there had been a little visiting to and fro; it had
+      lasted but a little time, and then the two households had settled down, as
+      the way is in the country, to follow each its own natural course of
+      living. George Pelham's wife had always lived in an odd little house, all
+      doors and windows, near by her father, in her native village.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was from Porto Cabello that that message came,&mdash;yellow fever&mdash;a
+      short sickness&mdash;a burial in a stranger's grave. George Pelham's wife
+      had been for two or three years of less than her usual strength. It was
+      not long after that news came,&mdash;came so suddenly, with no warning,&mdash;that
+      she began to fade away; and after ten months she died.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember seeing her a week or two before her death. Her bed had been set
+      up in her little parlor for the convenience of those who were attending
+      upon her. She lay on her back, bolstered up. The paleness of her face was
+      intensified by her coal-black hair, lying back heavy on the pillow. Her
+      hands were thin and transparent, and I remember well the straining look in
+      her eyes as she talked with me about the boy whom she was going to leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was living, as I have said, close by her father. It was natural that
+      in the last few days of her illness the child should be taken to her
+      father's house, and when she died and the funeral was over, it was there
+      that he returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Picture now to yourself a boy toward nine years old, symmetrically made,
+      firm and hard. His head is round, his features are good, his hair is fine
+      and lies down close. He is clothed in a neat print jacket, with a collar
+      and a little handkerchief at the neck, and a pair of short trousers
+      buttoned on to the jacket. He is barefoot. He is tanned but not burnt. His
+      complexion is of a rich dark brown. He is always fresh and clean. But the
+      great charm about him is the expression of infinite fun and mirth that is
+      always upon his face. Never for a moment while he is awake is his face
+      still. Always the same, yet always shifting, with a thousand varying
+      shades of roguish joy. Quick, bright, full of boyish repartee, full of
+      shouts and laughter. And the same incessant life which plays upon his face
+      shows itself in every movement of his limbs. Never for a moment is he
+      still unless he has some work upon his hands. He has his little routine of
+      tasks, regularly assigned, which he goes through with the most amusing
+      good-humor and attention. It is his duty to see that the skiffs are not
+      jammed under the wharf on the rising tide; to sweep out the &ldquo;Annie&rdquo; when
+      she comes in, and to set her cabin to rights; to set away the dishes after
+      meals, and to feed the chickens. Aside from a few such tasks, his time in
+      summer is his own. The rest of the year he goes to the &ldquo;primary,&rdquo; and
+      serves to keep the whole room in a state of mirth. He has the happy gift
+      that to put every one in high spirits he has only to be present. Such an
+      incessant flow of life you rarely see. His manners are good, and he comes
+      honestly by them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is an amusing union in him of the baby and the man. While the
+      children of his age at the summer hotel walk about for the most part with
+      their nurses, he is turned loose upon the shore, and has been, from his
+      cradle. He can dive and swim and paddle and float and &ldquo;go steamboat.&rdquo; He
+      can row a boat that is not too heavy, and up to the limit of his strength
+      he can steer a sail-boat with substantial skill. He knows the currents,
+      the tides, and the shoals about his shore, and the nearer landmarks. He
+      knows that to find the threadlike entrance to the bay you bring the
+      flag-staff over Cart-wright's barn. He has vague theories of his own as to
+      the annual shifting of the channel. He knows where to take the city
+      children to look for tinkle-shells and mussels. He knows what winds bring
+      in the scallops from their beds. He knows where to dig for clams, and
+      where to tread for quahaugs without disturbing the oysters. He has a good
+      deal of fragmentary lore of the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every morning you will hear his cry, a sort of yodel, or bird-call,
+      peculiar to him, with which he bursts forth upon the world. Then you will
+      hear, perhaps, loud peals of laughter at something that has excited his
+      sense of the absurd,&mdash;contagious laughter, full of innocent fun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he will appear, perhaps, with his wooden dinner-bucket,&mdash;he is
+      going off with his grandfather for the day,&mdash;and will yodel to the
+      old man as a signal to make haste. Then you will hear him consulting with
+      some one upon the weather.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this time he will be going; through various evolutions, swinging in
+      the hammock, sitting on the fence, opening his bucket to show you what he
+      has to eat, closing the bucket and sitting down upon the cover, or turning
+      somersaults upon the grass. Then he will encamp under an apple-tree to
+      wait until his grandfather appears, enlivening the time by a score of
+      minute excursions after hens and cats. Then he will go into the house
+      again, and rock while the old man finishes his coffee, sure of a greeting,
+      confident in a sense of entire good-fellowship, until the meal is
+      finished, and James Parsons is ready to take his coat and a red-bladed
+      oar, and set out. Then the boy is like a setter off for a walk,&mdash;all
+      sorts of whimsical expressions in his face, of absolute delight; every
+      form of extravagance in his bearing. The only trouble is, one has to laugh
+      too much; but with all this, something so manly, so companionable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is no little of a philosopher in his way. He has been a great deal with
+      older people, and has caught the habit of discussion of affairs, or
+      rather, perhaps, of unconsciously reflecting forth discussions which he
+      has heard. He has an infinite curiosity upon all matters of human life. He
+      likes, within limits, to discuss character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the boat his chief delights are to talk, to eat cookies, and to steer.
+      When it is not blowing too hard for him to stand at the tiller, he will
+      steer for an hour together, watching with the most constant care the
+      trembling of the leach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It makes no difference to him at what hour he returns,&mdash;from
+      oystering or from the cranberry-bog. If it is in the middle of the
+      afternoon, good and well. Instantly upon landing he will collect a troop
+      of urchins; in an incredibly short space of time there will be a heap of
+      little clothes upon the bank; in a moment a procession of small naked
+      figures will go running down to the wharf, diving, one after the other. If
+      distance or tide or a calm keeps him out late, so much the better. In that
+      case there is the romance of coasting along the shore by night; of
+      counting and distinguishing the lights; of guessing the nearness to land
+      from the dull roar of the sea breaking on the beach. &ldquo;Don't you think,&rdquo; he
+      will sometimes say, &ldquo;that we are nearer shore than we think we are?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is amusing sometimes, on a distant voyage of fifteen or twenty miles,
+      after seed oysters, when a landing is made at some little port, to see him
+      drop the mariner at once and become a child, with a burning desire to find
+      a shop where he can buy animal-crackers. Finding such a place,&mdash;and
+      usually it is not difficult,&mdash;he will lay in a supply of lions and
+      tigers, and then go marching about with great delight, with mockery in his
+      eyes, keenly appreciating the satire involved in eating the head off a
+      cooky lion, incapable of resistance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No picture of Joe would be complete which left out his dog. Kit was a
+      black, fine-haired creature, smaller than a collie, but of much the same
+      gentle disposition,&mdash;a present from Captain Pelham. When Kit was
+      first presented to the boy he domesticated himself at once, and in a week
+      it was impossible to tell, from his relations with the household, which
+      was boy and which was dog. They were both boys and they were both dogs.
+      Kit had an unqualified sense of being at home, and of being beloved and
+      indispensable. It was long before he became a sailor. When, at the outset,
+      it was attempted to make a man of him by taking him when they went out to
+      fish, the failure seemed to be complete. He was a little sea-sick. Then he
+      was sad, and sighed and groaned as dogs never do on shore. He would not
+      lie still, but was nervous and feverish. Once he leaped out of the boat
+      and made for shore, and had to be pursued and rescued, exhausted and
+      half-drowned. Still, whenever he had to be left at home, it was a struggle
+      every time to reconcile him and leave him. Once he pursued a boat which he
+      mistook for James's along the shore of the bay, half down to Benson's
+      Narrows, got involved in the creeks which the tide was beginning to fill,
+      and had to be brought ingloriously home by a farmer, made fast on the top
+      of a load of sweet, salt hay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would tease like a child to be allowed to go. He would listen with an
+      unsatisfied and appealing look while Joe, with an exuberant but regretful
+      air, explained to him in detail the reasons which made it impossible for
+      him to go. But in a few months, as the dog grew older, he prevailed, and
+      although he would generally retire into the shelter of the cabin, he was
+      nevertheless the boy's almost inseparable companion on the water as on the
+      shore. The relation between the two was always touching. It evidently
+      never crossed the dog's mind that he was not a younger brother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, to complete the picture of James Par-sons's household, add in this
+      boy; for while it is but just now that he is strictly of it, he has been
+      for years its mirth and life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember that quiet household before it knew him,&mdash;cosey, homelike,
+      with a pervading air even then of genial humor, but with long hours of
+      silence and repose,&mdash;geraniums and the click of knitting-needles in
+      the sitting-room; faint odors of a fragrant pipe from the shed kitchen; no
+      stir of boisterous fun, except when some bronzed, solemn joker, with his
+      wife, came in for a formal call, and solemnity gave way, by a gradual
+      descent, to merriment. Joe had given no new departure, only an impulse.
+      &ldquo;James used to behave himself quite well,&rdquo; Mrs. Parsons would say, archly
+      raising her eyebrows, &ldquo;before Joe's time; but now there 's two boys of 'em
+      together, and the one as bad as the other, and I can't do nothing with
+      'em. And then,&rdquo;&mdash;with a mock gesture of despair,&mdash;&ldquo;that dog!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      While Joe's mother was lying ill, and after it had become certain that she
+      would soon leave this world forever, the question had been
+      freely-discussed as to what her boy's future should be. In Captain Joseph
+      Pelham's mind there was only-one answer to this question,&mdash;that the
+      lad should come to him. He bore the Captain's name; he represented the
+      Captain's son; he should take a place now in the Captain's home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was now about three weeks since Joe's mother had been buried. The stone
+      had not yet been cut and set over her grave. But the Captain thought it
+      time to drive over to James Parsons's and take the boy. That James would
+      make any serious opposition perhaps never entered his mind. It was a
+      bright, charming afternoon; with his shining horse, in a bright,
+      well-varnished buggy, the Captain drove over the seven miles of winding
+      roads through the woods, and along the sea, to the village where James
+      Parsons lived. He tied his horse to the hitching-post in front of the
+      broad cottage house, went down the path to the L door, knocked, and went
+      in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James was sitting in a large room which served in winter as a kitchen and
+      in summer as a sort of sitting-room, smoking a pipe and gazing vacantly
+      into the pine-branches in the open fireplace before him. He had been out
+      all day on his marsh, but he had been home a couple of hours. His wife&mdash;kindly
+      soul&mdash;received Captain Pelham at the door, wiping her hands upon her
+      apron, and modestly showed him into the sitting-room; then she retired to
+      her tasks in the shed kitchen. She moved about mechanically for a moment;
+      then she ran hastily out into the lean-to wood-shed, shut the door behind
+      her, sat down on the worn floor where it gives way with a step to the
+      floor of earth by the wood-pile, hid her face in her apron, and burst into
+      tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joe was at the wharf with his comrades playing at war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, if there ever was a hospitable man,&mdash;a man who gave a welcome,&mdash;a
+      rough but merry welcome to every one who entered his doors, it was James
+      Parsons. He had a homely, jocose saying that you must either make yourself
+      at home or go home. But on this occasion he rose with a somewhat forced
+      and awkward air, laid his pipe down on the mantel-piece, and nodded to the
+      Captain with an air of embarrassed inquiry. Then he bethought himself, and
+      asked the Captain to sit down. The Captain took the nearest chair, beside
+      the table, where Mrs. Parsons had lately been sitting at her work. James's
+      chair was directly opposite. The table was between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James rose and went to the mantel-piece, scratched a match upon his
+      boot-heel, and undertook to light his pipe. It did not light; he did not
+      notice it, but put the pipe in his mouth as if it were lighted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It occurred to Captain Pelham now, for the first time, absorbed as he had
+      been with exclusive thoughts of the boy, that he should first say
+      something to this old man about the daughter whom he had lost: and he made
+      some expressions of sympathy. The old man nodded, but said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was silence for two or three minutes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The subject in order now was inevitably the boy. Captain Pelham opened his
+      lips to claim him; but, almost to his own surprise, he found himself
+      making some common remark about the affairs of the neighborhood. It came
+      in harsh and forced, as if it were a fragment of conversation floated in
+      by the breeze from the street outside. Then the Captain waited a moment,
+      looking out of the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James took his pipe from his mouth and leaned his elbows on the table.
+      &ldquo;Why don't you go take him?&rdquo; he suddenly said: &ldquo;he's probably down to the
+      wharf. Ef you have got the claim to him, why don't you go take him? You
+      've got your team here,&mdash;drive right down there and put him in and
+      drive off; if you 've got the right to him, why don't you go take him? But
+      ef you 've come for my consent, you can set there till the chair rots
+      beneath you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With this, James rose and took the felt hat which was lying by him on the
+      table, and saying not another word, went out of the door. He went down to
+      the shore, and affected to busy himself with his boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was nothing for Captain Pelham to do but to take his hat, untie his
+      horse, and drive home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Captain well knew that nobody in the world had a legal right to the
+      child until a guardian should be appointed. A plain and simple path was
+      open before him: it was his only path. James Parsons had proved wilful and
+      wrong-headed; there was nothing now but to take out letters as guardian of
+      the boy. Then James would acquiesce without a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Immediately after breakfast the Captain went down the street. He opened
+      his letters and attended to the first routine of business; then he went
+      across the way and up a flight of stairs to a lawyer's office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you had happened to read the county papers at about this time, you
+      would have seen among the legal notices two petitions, identical in form,&mdash;the
+      one by Joseph Pelham, the other by James Parsons,&mdash;each applying for
+      guardianship of Joseph Pelham, the younger of that name, with an order
+      upon each petition for all persons interested to come in on the first
+      Tuesday of the following month and show cause why the petitioner's demand
+      should not be granted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The county court-house was a new brick building, of modest size, fifteen
+      miles from W&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, and twenty miles from the village where
+      James Parsons lived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were fifteen or twenty people from different towns in attendance
+      when the court opened on the important first Tuesday. As one after another
+      transacted his affairs and went away, others would come in. Three or four
+      lawyers sat at tables talking with clients, or stood about the judge's
+      desk. There was a sprinkling of women in new mourning. Printed papers,
+      filled out with names and dates,&mdash;petitions and bonds and executors'
+      accounts,&mdash;were being handed in to the judge and receiving his
+      signature of approval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The routine business was transacted first. It was almost noon when the
+      judge was at last free to attend to contested matters. There was a small
+      audience by that time,&mdash;only ten or a dozen people, some of whom were
+      waiting for train-time, while others, who had come upon their own affairs,
+      lingered now from curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge was a tall, spare, old-fashioned man; he had held the office for
+      above thirty years. He was a man of much native force, of sound learning
+      within the range of his judicial duties, and of strong common-sense. He
+      was often employed by Captain Pelham in his own affairs, and more
+      particularly in bank and insurance matters,&mdash;for the probate judges
+      are free to practise at the bar in matters not connected with their
+      judicial duties,&mdash;and Captain Pelham had always retained him in
+      important cases as counsel for the town. He had a large practice
+      throughout the county; he knew its people, their ideas, their traditions,
+      and their feelings. He understood their social organization to the core.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said the judge, laying aside some papers upon which he had been
+      writing, and taking off his glasses, &ldquo;we will take up the two petitions
+      for guardianship of Joseph Pelham.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Pelham and the lawyer whom he had employed took seats at a small
+      table before the judge; James Parsons timidly took a seat at another. His
+      petition had been filled out for him by one of his neighbors: he had no
+      counsel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Pelham's lawyer rose; he had been impressed by the Captain with
+      the importance of the matter, and he was about to make a formal opening.
+      But the judge interrupted him. &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that we may assume
+      that I know in a general way about these two petitioners. I shall assume,
+      unless something is shown to the contrary, that they are both men of
+      respectable character, and have proper homes for a boy to grow up in. And
+      I suppose there is no controversy that Captain Pelham is a man of some
+      considerable means, and that the other petitioner is a man of small
+      property.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; he went on, leaning forward with his elbow on his desk, and gently
+      waving his glasses with his right hand, &ldquo;did the father of this boy ever
+      express any wish as to what should be done with him in case his mother
+      should die?&rdquo; Nobody answered. &ldquo;It would be of no legal effect,&rdquo; he said,
+      &ldquo;but it would have weight with me. Now, is there any evidence as to what
+      his mother wanted? A boy's mother can tell best about these things, if she
+      is a sensible woman. Mr. Baker,&rdquo; he said to Captain Pelham's lawyer, &ldquo;have
+      you any evidence as to what his mother wanted to have done with him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Baker conversed for a moment with Captain Pelham and then called him
+      to the stand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Pelham testified as to his frequent visits to the boy's mother,
+      and to her unbroken friendly relations with him. She had never said in so
+      many words what she wanted to have done for the boy, but he always
+      understood that she meant to have the child come to him; he could not say,
+      however, that she had said anything expressly to that effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James sat before him not many feet away, in his old-fashioned broadcloth
+      coat with a velvet collar. He cross-examined Captain Pelham a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She did n't never tell you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that she was going to give you the
+      boy, did she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir;&rdquo; said Captain Pelham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How often did your wife come over to see her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could n't tell you, sir,&rdquo; said the Captain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not very often, did she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think not,&rdquo; the Captain admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The boy's mother did n't never talk much about Mis' Captain Pelham, did
+      she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't remember that she did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She did n't never have her over to talk with her about what she was going
+      to do with the boy, did she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that she did,&rdquo; said the Captain. &ldquo;She is here; you can ask
+      her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't never hear of her leaving no word with Mis' Captain Pelham
+      about taking care of the boy, did you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't say that I did,&rdquo; said Captain Pelham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man nodded his head with a satisfied air. His cross-examination
+      was done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Captain retired from the witness-stand; his lawyer whispered with him
+      a moment and then went over and whispered for two or three minutes with
+      Mrs. Pelham; then he said he had no more evidence to offer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Parsons,&rdquo; said the judge, &ldquo;do you wish to testify?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      James went to the witness-stand and was sworn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did n't your daughter ever talk about what she wanted done with the boy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talk about it?&rdquo; said James. &ldquo;Why, she didn't talk about nothing else. She
+      used to have it all over every time we went in. It was all about how
+      mother 'n me must do this with him and do that with him,&mdash;how he was
+      to go to school, what room he was going to sleep in to our house, and all
+      that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Baker desired to make no cross-examination, and James's wife was
+      called, and testified in her quaint way to the same effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By a keen, homely instinct James had half consciously foreseen what would
+      be the controlling element of the case; and while he had not formulated it
+      to himself he had brought with him one of his neighbors, who had watched
+      with his daughter through the last nights of her life. She was one of the
+      poorest women of the village. Her husband was shiftless, and was somewhat
+      given to drink. She had a large family, with little to bring them up on.
+      Her life had been one long struggle. She was extremely poorly dressed, and
+      although she was neat, there was an air of unthrift or discouragement
+      about her dress. She wore an oversack which evidently had originally been
+      made for some one else; it lacked one button. She was faded and worn and
+      homely; but the moment she spoke she impressed you as a woman of
+      conscience. She had talked in the long watches of the night with the boy's
+      mother, and she confirmed what James and his wife had said. There could be
+      no question what the mother had desired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Baker ventured out upon the thin ice of cross-examination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She must have talked about her father-in-law, Captain Pelham?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; said the woman, &ldquo;often.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She seemed to be attached to him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, indeed,&rdquo; said the woman, quickly; &ldquo;she was always telling how good
+      he was to her; I have heard her say there was n't no better man in the
+      world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She must have talked about what he could do for the boy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the woman. &ldquo;She expected him to do for Joe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did n't she ever say,&rdquo; and the lawyer looked round at James,&mdash;&ldquo;did
+      n't you ever hear her say that she was worried sometimes for fear her
+      father would not be careful enough about the boy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman hesitated a moment. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I have heard her say so,
+      but that 's what every mother says.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What reason did you ever hear her give,&rdquo; the lawyer asked, &ldquo;why she would
+      rather have him stay over there than to go and be brought up by his
+      grandfather Pelham?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman looked around timidly at the judge. &ldquo;Be I obliged to answer?&rdquo;
+       she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman looked toward Captain Pelham with an embarrassed air. He was the
+      best friend she had in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I rather not say nothing about that,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;it 's no account,
+      anyway.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, tell us what she said,&rdquo; said Mr. Baker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt that he had made some progress up to that point with his
+      cross-examination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it was n't much,&rdquo; said the woman; &ldquo;it was only like this. I have
+      heard her say that Miss Captain Pelham was a good woman and meant to do
+      what was right, but she was n't a woman that knew how to mother a little
+      boy.&rdquo; And here the witness began to cry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge moved slightly in his chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was more or less rambling talk about the way the boy was allowed to
+      run loose on the shore, and some suggestions were made in the way of
+      conversational argument about his being allowed to go barefoot, and to go
+      in swimming when he pleased; but the judge seemed to pay very little
+      attention to that. &ldquo;That 's the way we were all brought up,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It
+      is good for the boy; he 'll learn to take care of himself, and his mother
+      knew all about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is plain enough,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;that there would be some
+      advantages to the boy in going to live with Captain Pelham; but there is
+      one thing that has been overlooked which would probably have been
+      suggested if the petitioner Parsons had had counsel. It has been assumed
+      that the boy would be cut loose in future from his grandfather Pelham
+      unless he was put under his guardianship; but that is n't so. All his
+      grandparents will look out for him, and when he gets older, and wants to
+      go into business, here or elsewhere, Captain Pelham will look after him
+      just the same as if he were his guardian. The other grandfather has n't
+      got the means to advance him. I am not at all afraid about that,&rdquo; he said;
+      &ldquo;the only question here is, where he shall be deposited for the next five
+      or six years. Either place is good enough. His father had a right to fix
+      it by will if he had chosen to; but he did n't, and I think we must
+      consider it a matter for the women to settle: they know best about such
+      things. It is plain that his mother thought it would be best for him to
+      stay where he is, and she knew best. He 's wonted there, and wants to
+      stay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he took up his pen and wrote on Captain Pelham's petition an order of
+      dismissal. On the other he filled out and signed the decree granting
+      guardianship to James Parsons, and approved the bond. Then he handed the
+      papers to the register and called the next case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this day on, little was seen of Captain Pelham at James's house.
+      Sometimes he would stop in his buggy and take the boy off with him for a
+      little stay; but Joe soon wearied of formality, and grew restless for
+      James, for his grandmother Parsons, for the free life of the little wharf
+      and the shore. Life always opened fresh to him on his return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once and only once Captain Pelham entered James's door-yard. James was
+      sitting in an armchair under an apple-tree by the well, smoking and
+      reading the paper. The Captain began, this time, with no introduction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fred Gooding,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;tells me you are talking of letting Joe go out
+      with Pitts in his boat You know Pitts is no fit man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You tell Fred Gooding he don't know what he 's talking about,&rdquo; said
+      James, as he rose from his chair, holding the paper in his hand. &ldquo;What I
+      told Pitts was just the contr'y,&mdash;the boy should n't go along o'
+      him.&rdquo; Then his anger began to rise. &ldquo;But what right you got,&rdquo; he demanded,
+      &ldquo;to interfere? 'T ain 't none of your business who I let him go along of.
+      It's me that's the boy's guardeen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; said the Captain. &ldquo;Only I tell you fairly,&mdash;the first
+      time I get word of anything, I 'll go to the probate court and have you
+      removed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      James followed him down the path with derisive laughter. &ldquo;Why don't you go
+      to the probate court?&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;you hed great luck before!&rdquo; And as the
+      Captain drove away, James shouted after him, &ldquo;Go to the probate court! Go
+      to the probate court!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There is a low, pleasant boat-shop, close on the shore of a little arm of
+      the sea. The tide ebbs and flows before its wide double doors, and
+      sometimes rises so high as to flow the sills; then you have to walk across
+      in front of the shop on a plank, laid upon iron ballast. There is a little
+      wharf or pier close at hand, the outer end of which is always going to be
+      repaired. There are two or three other shops near by, and about them is
+      the pleasant litter of a boat-yard. In the cove before them lie at their
+      moorings in the late afternoon a fleet of fifteen or twenty fishing and
+      pleasure boats, all cat-rigged, all of one general build, wide, shoal,
+      with one broad sail, all painted white, by the custom of the place, and
+      all or nearly all kept neat and clean: they are all likely enough to be
+      called upon now and then for sailing-parties. Often of a bright afternoon
+      in summer the sails will all be up, as the boats swing at their floats:
+      then you have all the effect of a regatta in still life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shop faces down the bay of which this inlet is the foot, and as you
+      look out from your seat within, on a wooden stool, the great door frames
+      in a landscape of peaceful beauty. The opening to the sea is closed to the
+      view. Simply you can see the two white sand-cliffs through which it makes.
+      The bay is a mile in length, perhaps, and of half that width. From its
+      white, sandy shores rise gentle hills, bare to the sun or covered with a
+      low growth of woods. To the right are low-lying pastures and marshes, with
+      here and there a grazing cow. At the head of the bay the valley of a
+      stream can be faintly distinguished, while in the distance there is a
+      faint suggestion of a few scattered houses on the upper waters. At one or
+      two points masts of boats rise from the grass of the inland, and sometimes
+      a sail is seen threading its slow way amid the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shop is a favorite resort. You may go there in the early morning, in
+      the late forenoon, or in the afternoon; whenever you go you will find
+      there more or less company. There is a sort of social, hospitable
+      atmosphere about the place which is attractive in the extreme. Sometimes
+      there is a good deal of conversation; sometimes there is a comfortable
+      silence of good-fellowship. There is more or less knitting there and
+      crocheting; often in the afternoon the women from near by take their work
+      there to enjoy the view, and the fresh air which draws up there as nowhere
+      else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a good deal of religious discussion there, although the
+      atmosphere of the shop is not entirely religious, as you may see by some
+      of the papers lying about, and the cuts pasted up on the walls. Chief is a
+      picture representing a scene in the life of the prophet Jonah. Jonah and
+      the seamen are drawing lots to see who shall be cast over. Jonah has just
+      drawn the ace of spades.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are various other pictures on the walls,&mdash;prints of famous
+      yachts, charts, advertisements of regattas, sailing rules of yacht-clubs.
+      Nowhere is the science of boat-building and boat-sailing studied with
+      greater closeness than in that shop. Many a successful racer has been
+      built there. There are models of boats pinned up against the wall,&mdash;models
+      which to the common eye hardly vary at all, but to a trained perception
+      differ widely. There are oars lying about the shop, oil-skin suits, a
+      compass, charts, in round tin cases, boat hardware, and coils of new rope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little pier has its periods of activity and life, like the great world
+      outside. At three or four o'clock, in the gray dawn, fishermen appear,
+      singly, or two by two; there is often then a failure of wind, and they
+      have to get out to sea by heavy rowing or by the drift of the tide. Then
+      there is silence for some hours, and when the world awakes the cove is
+      nearly deserted. At seven o'clock begins the life of the shop. Amateur
+      fishermen appear,&mdash;boarders from New York or visiting sons from
+      Brockton. Later still, little parties come down,&mdash;a knot of young
+      fellows and laughing girls with bright-colored wraps, bound on a
+      sailing-party to Katameset, with a matron, and with some well-salted man
+      to steer the boat, perhaps in slippers and a dressing-gown. They go
+      singing out to sea. Then come a party of bathers,&mdash;ladies and little
+      children, with towels and blue suits, and all the paraphernalia of pails
+      and wooden shovels. Then will come perhaps a couple of girls, to sketch.
+      They will encamp anywhere upon the shore, call into their service some
+      small amphibious creature to tip a skiff up on its side to make an
+      effective scene, and proceed with the wonders of their art. Soon the
+      bathers return. They have been only a little way down the narrows, and
+      come back to dinner at one. The fishermen come in from three to four,
+      unless they happen to be becalmed; there is a bustle then of getting out
+      ice; of slitting and weighing and packing fish, and loading them into
+      wagons to be carted to the railway. Then there is a lull until the
+      sailing-parties return, perhaps at five, perhaps at six, perhaps not until
+      the turn of the tide or the evening breeze brings them home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the time the quiet life of the boat-shop goes on,&mdash;its labor, its
+      discussions on politics and religion, its criticism of yachts. All day
+      long small boys play about the pier, race in skiffs or in such
+      insignificant sailing-craft as may be available, and every half-hour, at
+      the initiative of some infant leader, all doff their little print waists
+      and short trousers and &ldquo;go in,&rdquo; regardless of the sketchers on the shore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a bright, fresh day. The air was as clear as crystal. Joe had been
+      gone since dawn with Henry Price. The wind had been blowing hard from the
+      north for a dozen hours, and, as the saying is, had kicked up a sea. On
+      the shoal the waves were rolling heavily, and since three o'clock the tide
+      had been running against the wind, and the seas had been broken every way.
+      But to Henry Price, and with that boat, rough seas, from March to
+      November, were only what a rude mountain road would be to you or me. If
+      his wife, toward afternoon, shading her eyes at the south door, ever felt
+      anxious about him, it was a woman's foolish fear; it was only because she
+      thought with concern of that&mdash;internal neuralgia was it?&mdash;which
+      her husband brought back from the war; which seized him at rare intervals
+      and enfeebled him for days. He made light of it, and never spoke of it out
+      of the house. There was no better boatman on that shore. Let alone that
+      one possibility of weakness, and the ocean had a hard man to deal with
+      when it dealt with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had been gone all day. It had been rough, and they would come in wet.
+      This wind would not die down; they were sure to make a quick run, and
+      would be in before dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was late in the afternoon. James was sitting in the shop with one or
+      two companions, engaged in a loud discussion. He had been discoursing upon
+      all his favorite themes. He had been declaiming upon the dangers from
+      Catholic supremacy and the subserviency of the Irish vote to the Church of
+      Rome, and upon the absolute necessity of the supremacy of the Democratic
+      party; upon the Apocalypse and the seven seals. He had been maintaining
+      the literal infallibility of the Scriptures, and the necessity of treating
+      some portions as legendary. It would be hard to say what inconsistent
+      views he had not set forth within the space of the past hour; and all this
+      with the utmost intensity, and yet with the utmost good-humor, always
+      ready to acknowledge a point against himself,&mdash;the more readily if
+      entirely fallacious,&mdash;with a burst of hearty laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last there was a pause. Something had called out of doors the two or
+      three men who were within. There was nothing to disturb the peaceful
+      beauty of the afternoon. It was blowing hard outside, but this was a
+      sheltered spot, and the wind was little felt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As James sat there silent, with no one at hand but the owner of the shop,
+      who was busy upon the keel of a new boat, a fisherman came in and took a
+      seat, with an affectation of ease and nonchalance; in a moment another
+      followed; two or three more came in, then others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The carpenter stopped his work, and shading his eyes with his hand, seemed
+      to be looking down the bay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a dead silence for a few moments. Then James spoke. But it was
+      not the voice of James. It was not that cheery and hearty voice which had
+      just been filling the shop with mirth. It was a voice harsh, forced,
+      mechanical,&mdash;the voice of a man paralyzed with terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don't you tell me?&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;is it Henry, or&mdash;is it the boy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But no one spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't need to tell me nothing,&rdquo; he said, in the same strange tone of
+      paralysis and fear, &ldquo;I knowed it when Bassett first come in. I knowed it
+      when the rest come in and closed in round me and did n't say nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat still a moment. Then he rose abruptly and turned to the landward
+      door. He stumbled over a stool which was in his way, and would have fallen
+      but that one of the men sprang forward and held him. He plunged hastily
+      out of the door. Just outside, in the shade of a small wild cherry-tree,
+      was a bucket of clams which he had dug; across the bucket was an old hoe
+      worn down to nothing. He stopped and mechanically took up the pail and
+      hoe. Bassett stood by the door and looked after him as he went along the
+      foot-path toward his home. There was a scantling fence close by. He went
+      over it in his old habitual fashion: first he set over the bucket of clams
+      and the hoe; then one leg went over and then the other; he sat for an
+      instant on the top slat and then slid down. He took up his burden and went
+      his way over the fields. In a moment he was lost to sight behind a bit of
+      rising ground. Then he reappeared, making his way over the fields at his
+      own heavy gait, until he was lost to sight behind a clump of trees close
+      to his own door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They did not find Henry and the boy that night. It was not until the next
+      day that the bodies were washed ashore. One of the searchers, walking
+      along the beach in the early dawn, found them both. He came upon Henry
+      first; he was lying on the sand upon his face. A little farther on, gently
+      swayed by the rising tide, lay Joe and his dog. Joe lay on his side,
+      precisely as if asleep; the dog was in his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy lies in the burying-ground on the hill, near the stone and the
+      weeping-willow which mourn the youth who met his untimely death in 1830,
+      in the launching of the brig. There is a rose-bush at the grave, and few
+      bright days pass in summer that there is not a bunch of homely flowers
+      laid at its foot. It is the spot to which all Mrs. Parsons's thoughts now
+      tend, and her perpetual pilgrimage. It is too far for her to walk both
+      there and back; but often a neighbor is going that way, with a lug-wagon
+      or an open cart or his family carriage,&mdash;it makes no difference
+      which,&mdash;and it is easy to get a ride. It is a good-humored village.
+      Everybody stands ready to do a favor, and nobody hesitates to ask one.
+      Often on a bright afternoon Mrs. Parsons will watch from her front window
+      the &ldquo;teams&rdquo; that pass, going to the bay. When she sees one which is likely
+      to go in the right direction on its return from the bay,&mdash;everybody
+      knows in which direction she will wish to go,&mdash;she will run hastily
+      to the door, and hail it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whoa! Sh-h! Whoa! How d'do, Mis' Parsons?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be you going straight home when you come back? Well, then, if it won't
+      really be no trouble at all, I 'll be at the gap when you come by; I won't
+      keep you waiting a minute. It 's such a nice, sunshiny afternoon, I
+      thought I 'd like to go up and sit awhile, and take some posies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of By The Sea, by Heman White Chaplin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: By The Sea
+       1887
+
+Author: Heman White Chaplin
+
+Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #23001]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BY THE SEA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SEA
+
+1887
+
+By Heman White Chaplin
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+On the southeastern coast of Massachusetts is a small village with
+which I was once familiarly acquainted. It differs little in its general
+aspect from other hamlets scattered along that shore. It has its one
+long, straggling street, plain and homelike, from which at two or three
+different points a winding lane leads off and ends abruptly in the
+water.
+
+Fifty years ago the village had a business activity of its own. There
+still remain the vestiges of a wharf at a point where once was a
+hammering ship-yard. Here and there, in bare fields along the sea,
+are the ruins of vats and windmills,--picturesque remains of ancient
+salt-works.
+
+There is no visible sign left now of the noisy life of the ship-yards,
+except a marble stone beneath a willow in the burying-ground on the
+hill, which laments the untimely death of a youth of nineteen, killed in
+1830 in the launching of a brig. But traces of the salt-works everywhere
+remain, in frequent sheds and small barns which are wet and dry, as
+the saying is, all the time, and will not hold paint. They are built of
+salt-boards.
+
+There were a good many of the people of the village and its adjoining
+country who interested me very greatly. I am going to tell you a simple
+event which happened in one of its families, deeply affecting its little
+history.
+
+James Parsons was a man perhaps sixty years of age, strongly built,
+gray-haired, cleanshaven except for the conventional seaman's fringe of
+beard below the chin, and always exquisitely neat. Whether you met him
+in his best suit, on Sunday morning, or in his old clothes, going to
+his oyster-beds or his cranberry-marsh, it was always the same. He was
+usually in his shirt-sleeves in summer. His white cotton shirt, with
+its easy collar and wristbands, seemed always to have just come from the
+ironing-board. "It ain't no trouble at all to keep James clean," I have
+heard Mrs. Parsons say, in her funny little way; "he picks his way round
+for all the world just like a pussycat, and never gets no spots on him,
+nowhere."
+
+You saw at once, upon the slightest acquaintance with James, that while
+he was of the same general civilization as his neighbors, he was of
+a different type. In his narrowness, there was a peculiar breadth and
+vigor which characterized him. He had about him the atmosphere of a
+wider ocean.
+
+His early reminiscences were all of that picturesque and adventurous
+life which prevailed along our coasts to within forty years, and his
+conversation was suggestive of it He held a silver medal from the Humane
+Society for conspicuous bravery in the rescue of the crew of a ship
+stranded in winter in a storm of sleet off Post Hill Bar. He had a
+war-hatchet, for which he had negotiated face to face with a naked
+cannibal in the South Sea. He was familiar with the Hoogly.
+
+His language savored always of the sea. His hens "turned in," at night.
+He was full of sayings and formulas of a maritime nature; there was
+one which always seemed to me to have something of a weird and mystic
+character: "South moon brings high water on Coast Island Bar." In
+describing the transactions of domestic life, he used words more
+properly applicable to the movements of large ships. He would speak of a
+saucepan as if it weighed a hundred tons. He never tossed or threw even
+the slightest object; he hove it. "Why, father!" said Mrs. Parsons,
+surprised at seeing him for a moment untidy; "what have you ben doing?
+Your boots and trousers-legs is all white!" "Yes," said Mr. Parsons,
+apologetically, looking down upon his dusty garments, "I just took that
+bucket of ashes and hove 'em into the henhouse."
+
+The word "heave," in fact, was always upon his tongue. It applied to
+everything. "How was this road straightened out?" I asked him one day;
+"did the town vote to do it?" "No, no," he said quickly; "there was n't
+never no vote. The se-lec'men just come along one day, and got us all
+together, and hove in and hove out; and we altered our fences to suit."
+
+I remember hearing him testify as a witness to a will. It appeared
+that the testator was sick in bed when he signed the instrument. He was
+suffering greatly, and when he was to sign, it was necessary to lift him
+with the ex-tremest care, to turn him to the light-stand. "State what
+was done next," the lawyer asked of James. "Captain Frost was laying on
+his left side," said James. "Two of us took a holt of him and rolled him
+over."
+
+He had probably not the least suspicion that his language had a maritime
+flavor. I asked him one night, as we coasted along toward home, "What do
+seafaring men call the track of light that the moon makes on the water?
+They must have some name for it" "No, no," he said, "they don't have no
+name for it; they just call it 'the wake of the moon.'"
+
+James's learning had been chiefly gained from the outside world and not
+from books. I have heard him lay it down as a fact that the word "Bible"
+had its etymology from the word "by-bill" (hand-bill). "It was writ,"
+he said, "in small parcels, and they was passed around by them that writ
+'em, like by-bills; and so when they hove it all into one, they called
+it the Bible.'"
+
+But while James had little learning himself, he appreciated it highly in
+others. I had occasion to ask him once why it was that the son of one
+of his neighbors, in closing up his father's estate, had not settled his
+accounts regularly in the probate court. "Oh, I know how that was," he
+replied; "he settled 'em the other way. You see, he went to the college
+at Woonsocket, and he learned there how to settle accounts the other
+way: and that's the way he settled 'em." And then he added, "When Alvin
+left the college, they giv' him a book that tells how to do all kinds
+of business, and what you want to do so's to make money; and Alvin has
+always followed them rules. The consequence is, he's made money, and
+what he 's made, he 's kep' it. I suppose he's worth not less than
+sixteen hundred dollars."
+
+Sometimes he would venture a remark of a gallant nature. "They don't
+generally git the lights in the hall so as to suit me," he once said.
+"I don't want it too light, because then it hurts my eyes; but I want it
+light enough so as 't I can see the women!"
+
+James was a large, strong man, but Mrs. Parsons, although she was little
+and slight, and was always ailing, constantly assumed the role of her
+husband's nurse and protector, not only in household matters, but in
+other affairs of life. Whenever she had visitors,--and she and James
+were hospitable in the extreme,--she was pretty sure to end up, sooner
+or later, if James were present, with some droll criticism of him, as
+much to his delight as to hers.
+
+James sometimes liked to affect a certain harshness of demeanor; but the
+disguise was a transparent one. How well do I remember the time--oh,
+so long ago!--when for some reason or other I happened to have his boat
+instead of my own, one day, with one of the boys of the village, to go
+to Matamet, twelve miles off, to visit certain lobster-pots which we had
+set. We were delayed there by breaking our boom, in jibing. We should
+have been at home at noon; at seven in the evening we were not yet in
+sight. When we got in, rather crestfallen at our disaster, particularly
+as the boat was wanted for the next day, James met us at the pier. We
+were boys then, and his tongue was free. As he stood there on the shore,
+bare-headed, hastily summoned from his house, with his hair blowing in
+the wind, waving his hands and addressing first us and then a knot of
+men who stood smoking by, no words of censure were too harsh, no
+comment on our carelessness too cutting, no laments too keen over the
+irreparable loss of that particular boom. The next time I could take my
+own boat, if I were going to get cast away. And I remember well how he
+ended his tirade. "I did n't care nothing about you two," he said. "If
+you want to git drownded, git drownded; it ain't nothing to me. All I
+was afraid of was that you 'd gone and capsized my boat, and would
+n't never turn up to tell where you sunk her. But as for you--" and he
+laughed a laugh of heartless indifference.
+
+But ten minutes later, and right before his face, at his own front gate,
+Mrs. Parsons betrayed him. "I never see father so worried," she said,
+"sence the time he heard about Thomas; why, he 's spent the whole
+afternoon as nervous as a hawk, going up on the hill with his
+spy-glass; and I don't feel so sure but what he was crying. He said he
+did n't care nothing about the boat,--'What 's that old boat!' says he;
+but if you boys was drownded out of her, he would n't never git over
+it." At which James, being so unmasked, laughed in a shamefaced way,
+and shook us by the shoulders. He had a son who carried on some sort
+of half-maritime business on one of the wharves, in the city, and lived
+over his shop. When James went at intervals to visit him, he made his
+way at once from the railway station to the nearest wharf; then he
+followed the line of the water around to the shop. Where jib-booms
+project out over the sidewalk, one feels so thoroughly at home! From the
+shop he would make short adventurous excursions up Commercial Street and
+State Street, sometimes going no farther than the nautical-instrument
+store on the corner of Broad Street, sometimes venturing to Washington
+Street, or even moving for a short distance up or down in the current of
+that gay thoroughfare. He loved to comment satirically on the city, with
+a broad humorous sense of his own strangeness there. "The city folks
+don't seem to have nothing to do," he said. "They seem to be all out,
+walking up and down the streets. Come noon, I thought there'd be some
+let-up for dinner; but they did n't seem to want nothing to eat; they
+kep' right on walking."
+
+I must not leave James Parsons without telling you of two whale's teeth
+which stand on his parlor mantel-piece; he ornamented them himself,
+copying the designs from cheap foreign prints. One of them is what he
+calls "the meeting-house." It is the high altar of the Cathedral of
+Seville. On the other is "the wild-beast tamer." A man with a feeble,
+wishy-washy expression holds by each hand a fierce, but subjugated
+tiger. His legs dangle loosely in the air. There is nothing to suggest
+what upholds him in his mighty contest.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Now we must turn from James Parsons to a man of a different type, or
+rather of a different variety of the same type; for they descend
+alike from original founders of the town, and, like most of their
+fellow-townsmen, are both of unqualified Pilgrim stock.
+
+To get to Captain Joseph Pelham's house, you have to drive along a range
+of hills for some miles, skirting the sea; then you come, half-way, to a
+bright modern village with trees along the main street, with houses and
+fences kept painted up, for the most part, but here and there relieved
+by an unpainted dwelling of a past generation.
+
+Here you have an option. You may either pursue your road through the
+high-lying prosperous street, with peeps of salt water to the right,
+or you may turn sharply off at a little store and descend to the lower
+road. It is always a struggle to choose.
+
+The road to the beach descends a sharp, gravelly hill, and crosses a
+bridge. Then you come out on a waste of salt-marsh, threaded by the
+creek, broken by wild, fantastic sand-hills, grown over by beach-grass
+which will cut your fingers like a knife. You drive close along
+the white, precipitous beach; you pass the long, shaky pier, with
+half-decayed fish-houses at the other end, and picturesque heaps of
+fish-cars, seines, and barrels. Then the road, following the shore a
+little longer, climbs the hill and enters the woods. Two miles more and
+you come out to fields with mossy fences, and occasional houses.
+
+The houses begin to be more frequent. All at once you enter the main
+street of W------.
+
+In a moment you see that you have come into a new atmosphere. There is a
+large modern church among the older ones. There are large, fine houses,
+some old-fashioned, others new. By some miraculous intervention Queen
+Anne has not as yet made her appearance. There are handsome, well-filled
+stores, going into no little refinement in stock. There is, of course,
+a small brick library, built by the bounty of a New Yorker who was born
+here. There is a brick national bank, and a face brick block occupied
+above by Freemasons, orders of Red Men, Knights Templars, and the Pool
+of Siloam Lodge, I. O. O. F., and below by a savings bank and a local
+marine insurance company.
+
+It is here that we shall find Captain Joseph Pelham. If a stranger has
+occasion to inquire for the leading men of the place he is always first
+referred to him. It is he who heads every list and is the chairman
+of every meeting. When a certain public man, commanding but a small
+following here, appeared, upon his campaign tour, and found no one
+to escort him to the platform and preside, so that he was obliged to
+justify his appearance here by the Scripture passage, "They that are
+whole need not a physician, but they that are sick;" at the moment
+of entering the hall, closely packed with curious opponents, disposed
+perhaps to be derisive when the situation for the visitor was
+embarrassing in the extreme,--it was Captain Joseph Pelham who, though
+the bitterest opponent of them all, rose from his seat, gave the speaker
+his arm, escorted him to the platform, presented him with grave courtesy
+to the audience, and sat beside him through the entire discourse.
+
+While Captain Pelham continued to go to sea, and after that, until he
+was made president of the insurance company, he lived a mile or two out
+of the town, in a house he had inherited. It is picturesquely situated,
+on a bare hill, with a wide view of the inland and the ocean. As
+you look down from its south windows, the cluster of houses nestling
+together at the shore below stand sharply out against the water. It is
+one of those white houses common in our older towns,--two-storied, long
+on the street, with the front door in the middle. Of the interior it is
+enough to say that its owner had sailed for thirty years to Hong-Kong,
+Calcutta and Madras. It had a prevailing odor of teak and lacquer. In
+the front hall was a vast china cane-holder; a turretted Calcutta hat
+hung on the hat-tree; a heavy, varnished Chinese umbrella stood in a
+corner; a long and handsome settee from Java stood against the wall.
+In the parlors, on either hand, were Chinese tables shutting up like
+telescopes, elaborate rattan chairs of different kinds, and numberless
+other things of this sort, which had plainly been honestly come by, and
+not bought.
+
+Then, if you met the Captain's favor, he would show you with becoming
+pride some family relics, and tell you about them. They came mostly
+from his paternal grandfather, who was a shipmaster too, had commanded a
+privateer in the Revolution, and made a fortune. There were a number
+of pieces of handsome furniture,--these you could see for yourself What
+would be shown you, with a half-diffident air, would be: a silver mug;
+two Revere tablespoons; a few tiny teaspoons marked F.; a handsome sword
+and scabbard; a yellow satin waistcoat and small-clothes; portraits,
+not artistic, but effective, of his grandfather, in a velvet coat and
+knee-breeches, with a long spyglass in his hand, and of his grandmother,
+a strong, matter-of-fact looking woman, handsomely dressed.
+
+But the thing which the Captain secretly treasured most, but brought out
+last, was his grandmother's Dutch Bible. It is a curious old book; you
+can see it still if you wish. It has an elaborate frontispiece. Sixteen
+cuts of leading incidents in Scripture history conduct you by gentle
+stages, from Eden, through the offering of Isaac, to the close of the
+Evangelists, and surround Dr. Martin Luther, who, in a gown, holds back
+the curtains of a pillared alcove, to show you, through two windows, an
+Old and a New Testament landscape, and a lady sitting beneath a canopy,
+with an open volume. The covers are of thick bevelled board covered with
+leather. There was once a heavy clasp. The edges are richly gilded, and
+figures are pricked in the gilding. It is very handsomely printed.
+It was in the possession, in 1760, of a young New England girl, the
+Captain's grandmother. There is a story about it,--a story too long to
+tell here. Suffice it to say that the Captain's ancestor, who settled
+early in New England, came from Leyden shortly after Mr. John Robinson.
+A hundred years later and more, in the oddest way, an acquaintance
+sprang up with certain Dutch connections, and in the course of it this
+Bible, then new and elegant, found its way over the sea as a gift to
+young Mistress Preston. In New England, and as a relic of the early
+ties of our people with Holland, momentarily renewed after a century had
+passed away, it is probably unique. It was a last farewell from Holland
+to her English children, before she parted company with them forever.
+
+I have told you about this house, as I recall it, although Captain
+Pelham had now ceased to live there, because it was there alone that he
+seemed completely at home. Furnished as it was from the four quarters
+of the globe, everything seemed to fit in with his ways. He supplemented
+the Chinese tables, and they supplemented him. But when he ceased to
+go to sea, in late middle life, and settled down at home upon his
+competency, and began a little later to become interested in public
+matters; when he was at last made president of the insurance company,
+a director in the bank, and a trustee in the savings bank, and when
+affairs were left more and more to his control, it became convenient for
+him to get into town; and his wife and daughter were perhaps ambitious
+for the change.
+
+So he had sold his house by the sea, and had bought a large and somewhat
+pretentious one on the main street, with a cast-iron summer arbor, and
+a bay-window closed in for a conservatory. He had furnished it from the
+city with new Brussels carpet, with a parlor set, a sitting-room set,
+a dining-room set, and chamber sets; and the antique things which had
+given his former home an air of charming picturesqueness were for the
+most part tucked away in unnoticed corners.
+
+The Captain never seemed to me to have become quite naturalized in his
+new home. He never belonged to the furniture, or the furniture to him.
+The place where you saw him best in these later days was in the office
+of his insurance company, or in the little business-room of one of the
+banks, surrounded by a knot of more substantial townsmen, or talking
+patiently with some small farmer or seafaring man seeking for insurance
+or a loan. One of the most marked features of his character was a
+certain patience and considerateness which made all borrowers apply by
+preference to him. He would sit down at his little table with a plain
+man whose affairs were in disorder, and listen with close attention
+to his application for a loan. Somehow the man would find himself
+disclosing all the particulars of his distress. Then Captain Pelham, in
+his quiet way, would go over the whole matter with him; would plan
+with him on his concerns; would try to see if it were not possible to
+postpone a little the payment of debts and to hasten the collection of
+claims; to get a part of the money for a short time from a son in Boston
+or a married daughter in New Bedford; and so, by pulling and hauling, to
+weather the Cape.
+
+I must say a word about his position in town matters. He had been at sea
+the greater part of the time from sixteen to fifty-two. During that time
+he had had absolutely no concern with political affairs. He had never
+voted: for he had never, as it had happened, been ashore at the time of
+an election. And yet before he had been at home six years he was one
+of the selectmen of the town and overseer of the poor, and had
+become familiar with the details of Massachusetts town government,
+superficially so simple, in fact so complex. It was a large town, of no
+small wealth. Lying as it did along the seaboard, where havoc was always
+being made by disasters of the sea, there was not only a larger number
+than in an inland town of persons actually quartered in the poorhouse,
+but there were many broken families who had to be helped in their own
+homes. And it was to me an interesting fact that in dealing with two
+score households of this class, Captain Pel-ham, who had spent most of
+his time at sea, was able to display the utmost tact and judgment. He
+applied to their affairs that same plain kindliness and sound sense
+which he showed in the matter of discounts at the bank.
+
+While the friendships of Captain Pelham were chiefly in his own town,
+his acquaintance was not confined to it. In his own quiet, unpretending
+way he was something of a man of the world. He was known in the marine
+insurance offices in the large cities. He had been familiar all his
+life with large affairs; he had commanded valuable ships, loaded with
+fortunes in teas and silks, in the days when an India captain was a
+merchant.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+You will ask me why it is that I have been telling you about these men,
+and what it is that connects them.
+
+It was now ten years since Captain Pelham's only son, himself at
+twenty-two the master of a vessel, had married a daughter of James
+Parsons,--a tall, impulsive, and warm-hearted girl,--one of those girls
+to whom children always cling. Both James Parsons's daughters had proved
+attractive and had married well. It had been a disappointment in Captain
+Pelham's household, perhaps, that this son, their especial pride, should
+not have married into one of the wealthy families in his own village. At
+first there had been a little visiting to and fro; it had lasted but a
+little time, and then the two households had settled down, as the way is
+in the country, to follow each its own natural course of living. George
+Pelham's wife had always lived in an odd little house, all doors and
+windows, near by her father, in her native village.
+
+It was from Porto Cabello that that message came,--yellow fever--a short
+sickness--a burial in a stranger's grave. George Pelham's wife had been
+for two or three years of less than her usual strength. It was not long
+after that news came,--came so suddenly, with no warning,--that she
+began to fade away; and after ten months she died.
+
+I remember seeing her a week or two before her death. Her bed had
+been set up in her little parlor for the convenience of those who were
+attending upon her. She lay on her back, bolstered up. The paleness of
+her face was intensified by her coal-black hair, lying back heavy on
+the pillow. Her hands were thin and transparent, and I remember well the
+straining look in her eyes as she talked with me about the boy whom she
+was going to leave.
+
+She was living, as I have said, close by her father. It was natural that
+in the last few days of her illness the child should be taken to her
+father's house, and when she died and the funeral was over, it was there
+that he returned.
+
+Picture now to yourself a boy toward nine years old, symmetrically made,
+firm and hard. His head is round, his features are good, his hair is
+fine and lies down close. He is clothed in a neat print jacket, with
+a collar and a little handkerchief at the neck, and a pair of short
+trousers buttoned on to the jacket. He is barefoot. He is tanned but not
+burnt. His complexion is of a rich dark brown. He is always fresh and
+clean. But the great charm about him is the expression of infinite fun
+and mirth that is always upon his face. Never for a moment while he is
+awake is his face still. Always the same, yet always shifting, with a
+thousand varying shades of roguish joy. Quick, bright, full of boyish
+repartee, full of shouts and laughter. And the same incessant life which
+plays upon his face shows itself in every movement of his limbs. Never
+for a moment is he still unless he has some work upon his hands. He has
+his little routine of tasks, regularly assigned, which he goes through
+with the most amusing good-humor and attention. It is his duty to see
+that the skiffs are not jammed under the wharf on the rising tide; to
+sweep out the "Annie" when she comes in, and to set her cabin to rights;
+to set away the dishes after meals, and to feed the chickens. Aside from
+a few such tasks, his time in summer is his own. The rest of the year he
+goes to the "primary," and serves to keep the whole room in a state of
+mirth. He has the happy gift that to put every one in high spirits he
+has only to be present. Such an incessant flow of life you rarely see.
+His manners are good, and he comes honestly by them.
+
+There is an amusing union in him of the baby and the man. While the
+children of his age at the summer hotel walk about for the most part
+with their nurses, he is turned loose upon the shore, and has been,
+from his cradle. He can dive and swim and paddle and float and "go
+steamboat." He can row a boat that is not too heavy, and up to the limit
+of his strength he can steer a sail-boat with substantial skill. He
+knows the currents, the tides, and the shoals about his shore, and the
+nearer landmarks. He knows that to find the threadlike entrance to
+the bay you bring the flag-staff over Cart-wright's barn. He has vague
+theories of his own as to the annual shifting of the channel. He knows
+where to take the city children to look for tinkle-shells and mussels.
+He knows what winds bring in the scallops from their beds. He knows
+where to dig for clams, and where to tread for quahaugs without
+disturbing the oysters. He has a good deal of fragmentary lore of the
+sea.
+
+Every morning you will hear his cry, a sort of yodel, or bird-call,
+peculiar to him, with which he bursts forth upon the world. Then you
+will hear, perhaps, loud peals of laughter at something that has excited
+his sense of the absurd,--contagious laughter, full of innocent fun.
+
+Then he will appear, perhaps, with his wooden dinner-bucket,--he is
+going off with his grandfather for the day,--and will yodel to the old
+man as a signal to make haste. Then you will hear him consulting with
+some one upon the weather.
+
+All this time he will be going; through various evolutions, swinging in
+the hammock, sitting on the fence, opening his bucket to show you what
+he has to eat, closing the bucket and sitting down upon the cover,
+or turning somersaults upon the grass. Then he will encamp under an
+apple-tree to wait until his grandfather appears, enlivening the time by
+a score of minute excursions after hens and cats. Then he will go into
+the house again, and rock while the old man finishes his coffee, sure
+of a greeting, confident in a sense of entire good-fellowship, until
+the meal is finished, and James Parsons is ready to take his coat and
+a red-bladed oar, and set out. Then the boy is like a setter off for
+a walk,--all sorts of whimsical expressions in his face, of absolute
+delight; every form of extravagance in his bearing. The only trouble
+is, one has to laugh too much; but with all this, something so manly, so
+companionable.
+
+He is no little of a philosopher in his way. He has been a great deal
+with older people, and has caught the habit of discussion of affairs, or
+rather, perhaps, of unconsciously reflecting forth discussions which he
+has heard. He has an infinite curiosity upon all matters of human life.
+He likes, within limits, to discuss character.
+
+In the boat his chief delights are to talk, to eat cookies, and to
+steer. When it is not blowing too hard for him to stand at the tiller,
+he will steer for an hour together, watching with the most constant care
+the trembling of the leach.
+
+It makes no difference to him at what hour he returns,--from oystering
+or from the cranberry-bog. If it is in the middle of the afternoon, good
+and well. Instantly upon landing he will collect a troop of urchins; in
+an incredibly short space of time there will be a heap of little clothes
+upon the bank; in a moment a procession of small naked figures will go
+running down to the wharf, diving, one after the other. If distance
+or tide or a calm keeps him out late, so much the better. In that case
+there is the romance of coasting along the shore by night; of counting
+and distinguishing the lights; of guessing the nearness to land from the
+dull roar of the sea breaking on the beach. "Don't you think," he will
+sometimes say, "that we are nearer shore than we think we are?"
+
+It is amusing sometimes, on a distant voyage of fifteen or twenty miles,
+after seed oysters, when a landing is made at some little port, to see
+him drop the mariner at once and become a child, with a burning
+desire to find a shop where he can buy animal-crackers. Finding such
+a place,--and usually it is not difficult,--he will lay in a supply of
+lions and tigers, and then go marching about with great delight, with
+mockery in his eyes, keenly appreciating the satire involved in eating
+the head off a cooky lion, incapable of resistance.
+
+No picture of Joe would be complete which left out his dog. Kit was a
+black, fine-haired creature, smaller than a collie, but of much the same
+gentle disposition,--a present from Captain Pelham. When Kit was first
+presented to the boy he domesticated himself at once, and in a week it
+was impossible to tell, from his relations with the household, which was
+boy and which was dog. They were both boys and they were both dogs.
+Kit had an unqualified sense of being at home, and of being beloved
+and indispensable. It was long before he became a sailor. When, at the
+outset, it was attempted to make a man of him by taking him when they
+went out to fish, the failure seemed to be complete. He was a little
+sea-sick. Then he was sad, and sighed and groaned as dogs never do on
+shore. He would not lie still, but was nervous and feverish. Once he
+leaped out of the boat and made for shore, and had to be pursued and
+rescued, exhausted and half-drowned. Still, whenever he had to be left
+at home, it was a struggle every time to reconcile him and leave him.
+Once he pursued a boat which he mistook for James's along the shore of
+the bay, half down to Benson's Narrows, got involved in the creeks which
+the tide was beginning to fill, and had to be brought ingloriously home
+by a farmer, made fast on the top of a load of sweet, salt hay.
+
+He would tease like a child to be allowed to go. He would listen with
+an unsatisfied and appealing look while Joe, with an exuberant but
+regretful air, explained to him in detail the reasons which made it
+impossible for him to go. But in a few months, as the dog grew older,
+he prevailed, and although he would generally retire into the shelter of
+the cabin, he was nevertheless the boy's almost inseparable companion
+on the water as on the shore. The relation between the two was always
+touching. It evidently never crossed the dog's mind that he was not a
+younger brother.
+
+Now, to complete the picture of James Par-sons's household, add in this
+boy; for while it is but just now that he is strictly of it, he has been
+for years its mirth and life.
+
+I remember that quiet household before it knew him,--cosey, homelike,
+with a pervading air even then of genial humor, but with long hours of
+silence and repose,--geraniums and the click of knitting-needles in the
+sitting-room; faint odors of a fragrant pipe from the shed kitchen; no
+stir of boisterous fun, except when some bronzed, solemn joker, with his
+wife, came in for a formal call, and solemnity gave way, by a gradual
+descent, to merriment. Joe had given no new departure, only an impulse.
+"James used to behave himself quite well," Mrs. Parsons would say,
+archly raising her eyebrows, "before Joe's time; but now there 's two
+boys of 'em together, and the one as bad as the other, and I can't do
+nothing with 'em. And then,"--with a mock gesture of despair,--"that
+dog!"
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+While Joe's mother was lying ill, and after it had become certain
+that she would soon leave this world forever, the question had been
+freely-discussed as to what her boy's future should be. In Captain
+Joseph Pelham's mind there was only-one answer to this question,--that
+the lad should come to him. He bore the Captain's name; he represented
+the Captain's son; he should take a place now in the Captain's home.
+
+It was now about three weeks since Joe's mother had been buried. The
+stone had not yet been cut and set over her grave. But the Captain
+thought it time to drive over to James Parsons's and take the boy. That
+James would make any serious opposition perhaps never entered his
+mind. It was a bright, charming afternoon; with his shining horse, in a
+bright, well-varnished buggy, the Captain drove over the seven miles of
+winding roads through the woods, and along the sea, to the village where
+James Parsons lived. He tied his horse to the hitching-post in front of
+the broad cottage house, went down the path to the L door, knocked, and
+went in.
+
+James was sitting in a large room which served in winter as a kitchen
+and in summer as a sort of sitting-room, smoking a pipe and gazing
+vacantly into the pine-branches in the open fireplace before him. He had
+been out all day on his marsh, but he had been home a couple of hours.
+His wife--kindly soul--received Captain Pelham at the door, wiping her
+hands upon her apron, and modestly showed him into the sitting-room;
+then she retired to her tasks in the shed kitchen. She moved about
+mechanically for a moment; then she ran hastily out into the lean-to
+wood-shed, shut the door behind her, sat down on the worn floor where
+it gives way with a step to the floor of earth by the wood-pile, hid her
+face in her apron, and burst into tears.
+
+Joe was at the wharf with his comrades playing at war.
+
+Now, if there ever was a hospitable man,--a man who gave a welcome,--a
+rough but merry welcome to every one who entered his doors, it was
+James Parsons. He had a homely, jocose saying that you must either
+make yourself at home or go home. But on this occasion he rose with a
+somewhat forced and awkward air, laid his pipe down on the mantel-piece,
+and nodded to the Captain with an air of embarrassed inquiry. Then he
+bethought himself, and asked the Captain to sit down. The Captain took
+the nearest chair, beside the table, where Mrs. Parsons had lately been
+sitting at her work. James's chair was directly opposite. The table was
+between them.
+
+James rose and went to the mantel-piece, scratched a match upon his
+boot-heel, and undertook to light his pipe. It did not light; he did not
+notice it, but put the pipe in his mouth as if it were lighted.
+
+It occurred to Captain Pelham now, for the first time, absorbed as he
+had been with exclusive thoughts of the boy, that he should first say
+something to this old man about the daughter whom he had lost: and he
+made some expressions of sympathy. The old man nodded, but said nothing.
+
+There was silence for two or three minutes.
+
+The subject in order now was inevitably the boy. Captain Pelham opened
+his lips to claim him; but, almost to his own surprise, he found himself
+making some common remark about the affairs of the neighborhood. It came
+in harsh and forced, as if it were a fragment of conversation floated in
+by the breeze from the street outside. Then the Captain waited a moment,
+looking out of the window.
+
+James took his pipe from his mouth and leaned his elbows on the table.
+"Why don't you go take him?" he suddenly said: "he's probably down to
+the wharf. Ef you have got the claim to him, why don't you go take him?
+You 've got your team here,--drive right down there and put him in and
+drive off; if you 've got the right to him, why don't you go take him?
+But ef you 've come for my consent, you can set there till the chair
+rots beneath you."
+
+With this, James rose and took the felt hat which was lying by him on
+the table, and saying not another word, went out of the door. He went
+down to the shore, and affected to busy himself with his boat.
+
+There was nothing for Captain Pelham to do but to take his hat, untie
+his horse, and drive home.
+
+The Captain well knew that nobody in the world had a legal right to the
+child until a guardian should be appointed. A plain and simple path was
+open before him: it was his only path. James Parsons had proved wilful
+and wrong-headed; there was nothing now but to take out letters as
+guardian of the boy. Then James would acquiesce without a word.
+
+Immediately after breakfast the Captain went down the street. He opened
+his letters and attended to the first routine of business; then he went
+across the way and up a flight of stairs to a lawyer's office.
+
+If you had happened to read the county papers at about this time, you
+would have seen among the legal notices two petitions, identical in
+form,--the one by Joseph Pelham, the other by James Parsons,--each
+applying for guardianship of Joseph Pelham, the younger of that name,
+with an order upon each petition for all persons interested to come
+in on the first Tuesday of the following month and show cause why the
+petitioner's demand should not be granted.
+
+The county court-house was a new brick building, of modest size, fifteen
+miles from W------, and twenty miles from the village where James
+Parsons lived.
+
+There were fifteen or twenty people from different towns in attendance
+when the court opened on the important first Tuesday. As one after
+another transacted his affairs and went away, others would come in.
+Three or four lawyers sat at tables talking with clients, or stood
+about the judge's desk. There was a sprinkling of women in new mourning.
+Printed papers, filled out with names and dates,--petitions and
+bonds and executors' accounts,--were being handed in to the judge and
+receiving his signature of approval.
+
+The routine business was transacted first. It was almost noon when the
+judge was at last free to attend to contested matters. There was a small
+audience by that time,--only ten or a dozen people, some of whom were
+waiting for train-time, while others, who had come upon their own
+affairs, lingered now from curiosity.
+
+The judge was a tall, spare, old-fashioned man; he had held the office
+for above thirty years. He was a man of much native force, of sound
+learning within the range of his judicial duties, and of strong
+common-sense. He was often employed by Captain Pelham in his own
+affairs, and more particularly in bank and insurance matters,--for the
+probate judges are free to practise at the bar in matters not connected
+with their judicial duties,--and Captain Pelham had always retained
+him in important cases as counsel for the town. He had a large
+practice throughout the county; he knew its people, their ideas, their
+traditions, and their feelings. He understood their social organization
+to the core.
+
+"Now," said the judge, laying aside some papers upon which he had been
+writing, and taking off his glasses, "we will take up the two petitions
+for guardianship of Joseph Pelham."
+
+Captain Pelham and the lawyer whom he had employed took seats at a small
+table before the judge; James Parsons timidly took a seat at another.
+His petition had been filled out for him by one of his neighbors: he had
+no counsel.
+
+Captain Pelham's lawyer rose; he had been impressed by the Captain with
+the importance of the matter, and he was about to make a formal opening.
+But the judge interrupted him. "I think," he said, "that we may assume
+that I know in a general way about these two petitioners. I shall
+assume, unless something is shown to the contrary, that they are both
+men of respectable character, and have proper homes for a boy to grow up
+in. And I suppose there is no controversy that Captain Pelham is a man
+of some considerable means, and that the other petitioner is a man of
+small property.
+
+"Now," he went on, leaning forward with his elbow on his desk, and
+gently waving his glasses with his right hand, "did the father of this
+boy ever express any wish as to what should be done with him in case his
+mother should die?" Nobody answered. "It would be of no legal effect,"
+he said, "but it would have weight with me. Now, is there any evidence
+as to what his mother wanted? A boy's mother can tell best about these
+things, if she is a sensible woman. Mr. Baker," he said to Captain
+Pelham's lawyer, "have you any evidence as to what his mother wanted to
+have done with him?"
+
+Mr. Baker conversed for a moment with Captain Pelham and then called him
+to the stand.
+
+Captain Pelham testified as to his frequent visits to the boy's mother,
+and to her unbroken friendly relations with him. She had never said in
+so many words what she wanted to have done for the boy, but he always
+understood that she meant to have the child come to him; he could not
+say, however, that she had said anything expressly to that effect.
+
+James sat before him not many feet away, in his old-fashioned broadcloth
+coat with a velvet collar. He cross-examined Captain Pelham a little.
+
+"She did n't never tell you," he said, "that she was going to give you
+the boy, did she?"
+
+"No, sir;" said Captain Pelham.
+
+"How often did your wife come over to see her?"
+
+"I could n't tell you, sir," said the Captain.
+
+"Not very often, did she?"
+
+"I think not," the Captain admitted.
+
+"The boy's mother did n't never talk much about Mis' Captain Pelham, did
+she?"
+
+"I don't remember that she did."
+
+"She did n't never have her over to talk with her about what she was
+going to do with the boy, did she?"
+
+"I don't know that she did," said the Captain. "She is here; you can ask
+her."
+
+"You didn't never hear of her leaving no word with Mis' Captain Pelham
+about taking care of the boy, did you?"
+
+"I can't say that I did," said Captain Pelham.
+
+The old man nodded his head with a satisfied air. His cross-examination
+was done.
+
+The Captain retired from the witness-stand; his lawyer whispered with
+him a moment and then went over and whispered for two or three minutes
+with Mrs. Pelham; then he said he had no more evidence to offer.
+
+"Mr. Parsons," said the judge, "do you wish to testify?"
+
+James went to the witness-stand and was sworn.
+
+"Did n't your daughter ever talk about what she wanted done with the
+boy?"
+
+"Talk about it?" said James. "Why, she didn't talk about nothing else.
+She used to have it all over every time we went in. It was all about how
+mother 'n me must do this with him and do that with him,--how he was to
+go to school, what room he was going to sleep in to our house, and all
+that."
+
+Mr. Baker desired to make no cross-examination, and James's wife was
+called, and testified in her quaint way to the same effect.
+
+By a keen, homely instinct James had half consciously foreseen what
+would be the controlling element of the case; and while he had not
+formulated it to himself he had brought with him one of his neighbors,
+who had watched with his daughter through the last nights of her
+life. She was one of the poorest women of the village. Her husband was
+shiftless, and was somewhat given to drink. She had a large family, with
+little to bring them up on. Her life had been one long struggle. She was
+extremely poorly dressed, and although she was neat, there was an air of
+unthrift or discouragement about her dress. She wore an oversack which
+evidently had originally been made for some one else; it lacked one
+button. She was faded and worn and homely; but the moment she spoke
+she impressed you as a woman of conscience. She had talked in the long
+watches of the night with the boy's mother, and she confirmed what James
+and his wife had said. There could be no question what the mother had
+desired.
+
+Mr. Baker ventured out upon the thin ice of cross-examination.
+
+"She must have talked about her father-in-law, Captain Pelham?" he said.
+
+"Oh, yes," said the woman, "often."
+
+"She seemed to be attached to him?"
+
+"Yes, indeed," said the woman, quickly; "she was always telling how good
+he was to her; I have heard her say there was n't no better man in the
+world."
+
+"She must have talked about what he could do for the boy?"
+
+"Yes," said the woman. "She expected him to do for Joe."
+
+"Did n't she ever say," and the lawyer looked round at James,--"did n't
+you ever hear her say that she was worried sometimes for fear her father
+would not be careful enough about the boy?"
+
+The woman hesitated a moment. "Yes," she said, "I have heard her say so,
+but that 's what every mother says."
+
+"What reason did you ever hear her give," the lawyer asked, "why she
+would rather have him stay over there than to go and be brought up by
+his grandfather Pelham?"
+
+The woman looked around timidly at the judge. "Be I obliged to answer?"
+she said.
+
+The judge nodded.
+
+The woman looked toward Captain Pelham with an embarrassed air. He was
+the best friend she had in the world.
+
+"I rather not say nothing about that," she said; "it 's no account,
+anyway."
+
+"Oh, tell us what she said," said Mr. Baker.
+
+He felt that he had made some progress up to that point with his
+cross-examination.
+
+"Well, it was n't much," said the woman; "it was only like this. I have
+heard her say that Miss Captain Pelham was a good woman and meant to do
+what was right, but she was n't a woman that knew how to mother a little
+boy." And here the witness began to cry.
+
+The judge moved slightly in his chair.
+
+There was more or less rambling talk about the way the boy was allowed
+to run loose on the shore, and some suggestions were made in the way of
+conversational argument about his being allowed to go barefoot, and to
+go in swimming when he pleased; but the judge seemed to pay very little
+attention to that. "That 's the way we were all brought up," he said.
+"It is good for the boy; he 'll learn to take care of himself, and his
+mother knew all about it.
+
+"It is plain enough," he said at last, "that there would be some
+advantages to the boy in going to live with Captain Pelham; but there
+is one thing that has been overlooked which would probably have been
+suggested if the petitioner Parsons had had counsel. It has been assumed
+that the boy would be cut loose in future from his grandfather Pelham
+unless he was put under his guardianship; but that is n't so. All his
+grandparents will look out for him, and when he gets older, and wants to
+go into business, here or elsewhere, Captain Pelham will look after him
+just the same as if he were his guardian. The other grandfather has n't
+got the means to advance him. I am not at all afraid about that," he
+said; "the only question here is, where he shall be deposited for the
+next five or six years. Either place is good enough. His father had a
+right to fix it by will if he had chosen to; but he did n't, and I think
+we must consider it a matter for the women to settle: they know best
+about such things. It is plain that his mother thought it would be best
+for him to stay where he is, and she knew best. He 's wonted there, and
+wants to stay."
+
+Then he took up his pen and wrote on Captain Pelham's petition an order
+of dismissal. On the other he filled out and signed the decree granting
+guardianship to James Parsons, and approved the bond. Then he handed the
+papers to the register and called the next case.
+
+From this day on, little was seen of Captain Pelham at James's house.
+Sometimes he would stop in his buggy and take the boy off with him for
+a little stay; but Joe soon wearied of formality, and grew restless
+for James, for his grandmother Parsons, for the free life of the little
+wharf and the shore. Life always opened fresh to him on his return.
+
+Once and only once Captain Pelham entered James's door-yard. James was
+sitting in an armchair under an apple-tree by the well, smoking and
+reading the paper. The Captain began, this time, with no introduction.
+
+"Fred Gooding," he said, "tells me you are talking of letting Joe go out
+with Pitts in his boat You know Pitts is no fit man."
+
+"You tell Fred Gooding he don't know what he 's talking about," said
+James, as he rose from his chair, holding the paper in his hand. "What
+I told Pitts was just the contr'y,--the boy should n't go along o' him."
+Then his anger began to rise. "But what right you got," he demanded, "to
+interfere? 'T ain 't none of your business who I let him go along of.
+It's me that's the boy's guardeen."
+
+"Very well," said the Captain. "Only I tell you fairly,--the first
+time I get word of anything, I 'll go to the probate court and have you
+removed!"
+
+James followed him down the path with derisive laughter. "Why don't you
+go to the probate court?" he said; "you hed great luck before!" And
+as the Captain drove away, James shouted after him, "Go to the probate
+court! Go to the probate court!"
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+There is a low, pleasant boat-shop, close on the shore of a little arm
+of the sea. The tide ebbs and flows before its wide double doors, and
+sometimes rises so high as to flow the sills; then you have to walk
+across in front of the shop on a plank, laid upon iron ballast. There is
+a little wharf or pier close at hand, the outer end of which is always
+going to be repaired. There are two or three other shops near by, and
+about them is the pleasant litter of a boat-yard. In the cove before
+them lie at their moorings in the late afternoon a fleet of fifteen or
+twenty fishing and pleasure boats, all cat-rigged, all of one general
+build, wide, shoal, with one broad sail, all painted white, by the
+custom of the place, and all or nearly all kept neat and clean: they are
+all likely enough to be called upon now and then for sailing-parties.
+Often of a bright afternoon in summer the sails will all be up, as the
+boats swing at their floats: then you have all the effect of a regatta
+in still life.
+
+The shop faces down the bay of which this inlet is the foot, and as you
+look out from your seat within, on a wooden stool, the great door frames
+in a landscape of peaceful beauty. The opening to the sea is closed to
+the view. Simply you can see the two white sand-cliffs through which
+it makes. The bay is a mile in length, perhaps, and of half that width.
+From its white, sandy shores rise gentle hills, bare to the sun or
+covered with a low growth of woods. To the right are low-lying pastures
+and marshes, with here and there a grazing cow. At the head of the
+bay the valley of a stream can be faintly distinguished, while in the
+distance there is a faint suggestion of a few scattered houses on the
+upper waters. At one or two points masts of boats rise from the grass of
+the inland, and sometimes a sail is seen threading its slow way amid the
+trees.
+
+The shop is a favorite resort. You may go there in the early morning,
+in the late forenoon, or in the afternoon; whenever you go you will
+find there more or less company. There is a sort of social, hospitable
+atmosphere about the place which is attractive in the extreme. Sometimes
+there is a good deal of conversation; sometimes there is a comfortable
+silence of good-fellowship. There is more or less knitting there and
+crocheting; often in the afternoon the women from near by take their
+work there to enjoy the view, and the fresh air which draws up there as
+nowhere else.
+
+There is a good deal of religious discussion there, although the
+atmosphere of the shop is not entirely religious, as you may see by some
+of the papers lying about, and the cuts pasted up on the walls. Chief is
+a picture representing a scene in the life of the prophet Jonah. Jonah
+and the seamen are drawing lots to see who shall be cast over. Jonah has
+just drawn the ace of spades.
+
+There are various other pictures on the walls,--prints of famous yachts,
+charts, advertisements of regattas, sailing rules of yacht-clubs.
+Nowhere is the science of boat-building and boat-sailing studied with
+greater closeness than in that shop. Many a successful racer has
+been built there. There are models of boats pinned up against the
+wall,--models which to the common eye hardly vary at all, but to a
+trained perception differ widely. There are oars lying about the shop,
+oil-skin suits, a compass, charts, in round tin cases, boat hardware,
+and coils of new rope.
+
+The little pier has its periods of activity and life, like the great
+world outside. At three or four o'clock, in the gray dawn, fishermen
+appear, singly, or two by two; there is often then a failure of wind,
+and they have to get out to sea by heavy rowing or by the drift of the
+tide. Then there is silence for some hours, and when the world awakes
+the cove is nearly deserted. At seven o'clock begins the life of the
+shop. Amateur fishermen appear,--boarders from New York or visiting sons
+from Brockton. Later still, little parties come down,--a knot of
+young fellows and laughing girls with bright-colored wraps, bound on a
+sailing-party to Katameset, with a matron, and with some well-salted
+man to steer the boat, perhaps in slippers and a dressing-gown. They
+go singing out to sea. Then come a party of bathers,--ladies and little
+children, with towels and blue suits, and all the paraphernalia of pails
+and wooden shovels. Then will come perhaps a couple of girls, to sketch.
+They will encamp anywhere upon the shore, call into their service some
+small amphibious creature to tip a skiff up on its side to make an
+effective scene, and proceed with the wonders of their art. Soon the
+bathers return. They have been only a little way down the narrows, and
+come back to dinner at one. The fishermen come in from three to four,
+unless they happen to be becalmed; there is a bustle then of getting out
+ice; of slitting and weighing and packing fish, and loading them into
+wagons to be carted to the railway. Then there is a lull until the
+sailing-parties return, perhaps at five, perhaps at six, perhaps not
+until the turn of the tide or the evening breeze brings them home.
+
+All the time the quiet life of the boat-shop goes on,--its labor, its
+discussions on politics and religion, its criticism of yachts. All
+day long small boys play about the pier, race in skiffs or in such
+insignificant sailing-craft as may be available, and every half-hour, at
+the initiative of some infant leader, all doff their little print waists
+and short trousers and "go in," regardless of the sketchers on the
+shore.
+
+It was a bright, fresh day. The air was as clear as crystal. Joe had
+been gone since dawn with Henry Price. The wind had been blowing hard
+from the north for a dozen hours, and, as the saying is, had kicked up
+a sea. On the shoal the waves were rolling heavily, and since three
+o'clock the tide had been running against the wind, and the seas had
+been broken every way. But to Henry Price, and with that boat, rough
+seas, from March to November, were only what a rude mountain road would
+be to you or me. If his wife, toward afternoon, shading her eyes at the
+south door, ever felt anxious about him, it was a woman's foolish fear;
+it was only because she thought with concern of that--internal neuralgia
+was it?--which her husband brought back from the war; which seized him
+at rare intervals and enfeebled him for days. He made light of it, and
+never spoke of it out of the house. There was no better boatman on that
+shore. Let alone that one possibility of weakness, and the ocean had a
+hard man to deal with when it dealt with him.
+
+They had been gone all day. It had been rough, and they would come in
+wet. This wind would not die down; they were sure to make a quick run,
+and would be in before dark.
+
+It was late in the afternoon. James was sitting in the shop with one or
+two companions, engaged in a loud discussion. He had been discoursing
+upon all his favorite themes. He had been declaiming upon the dangers
+from Catholic supremacy and the subserviency of the Irish vote to the
+Church of Rome, and upon the absolute necessity of the supremacy of the
+Democratic party; upon the Apocalypse and the seven seals. He had
+been maintaining the literal infallibility of the Scriptures, and the
+necessity of treating some portions as legendary. It would be hard to
+say what inconsistent views he had not set forth within the space of
+the past hour; and all this with the utmost intensity, and yet with
+the utmost good-humor, always ready to acknowledge a point against
+himself,--the more readily if entirely fallacious,--with a burst of
+hearty laughter.
+
+At last there was a pause. Something had called out of doors the two
+or three men who were within. There was nothing to disturb the peaceful
+beauty of the afternoon. It was blowing hard outside, but this was a
+sheltered spot, and the wind was little felt.
+
+As James sat there silent, with no one at hand but the owner of the
+shop, who was busy upon the keel of a new boat, a fisherman came in and
+took a seat, with an affectation of ease and nonchalance; in a moment
+another followed; two or three more came in, then others.
+
+The carpenter stopped his work, and shading his eyes with his hand,
+seemed to be looking down the bay.
+
+There was a dead silence for a few moments. Then James spoke. But it was
+not the voice of James. It was not that cheery and hearty voice which
+had just been filling the shop with mirth. It was a voice harsh, forced,
+mechanical,--the voice of a man paralyzed with terror.
+
+"Why don't you tell me?" he said; "is it Henry, or--is it the boy?"
+
+But no one spoke.
+
+"You don't need to tell me nothing," he said, in the same strange tone
+of paralysis and fear, "I knowed it when Bassett first come in. I
+knowed it when the rest come in and closed in round me and did n't say
+nothing."
+
+He sat still a moment. Then he rose abruptly and turned to the landward
+door. He stumbled over a stool which was in his way, and would have
+fallen but that one of the men sprang forward and held him. He plunged
+hastily out of the door. Just outside, in the shade of a small wild
+cherry-tree, was a bucket of clams which he had dug; across the bucket
+was an old hoe worn down to nothing. He stopped and mechanically took up
+the pail and hoe. Bassett stood by the door and looked after him as he
+went along the foot-path toward his home. There was a scantling fence
+close by. He went over it in his old habitual fashion: first he set over
+the bucket of clams and the hoe; then one leg went over and then the
+other; he sat for an instant on the top slat and then slid down. He took
+up his burden and went his way over the fields. In a moment he was lost
+to sight behind a bit of rising ground. Then he reappeared, making his
+way over the fields at his own heavy gait, until he was lost to sight
+behind a clump of trees close to his own door.
+
+They did not find Henry and the boy that night. It was not until the
+next day that the bodies were washed ashore. One of the searchers,
+walking along the beach in the early dawn, found them both. He came upon
+Henry first; he was lying on the sand upon his face. A little farther
+on, gently swayed by the rising tide, lay Joe and his dog. Joe lay on
+his side, precisely as if asleep; the dog was in his arms.
+
+The boy lies in the burying-ground on the hill, near the stone and the
+weeping-willow which mourn the youth who met his untimely death in 1830,
+in the launching of the brig. There is a rose-bush at the grave, and few
+bright days pass in summer that there is not a bunch of homely flowers
+laid at its foot. It is the spot to which all Mrs. Parsons's thoughts
+now tend, and her perpetual pilgrimage. It is too far for her to walk
+both there and back; but often a neighbor is going that way, with
+a lug-wagon or an open cart or his family carriage,--it makes no
+difference which,--and it is easy to get a ride. It is a good-humored
+village. Everybody stands ready to do a favor, and nobody hesitates to
+ask one. Often on a bright afternoon Mrs. Parsons will watch from her
+front window the "teams" that pass, going to the bay. When she sees
+one which is likely to go in the right direction on its return from the
+bay,--everybody knows in which direction she will wish to go,--she will
+run hastily to the door, and hail it.
+
+"Whoa! Sh-h! Whoa! How d'do, Mis' Parsons?"
+
+"Be you going straight home when you come back? Well, then, if it won't
+really be no trouble at all, I 'll be at the gap when you come by; I
+won't keep you waiting a minute. It 's such a nice, sunshiny afternoon,
+I thought I 'd like to go up and sit awhile, and take some posies."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of By The Sea, by Heman White Chaplin
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+      By The Sea By Heman White Chaplin
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+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
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+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
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+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of By The Sea, by Heman White Chaplin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: By The Sea
+       1887
+
+Author: Heman White Chaplin
+
+Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #23001]
+Last Updated: March 8, 2018
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BY THE SEA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      BY THE SEA
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Heman White Chaplin
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> IV. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> V. </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the southeastern coast of Massachusetts is a small village with which I
+      was once familiarly acquainted. It differs little in its general aspect
+      from other hamlets scattered along that shore. It has its one long,
+      straggling street, plain and homelike, from which at two or three
+      different points a winding lane leads off and ends abruptly in the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fifty years ago the village had a business activity of its own. There
+      still remain the vestiges of a wharf at a point where once was a hammering
+      ship-yard. Here and there, in bare fields along the sea, are the ruins of
+      vats and windmills,&mdash;picturesque remains of ancient salt-works.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no visible sign left now of the noisy life of the ship-yards,
+      except a marble stone beneath a willow in the burying-ground on the hill,
+      which laments the untimely death of a youth of nineteen, killed in 1830 in
+      the launching of a brig. But traces of the salt-works everywhere remain,
+      in frequent sheds and small barns which are wet and dry, as the saying is,
+      all the time, and will not hold paint. They are built of salt-boards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were a good many of the people of the village and its adjoining
+      country who interested me very greatly. I am going to tell you a simple
+      event which happened in one of its families, deeply affecting its little
+      history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James Parsons was a man perhaps sixty years of age, strongly built,
+      gray-haired, cleanshaven except for the conventional seaman's fringe of
+      beard below the chin, and always exquisitely neat. Whether you met him in
+      his best suit, on Sunday morning, or in his old clothes, going to his
+      oyster-beds or his cranberry-marsh, it was always the same. He was usually
+      in his shirt-sleeves in summer. His white cotton shirt, with its easy
+      collar and wristbands, seemed always to have just come from the
+      ironing-board. &ldquo;It ain't no trouble at all to keep James clean,&rdquo; I have
+      heard Mrs. Parsons say, in her funny little way; &ldquo;he picks his way round
+      for all the world just like a pussycat, and never gets no spots on him,
+      nowhere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      You saw at once, upon the slightest acquaintance with James, that while he
+      was of the same general civilization as his neighbors, he was of a
+      different type. In his narrowness, there was a peculiar breadth and vigor
+      which characterized him. He had about him the atmosphere of a wider ocean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His early reminiscences were all of that picturesque and adventurous life
+      which prevailed along our coasts to within forty years, and his
+      conversation was suggestive of it He held a silver medal from the Humane
+      Society for conspicuous bravery in the rescue of the crew of a ship
+      stranded in winter in a storm of sleet off Post Hill Bar. He had a
+      war-hatchet, for which he had negotiated face to face with a naked
+      cannibal in the South Sea. He was familiar with the Hoogly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His language savored always of the sea. His hens &ldquo;turned in,&rdquo; at night. He
+      was full of sayings and formulas of a maritime nature; there was one which
+      always seemed to me to have something of a weird and mystic character:
+      &ldquo;South moon brings high water on Coast Island Bar.&rdquo; In describing the
+      transactions of domestic life, he used words more properly applicable to
+      the movements of large ships. He would speak of a saucepan as if it
+      weighed a hundred tons. He never tossed or threw even the slightest
+      object; he hove it. &ldquo;Why, father!&rdquo; said Mrs. Parsons, surprised at seeing
+      him for a moment untidy; &ldquo;what have you ben doing? Your boots and
+      trousers-legs is all white!&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Mr. Parsons, apologetically,
+      looking down upon his dusty garments, &ldquo;I just took that bucket of ashes
+      and hove 'em into the henhouse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The word &ldquo;heave,&rdquo; in fact, was always upon his tongue. It applied to
+      everything. &ldquo;How was this road straightened out?&rdquo; I asked him one day;
+      &ldquo;did the town vote to do it?&rdquo; &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; he said quickly; &ldquo;there was n't
+      never no vote. The se-lec'men just come along one day, and got us all
+      together, and hove in and hove out; and we altered our fences to suit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember hearing him testify as a witness to a will. It appeared that
+      the testator was sick in bed when he signed the instrument. He was
+      suffering greatly, and when he was to sign, it was necessary to lift him
+      with the ex-tremest care, to turn him to the light-stand. &ldquo;State what was
+      done next,&rdquo; the lawyer asked of James. &ldquo;Captain Frost was laying on his
+      left side,&rdquo; said James. &ldquo;Two of us took a holt of him and rolled him
+      over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had probably not the least suspicion that his language had a maritime
+      flavor. I asked him one night, as we coasted along toward home, &ldquo;What do
+      seafaring men call the track of light that the moon makes on the water?
+      They must have some name for it&rdquo; &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;they don't have no
+      name for it; they just call it 'the wake of the moon.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      James's learning had been chiefly gained from the outside world and not
+      from books. I have heard him lay it down as a fact that the word &ldquo;Bible&rdquo;
+       had its etymology from the word &ldquo;by-bill&rdquo; (hand-bill). &ldquo;It was writ,&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;in small parcels, and they was passed around by them that writ 'em,
+      like by-bills; and so when they hove it all into one, they called it the
+      Bible.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But while James had little learning himself, he appreciated it highly in
+      others. I had occasion to ask him once why it was that the son of one of
+      his neighbors, in closing up his father's estate, had not settled his
+      accounts regularly in the probate court. &ldquo;Oh, I know how that was,&rdquo; he
+      replied; &ldquo;he settled 'em the other way. You see, he went to the college at
+      Woonsocket, and he learned there how to settle accounts the other way: and
+      that's the way he settled 'em.&rdquo; And then he added, &ldquo;When Alvin left the
+      college, they giv' him a book that tells how to do all kinds of business,
+      and what you want to do so's to make money; and Alvin has always followed
+      them rules. The consequence is, he's made money, and what he 's made, he
+      's kep' it. I suppose he's worth not less than sixteen hundred dollars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes he would venture a remark of a gallant nature. &ldquo;They don't
+      generally git the lights in the hall so as to suit me,&rdquo; he once said. &ldquo;I
+      don't want it too light, because then it hurts my eyes; but I want it
+      light enough so as 't I can see the women!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      James was a large, strong man, but Mrs. Parsons, although she was little
+      and slight, and was always ailing, constantly assumed the rôle of her
+      husband's nurse and protector, not only in household matters, but in other
+      affairs of life. Whenever she had visitors,&mdash;and she and James were
+      hospitable in the extreme,&mdash;she was pretty sure to end up, sooner or
+      later, if James were present, with some droll criticism of him, as much to
+      his delight as to hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James sometimes liked to affect a certain harshness of demeanor; but the
+      disguise was a transparent one. How well do I remember the time&mdash;oh,
+      so long ago!&mdash;when for some reason or other I happened to have his
+      boat instead of my own, one day, with one of the boys of the village, to
+      go to Matamet, twelve miles off, to visit certain lobster-pots which we
+      had set. We were delayed there by breaking our boom, in jibing. We should
+      have been at home at noon; at seven in the evening we were not yet in
+      sight. When we got in, rather crestfallen at our disaster, particularly as
+      the boat was wanted for the next day, James met us at the pier. We were
+      boys then, and his tongue was free. As he stood there on the shore,
+      bare-headed, hastily summoned from his house, with his hair blowing in the
+      wind, waving his hands and addressing first us and then a knot of men who
+      stood smoking by, no words of censure were too harsh, no comment on our
+      carelessness too cutting, no laments too keen over the irreparable loss of
+      that particular boom. The next time I could take my own boat, if I were
+      going to get cast away. And I remember well how he ended his tirade. &ldquo;I
+      did n't care nothing about you two,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you want to git
+      drownded, git drownded; it ain't nothing to me. All I was afraid of was
+      that you 'd gone and capsized my boat, and would n't never turn up to tell
+      where you sunk her. But as for you&mdash;&rdquo; and he laughed a laugh of
+      heartless indifference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But ten minutes later, and right before his face, at his own front gate,
+      Mrs. Parsons betrayed him. &ldquo;I never see father so worried,&rdquo; she said,
+      &ldquo;sence the time he heard about Thomas; why, he 's spent the whole
+      afternoon as nervous as a hawk, going up on the hill with his spy-glass;
+      and I don't feel so sure but what he was crying. He said he did n't care
+      nothing about the boat,&mdash;'What 's that old boat!' says he; but if you
+      boys was drownded out of her, he would n't never git over it.&rdquo; At which
+      James, being so unmasked, laughed in a shamefaced way, and shook us by the
+      shoulders. He had a son who carried on some sort of half-maritime business
+      on one of the wharves, in the city, and lived over his shop. When James
+      went at intervals to visit him, he made his way at once from the railway
+      station to the nearest wharf; then he followed the line of the water
+      around to the shop. Where jib-booms project out over the sidewalk, one
+      feels so thoroughly at home! From the shop he would make short adventurous
+      excursions up Commercial Street and State Street, sometimes going no
+      farther than the nautical-instrument store on the corner of Broad Street,
+      sometimes venturing to Washington Street, or even moving for a short
+      distance up or down in the current of that gay thoroughfare. He loved to
+      comment satirically on the city, with a broad humorous sense of his own
+      strangeness there. &ldquo;The city folks don't seem to have nothing to do,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;They seem to be all out, walking up and down the streets. Come
+      noon, I thought there'd be some let-up for dinner; but they did n't seem
+      to want nothing to eat; they kep' right on walking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I must not leave James Parsons without telling you of two whale's teeth
+      which stand on his parlor mantel-piece; he ornamented them himself,
+      copying the designs from cheap foreign prints. One of them is what he
+      calls &ldquo;the meeting-house.&rdquo; It is the high altar of the Cathedral of
+      Seville. On the other is &ldquo;the wild-beast tamer.&rdquo; A man with a feeble,
+      wishy-washy expression holds by each hand a fierce, but subjugated tiger.
+      His legs dangle loosely in the air. There is nothing to suggest what
+      upholds him in his mighty contest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Now we must turn from James Parsons to a man of a different type, or
+      rather of a different variety of the same type; for they descend alike
+      from original founders of the town, and, like most of their
+      fellow-townsmen, are both of unqualified Pilgrim stock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To get to Captain Joseph Pelham's house, you have to drive along a range
+      of hills for some miles, skirting the sea; then you come, half-way, to a
+      bright modern village with trees along the main street, with houses and
+      fences kept painted up, for the most part, but here and there relieved by
+      an unpainted dwelling of a past generation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here you have an option. You may either pursue your road through the
+      high-lying prosperous street, with peeps of salt water to the right, or
+      you may turn sharply off at a little store and descend to the lower road.
+      It is always a struggle to choose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The road to the beach descends a sharp, gravelly hill, and crosses a
+      bridge. Then you come out on a waste of salt-marsh, threaded by the creek,
+      broken by wild, fantastic sand-hills, grown over by beach-grass which will
+      cut your fingers like a knife. You drive close along the white,
+      precipitous beach; you pass the long, shaky pier, with half-decayed
+      fish-houses at the other end, and picturesque heaps of fish-cars, seines,
+      and barrels. Then the road, following the shore a little longer, climbs
+      the hill and enters the woods. Two miles more and you come out to fields
+      with mossy fences, and occasional houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The houses begin to be more frequent. All at once you enter the main
+      street of W&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment you see that you have come into a new atmosphere. There is a
+      large modern church among the older ones. There are large, fine houses,
+      some old-fashioned, others new. By some miraculous intervention Queen Anne
+      has not as yet made her appearance. There are handsome, well-filled
+      stores, going into no little refinement in stock. There is, of course, a
+      small brick library, built by the bounty of a New Yorker who was born
+      here. There is a brick national bank, and a face brick block occupied
+      above by Freemasons, orders of Red Men, Knights Templars, and the Pool of
+      Siloam Lodge, I. O. O. F., and below by a savings bank and a local marine
+      insurance company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is here that we shall find Captain Joseph Pelham. If a stranger has
+      occasion to inquire for the leading men of the place he is always first
+      referred to him. It is he who heads every list and is the chairman of
+      every meeting. When a certain public man, commanding but a small following
+      here, appeared, upon his campaign tour, and found no one to escort him to
+      the platform and preside, so that he was obliged to justify his appearance
+      here by the Scripture passage, &ldquo;They that are whole need not a physician,
+      but they that are sick;&rdquo; at the moment of entering the hall, closely
+      packed with curious opponents, disposed perhaps to be derisive when the
+      situation for the visitor was embarrassing in the extreme,&mdash;it was
+      Captain Joseph Pelham who, though the bitterest opponent of them all, rose
+      from his seat, gave the speaker his arm, escorted him to the platform,
+      presented him with grave courtesy to the audience, and sat beside him
+      through the entire discourse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While Captain Pelham continued to go to sea, and after that, until he was
+      made president of the insurance company, he lived a mile or two out of the
+      town, in a house he had inherited. It is picturesquely situated, on a bare
+      hill, with a wide view of the inland and the ocean. As you look down from
+      its south windows, the cluster of houses nestling together at the shore
+      below stand sharply out against the water. It is one of those white houses
+      common in our older towns,&mdash;two-storied, long on the street, with the
+      front door in the middle. Of the interior it is enough to say that its
+      owner had sailed for thirty years to Hong-Kong, Calcutta and Madras. It
+      had a prevailing odor of teak and lacquer. In the front hall was a vast
+      china cane-holder; a turretted Calcutta hat hung on the hat-tree; a heavy,
+      varnished Chinese umbrella stood in a corner; a long and handsome settee
+      from Java stood against the wall. In the parlors, on either hand, were
+      Chinese tables shutting up like telescopes, elaborate rattan chairs of
+      different kinds, and numberless other things of this sort, which had
+      plainly been honestly come by, and not bought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, if you met the Captain's favor, he would show you with becoming
+      pride some family relics, and tell you about them. They came mostly from
+      his paternal grandfather, who was a shipmaster too, had commanded a
+      privateer in the Revolution, and made a fortune. There were a number of
+      pieces of handsome furniture,&mdash;these you could see for yourself What
+      would be shown you, with a half-diffident air, would be: a silver mug; two
+      Revere tablespoons; a few tiny teaspoons marked F.; a handsome sword and
+      scabbard; a yellow satin waistcoat and small-clothes; portraits, not
+      artistic, but effective, of his grandfather, in a velvet coat and
+      knee-breeches, with a long spyglass in his hand, and of his grandmother, a
+      strong, matter-of-fact looking woman, handsomely dressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the thing which the Captain secretly treasured most, but brought out
+      last, was his grandmother's Dutch Bible. It is a curious old book; you can
+      see it still if you wish. It has an elaborate frontispiece. Sixteen cuts
+      of leading incidents in Scripture history conduct you by gentle stages,
+      from Eden, through the offering of Isaac, to the close of the Evangelists,
+      and surround Dr. Martin Luther, who, in a gown, holds back the curtains of
+      a pillared alcove, to show you, through two windows, an Old and a New
+      Testament landscape, and a lady sitting beneath a canopy, with an open
+      volume. The covers are of thick bevelled board covered with leather. There
+      was once a heavy clasp. The edges are richly gilded, and figures are
+      pricked in the gilding. It is very handsomely printed. It was in the
+      possession, in 1760, of a young New England girl, the Captain's
+      grandmother. There is a story about it,&mdash;a story too long to tell
+      here. Suffice it to say that the Captain's ancestor, who settled early in
+      New England, came from Leyden shortly after Mr. John Robinson. A hundred
+      years later and more, in the oddest way, an acquaintance sprang up with
+      certain Dutch connections, and in the course of it this Bible, then new
+      and elegant, found its way over the sea as a gift to young Mistress
+      Preston. In New England, and as a relic of the early ties of our people
+      with Holland, momentarily renewed after a century had passed away, it is
+      probably unique. It was a last farewell from Holland to her English
+      children, before she parted company with them forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have told you about this house, as I recall it, although Captain Pelham
+      had now ceased to live there, because it was there alone that he seemed
+      completely at home. Furnished as it was from the four quarters of the
+      globe, everything seemed to fit in with his ways. He supplemented the
+      Chinese tables, and they supplemented him. But when he ceased to go to
+      sea, in late middle life, and settled down at home upon his competency,
+      and began a little later to become interested in public matters; when he
+      was at last made president of the insurance company, a director in the
+      bank, and a trustee in the savings bank, and when affairs were left more
+      and more to his control, it became convenient for him to get into town;
+      and his wife and daughter were perhaps ambitious for the change.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he had sold his house by the sea, and had bought a large and somewhat
+      pretentious one on the main street, with a cast-iron summer arbor, and a
+      bay-window closed in for a conservatory. He had furnished it from the city
+      with new Brussels carpet, with a parlor set, a sitting-room set, a
+      dining-room set, and chamber sets; and the antique things which had given
+      his former home an air of charming picturesqueness were for the most part
+      tucked away in unnoticed corners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Captain never seemed to me to have become quite naturalized in his new
+      home. He never belonged to the furniture, or the furniture to him. The
+      place where you saw him best in these later days was in the office of his
+      insurance company, or in the little business-room of one of the banks,
+      surrounded by a knot of more substantial townsmen, or talking patiently
+      with some small farmer or seafaring man seeking for insurance or a loan.
+      One of the most marked features of his character was a certain patience
+      and considerateness which made all borrowers apply by preference to him.
+      He would sit down at his little table with a plain man whose affairs were
+      in disorder, and listen with close attention to his application for a
+      loan. Somehow the man would find himself disclosing all the particulars of
+      his distress. Then Captain Pelham, in his quiet way, would go over the
+      whole matter with him; would plan with him on his concerns; would try to
+      see if it were not possible to postpone a little the payment of debts and
+      to hasten the collection of claims; to get a part of the money for a short
+      time from a son in Boston or a married daughter in New Bedford; and so, by
+      pulling and hauling, to weather the Cape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I must say a word about his position in town matters. He had been at sea
+      the greater part of the time from sixteen to fifty-two. During that time
+      he had had absolutely no concern with political affairs. He had never
+      voted: for he had never, as it had happened, been ashore at the time of an
+      election. And yet before he had been at home six years he was one of the
+      selectmen of the town and overseer of the poor, and had become familiar
+      with the details of Massachusetts town government, superficially so
+      simple, in fact so complex. It was a large town, of no small wealth. Lying
+      as it did along the seaboard, where havoc was always being made by
+      disasters of the sea, there was not only a larger number than in an inland
+      town of persons actually quartered in the poorhouse, but there were many
+      broken families who had to be helped in their own homes. And it was to me
+      an interesting fact that in dealing with two score households of this
+      class, Captain Pel-ham, who had spent most of his time at sea, was able to
+      display the utmost tact and judgment. He applied to their affairs that
+      same plain kindliness and sound sense which he showed in the matter of
+      discounts at the bank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the friendships of Captain Pelham were chiefly in his own town, his
+      acquaintance was not confined to it. In his own quiet, unpretending way he
+      was something of a man of the world. He was known in the marine insurance
+      offices in the large cities. He had been familiar all his life with large
+      affairs; he had commanded valuable ships, loaded with fortunes in teas and
+      silks, in the days when an India captain was a merchant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      You will ask me why it is that I have been telling you about these men,
+      and what it is that connects them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was now ten years since Captain Pelham's only son, himself at
+      twenty-two the master of a vessel, had married a daughter of James
+      Parsons,&mdash;a tall, impulsive, and warm-hearted girl,&mdash;one of
+      those girls to whom children always cling. Both James Parsons's daughters
+      had proved attractive and had married well. It had been a disappointment
+      in Captain Pelham's household, perhaps, that this son, their especial
+      pride, should not have married into one of the wealthy families in his own
+      village. At first there had been a little visiting to and fro; it had
+      lasted but a little time, and then the two households had settled down, as
+      the way is in the country, to follow each its own natural course of
+      living. George Pelham's wife had always lived in an odd little house, all
+      doors and windows, near by her father, in her native village.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was from Porto Cabello that that message came,&mdash;yellow fever&mdash;a
+      short sickness&mdash;a burial in a stranger's grave. George Pelham's wife
+      had been for two or three years of less than her usual strength. It was
+      not long after that news came,&mdash;came so suddenly, with no warning,&mdash;that
+      she began to fade away; and after ten months she died.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember seeing her a week or two before her death. Her bed had been set
+      up in her little parlor for the convenience of those who were attending
+      upon her. She lay on her back, bolstered up. The paleness of her face was
+      intensified by her coal-black hair, lying back heavy on the pillow. Her
+      hands were thin and transparent, and I remember well the straining look in
+      her eyes as she talked with me about the boy whom she was going to leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was living, as I have said, close by her father. It was natural that
+      in the last few days of her illness the child should be taken to her
+      father's house, and when she died and the funeral was over, it was there
+      that he returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Picture now to yourself a boy toward nine years old, symmetrically made,
+      firm and hard. His head is round, his features are good, his hair is fine
+      and lies down close. He is clothed in a neat print jacket, with a collar
+      and a little handkerchief at the neck, and a pair of short trousers
+      buttoned on to the jacket. He is barefoot. He is tanned but not burnt. His
+      complexion is of a rich dark brown. He is always fresh and clean. But the
+      great charm about him is the expression of infinite fun and mirth that is
+      always upon his face. Never for a moment while he is awake is his face
+      still. Always the same, yet always shifting, with a thousand varying
+      shades of roguish joy. Quick, bright, full of boyish repartee, full of
+      shouts and laughter. And the same incessant life which plays upon his face
+      shows itself in every movement of his limbs. Never for a moment is he
+      still unless he has some work upon his hands. He has his little routine of
+      tasks, regularly assigned, which he goes through with the most amusing
+      good-humor and attention. It is his duty to see that the skiffs are not
+      jammed under the wharf on the rising tide; to sweep out the &ldquo;Annie&rdquo; when
+      she comes in, and to set her cabin to rights; to set away the dishes after
+      meals, and to feed the chickens. Aside from a few such tasks, his time in
+      summer is his own. The rest of the year he goes to the &ldquo;primary,&rdquo; and
+      serves to keep the whole room in a state of mirth. He has the happy gift
+      that to put every one in high spirits he has only to be present. Such an
+      incessant flow of life you rarely see. His manners are good, and he comes
+      honestly by them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is an amusing union in him of the baby and the man. While the
+      children of his age at the summer hotel walk about for the most part with
+      their nurses, he is turned loose upon the shore, and has been, from his
+      cradle. He can dive and swim and paddle and float and &ldquo;go steamboat.&rdquo; He
+      can row a boat that is not too heavy, and up to the limit of his strength
+      he can steer a sail-boat with substantial skill. He knows the currents,
+      the tides, and the shoals about his shore, and the nearer landmarks. He
+      knows that to find the threadlike entrance to the bay you bring the
+      flag-staff over Cart-wright's barn. He has vague theories of his own as to
+      the annual shifting of the channel. He knows where to take the city
+      children to look for tinkle-shells and mussels. He knows what winds bring
+      in the scallops from their beds. He knows where to dig for clams, and
+      where to tread for quahaugs without disturbing the oysters. He has a good
+      deal of fragmentary lore of the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every morning you will hear his cry, a sort of yodel, or bird-call,
+      peculiar to him, with which he bursts forth upon the world. Then you will
+      hear, perhaps, loud peals of laughter at something that has excited his
+      sense of the absurd,&mdash;contagious laughter, full of innocent fun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he will appear, perhaps, with his wooden dinner-bucket,&mdash;he is
+      going off with his grandfather for the day,&mdash;and will yodel to the
+      old man as a signal to make haste. Then you will hear him consulting with
+      some one upon the weather.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this time he will be going; through various evolutions, swinging in
+      the hammock, sitting on the fence, opening his bucket to show you what he
+      has to eat, closing the bucket and sitting down upon the cover, or turning
+      somersaults upon the grass. Then he will encamp under an apple-tree to
+      wait until his grandfather appears, enlivening the time by a score of
+      minute excursions after hens and cats. Then he will go into the house
+      again, and rock while the old man finishes his coffee, sure of a greeting,
+      confident in a sense of entire good-fellowship, until the meal is
+      finished, and James Parsons is ready to take his coat and a red-bladed
+      oar, and set out. Then the boy is like a setter off for a walk,&mdash;all
+      sorts of whimsical expressions in his face, of absolute delight; every
+      form of extravagance in his bearing. The only trouble is, one has to laugh
+      too much; but with all this, something so manly, so companionable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is no little of a philosopher in his way. He has been a great deal with
+      older people, and has caught the habit of discussion of affairs, or
+      rather, perhaps, of unconsciously reflecting forth discussions which he
+      has heard. He has an infinite curiosity upon all matters of human life. He
+      likes, within limits, to discuss character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the boat his chief delights are to talk, to eat cookies, and to steer.
+      When it is not blowing too hard for him to stand at the tiller, he will
+      steer for an hour together, watching with the most constant care the
+      trembling of the leach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It makes no difference to him at what hour he returns,&mdash;from
+      oystering or from the cranberry-bog. If it is in the middle of the
+      afternoon, good and well. Instantly upon landing he will collect a troop
+      of urchins; in an incredibly short space of time there will be a heap of
+      little clothes upon the bank; in a moment a procession of small naked
+      figures will go running down to the wharf, diving, one after the other. If
+      distance or tide or a calm keeps him out late, so much the better. In that
+      case there is the romance of coasting along the shore by night; of
+      counting and distinguishing the lights; of guessing the nearness to land
+      from the dull roar of the sea breaking on the beach. &ldquo;Don't you think,&rdquo; he
+      will sometimes say, &ldquo;that we are nearer shore than we think we are?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is amusing sometimes, on a distant voyage of fifteen or twenty miles,
+      after seed oysters, when a landing is made at some little port, to see him
+      drop the mariner at once and become a child, with a burning desire to find
+      a shop where he can buy animal-crackers. Finding such a place,&mdash;and
+      usually it is not difficult,&mdash;he will lay in a supply of lions and
+      tigers, and then go marching about with great delight, with mockery in his
+      eyes, keenly appreciating the satire involved in eating the head off a
+      cooky lion, incapable of resistance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No picture of Joe would be complete which left out his dog. Kit was a
+      black, fine-haired creature, smaller than a collie, but of much the same
+      gentle disposition,&mdash;a present from Captain Pelham. When Kit was
+      first presented to the boy he domesticated himself at once, and in a week
+      it was impossible to tell, from his relations with the household, which
+      was boy and which was dog. They were both boys and they were both dogs.
+      Kit had an unqualified sense of being at home, and of being beloved and
+      indispensable. It was long before he became a sailor. When, at the outset,
+      it was attempted to make a man of him by taking him when they went out to
+      fish, the failure seemed to be complete. He was a little sea-sick. Then he
+      was sad, and sighed and groaned as dogs never do on shore. He would not
+      lie still, but was nervous and feverish. Once he leaped out of the boat
+      and made for shore, and had to be pursued and rescued, exhausted and
+      half-drowned. Still, whenever he had to be left at home, it was a struggle
+      every time to reconcile him and leave him. Once he pursued a boat which he
+      mistook for James's along the shore of the bay, half down to Benson's
+      Narrows, got involved in the creeks which the tide was beginning to fill,
+      and had to be brought ingloriously home by a farmer, made fast on the top
+      of a load of sweet, salt hay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would tease like a child to be allowed to go. He would listen with an
+      unsatisfied and appealing look while Joe, with an exuberant but regretful
+      air, explained to him in detail the reasons which made it impossible for
+      him to go. But in a few months, as the dog grew older, he prevailed, and
+      although he would generally retire into the shelter of the cabin, he was
+      nevertheless the boy's almost inseparable companion on the water as on the
+      shore. The relation between the two was always touching. It evidently
+      never crossed the dog's mind that he was not a younger brother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, to complete the picture of James Par-sons's household, add in this
+      boy; for while it is but just now that he is strictly of it, he has been
+      for years its mirth and life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember that quiet household before it knew him,&mdash;cosey, homelike,
+      with a pervading air even then of genial humor, but with long hours of
+      silence and repose,&mdash;geraniums and the click of knitting-needles in
+      the sitting-room; faint odors of a fragrant pipe from the shed kitchen; no
+      stir of boisterous fun, except when some bronzed, solemn joker, with his
+      wife, came in for a formal call, and solemnity gave way, by a gradual
+      descent, to merriment. Joe had given no new departure, only an impulse.
+      &ldquo;James used to behave himself quite well,&rdquo; Mrs. Parsons would say, archly
+      raising her eyebrows, &ldquo;before Joe's time; but now there 's two boys of 'em
+      together, and the one as bad as the other, and I can't do nothing with
+      'em. And then,&rdquo;&mdash;with a mock gesture of despair,&mdash;&ldquo;that dog!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      While Joe's mother was lying ill, and after it had become certain that she
+      would soon leave this world forever, the question had been
+      freely-discussed as to what her boy's future should be. In Captain Joseph
+      Pelham's mind there was only-one answer to this question,&mdash;that the
+      lad should come to him. He bore the Captain's name; he represented the
+      Captain's son; he should take a place now in the Captain's home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was now about three weeks since Joe's mother had been buried. The stone
+      had not yet been cut and set over her grave. But the Captain thought it
+      time to drive over to James Parsons's and take the boy. That James would
+      make any serious opposition perhaps never entered his mind. It was a
+      bright, charming afternoon; with his shining horse, in a bright,
+      well-varnished buggy, the Captain drove over the seven miles of winding
+      roads through the woods, and along the sea, to the village where James
+      Parsons lived. He tied his horse to the hitching-post in front of the
+      broad cottage house, went down the path to the L door, knocked, and went
+      in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James was sitting in a large room which served in winter as a kitchen and
+      in summer as a sort of sitting-room, smoking a pipe and gazing vacantly
+      into the pine-branches in the open fireplace before him. He had been out
+      all day on his marsh, but he had been home a couple of hours. His wife&mdash;kindly
+      soul&mdash;received Captain Pelham at the door, wiping her hands upon her
+      apron, and modestly showed him into the sitting-room; then she retired to
+      her tasks in the shed kitchen. She moved about mechanically for a moment;
+      then she ran hastily out into the lean-to wood-shed, shut the door behind
+      her, sat down on the worn floor where it gives way with a step to the
+      floor of earth by the wood-pile, hid her face in her apron, and burst into
+      tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joe was at the wharf with his comrades playing at war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, if there ever was a hospitable man,&mdash;a man who gave a welcome,&mdash;a
+      rough but merry welcome to every one who entered his doors, it was James
+      Parsons. He had a homely, jocose saying that you must either make yourself
+      at home or go home. But on this occasion he rose with a somewhat forced
+      and awkward air, laid his pipe down on the mantel-piece, and nodded to the
+      Captain with an air of embarrassed inquiry. Then he bethought himself, and
+      asked the Captain to sit down. The Captain took the nearest chair, beside
+      the table, where Mrs. Parsons had lately been sitting at her work. James's
+      chair was directly opposite. The table was between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James rose and went to the mantel-piece, scratched a match upon his
+      boot-heel, and undertook to light his pipe. It did not light; he did not
+      notice it, but put the pipe in his mouth as if it were lighted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It occurred to Captain Pelham now, for the first time, absorbed as he had
+      been with exclusive thoughts of the boy, that he should first say
+      something to this old man about the daughter whom he had lost: and he made
+      some expressions of sympathy. The old man nodded, but said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was silence for two or three minutes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The subject in order now was inevitably the boy. Captain Pelham opened his
+      lips to claim him; but, almost to his own surprise, he found himself
+      making some common remark about the affairs of the neighborhood. It came
+      in harsh and forced, as if it were a fragment of conversation floated in
+      by the breeze from the street outside. Then the Captain waited a moment,
+      looking out of the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James took his pipe from his mouth and leaned his elbows on the table.
+      &ldquo;Why don't you go take him?&rdquo; he suddenly said: &ldquo;he's probably down to the
+      wharf. Ef you have got the claim to him, why don't you go take him? You
+      've got your team here,&mdash;drive right down there and put him in and
+      drive off; if you 've got the right to him, why don't you go take him? But
+      ef you 've come for my consent, you can set there till the chair rots
+      beneath you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With this, James rose and took the felt hat which was lying by him on the
+      table, and saying not another word, went out of the door. He went down to
+      the shore, and affected to busy himself with his boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was nothing for Captain Pelham to do but to take his hat, untie his
+      horse, and drive home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Captain well knew that nobody in the world had a legal right to the
+      child until a guardian should be appointed. A plain and simple path was
+      open before him: it was his only path. James Parsons had proved wilful and
+      wrong-headed; there was nothing now but to take out letters as guardian of
+      the boy. Then James would acquiesce without a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Immediately after breakfast the Captain went down the street. He opened
+      his letters and attended to the first routine of business; then he went
+      across the way and up a flight of stairs to a lawyer's office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you had happened to read the county papers at about this time, you
+      would have seen among the legal notices two petitions, identical in form,&mdash;the
+      one by Joseph Pelham, the other by James Parsons,&mdash;each applying for
+      guardianship of Joseph Pelham, the younger of that name, with an order
+      upon each petition for all persons interested to come in on the first
+      Tuesday of the following month and show cause why the petitioner's demand
+      should not be granted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The county court-house was a new brick building, of modest size, fifteen
+      miles from W&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, and twenty miles from the village where
+      James Parsons lived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were fifteen or twenty people from different towns in attendance
+      when the court opened on the important first Tuesday. As one after another
+      transacted his affairs and went away, others would come in. Three or four
+      lawyers sat at tables talking with clients, or stood about the judge's
+      desk. There was a sprinkling of women in new mourning. Printed papers,
+      filled out with names and dates,&mdash;petitions and bonds and executors'
+      accounts,&mdash;were being handed in to the judge and receiving his
+      signature of approval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The routine business was transacted first. It was almost noon when the
+      judge was at last free to attend to contested matters. There was a small
+      audience by that time,&mdash;only ten or a dozen people, some of whom were
+      waiting for train-time, while others, who had come upon their own affairs,
+      lingered now from curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge was a tall, spare, old-fashioned man; he had held the office for
+      above thirty years. He was a man of much native force, of sound learning
+      within the range of his judicial duties, and of strong common-sense. He
+      was often employed by Captain Pelham in his own affairs, and more
+      particularly in bank and insurance matters,&mdash;for the probate judges
+      are free to practise at the bar in matters not connected with their
+      judicial duties,&mdash;and Captain Pelham had always retained him in
+      important cases as counsel for the town. He had a large practice
+      throughout the county; he knew its people, their ideas, their traditions,
+      and their feelings. He understood their social organization to the core.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said the judge, laying aside some papers upon which he had been
+      writing, and taking off his glasses, &ldquo;we will take up the two petitions
+      for guardianship of Joseph Pelham.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Pelham and the lawyer whom he had employed took seats at a small
+      table before the judge; James Parsons timidly took a seat at another. His
+      petition had been filled out for him by one of his neighbors: he had no
+      counsel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Pelham's lawyer rose; he had been impressed by the Captain with
+      the importance of the matter, and he was about to make a formal opening.
+      But the judge interrupted him. &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that we may assume
+      that I know in a general way about these two petitioners. I shall assume,
+      unless something is shown to the contrary, that they are both men of
+      respectable character, and have proper homes for a boy to grow up in. And
+      I suppose there is no controversy that Captain Pelham is a man of some
+      considerable means, and that the other petitioner is a man of small
+      property.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; he went on, leaning forward with his elbow on his desk, and gently
+      waving his glasses with his right hand, &ldquo;did the father of this boy ever
+      express any wish as to what should be done with him in case his mother
+      should die?&rdquo; Nobody answered. &ldquo;It would be of no legal effect,&rdquo; he said,
+      &ldquo;but it would have weight with me. Now, is there any evidence as to what
+      his mother wanted? A boy's mother can tell best about these things, if she
+      is a sensible woman. Mr. Baker,&rdquo; he said to Captain Pelham's lawyer, &ldquo;have
+      you any evidence as to what his mother wanted to have done with him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Baker conversed for a moment with Captain Pelham and then called him
+      to the stand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Pelham testified as to his frequent visits to the boy's mother,
+      and to her unbroken friendly relations with him. She had never said in so
+      many words what she wanted to have done for the boy, but he always
+      understood that she meant to have the child come to him; he could not say,
+      however, that she had said anything expressly to that effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      James sat before him not many feet away, in his old-fashioned broadcloth
+      coat with a velvet collar. He cross-examined Captain Pelham a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She did n't never tell you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that she was going to give you the
+      boy, did she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir;&rdquo; said Captain Pelham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How often did your wife come over to see her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could n't tell you, sir,&rdquo; said the Captain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not very often, did she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think not,&rdquo; the Captain admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The boy's mother did n't never talk much about Mis' Captain Pelham, did
+      she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't remember that she did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She did n't never have her over to talk with her about what she was going
+      to do with the boy, did she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that she did,&rdquo; said the Captain. &ldquo;She is here; you can ask
+      her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't never hear of her leaving no word with Mis' Captain Pelham
+      about taking care of the boy, did you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't say that I did,&rdquo; said Captain Pelham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man nodded his head with a satisfied air. His cross-examination
+      was done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Captain retired from the witness-stand; his lawyer whispered with him
+      a moment and then went over and whispered for two or three minutes with
+      Mrs. Pelham; then he said he had no more evidence to offer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Parsons,&rdquo; said the judge, &ldquo;do you wish to testify?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      James went to the witness-stand and was sworn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did n't your daughter ever talk about what she wanted done with the boy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talk about it?&rdquo; said James. &ldquo;Why, she didn't talk about nothing else. She
+      used to have it all over every time we went in. It was all about how
+      mother 'n me must do this with him and do that with him,&mdash;how he was
+      to go to school, what room he was going to sleep in to our house, and all
+      that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Baker desired to make no cross-examination, and James's wife was
+      called, and testified in her quaint way to the same effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By a keen, homely instinct James had half consciously foreseen what would
+      be the controlling element of the case; and while he had not formulated it
+      to himself he had brought with him one of his neighbors, who had watched
+      with his daughter through the last nights of her life. She was one of the
+      poorest women of the village. Her husband was shiftless, and was somewhat
+      given to drink. She had a large family, with little to bring them up on.
+      Her life had been one long struggle. She was extremely poorly dressed, and
+      although she was neat, there was an air of unthrift or discouragement
+      about her dress. She wore an oversack which evidently had originally been
+      made for some one else; it lacked one button. She was faded and worn and
+      homely; but the moment she spoke she impressed you as a woman of
+      conscience. She had talked in the long watches of the night with the boy's
+      mother, and she confirmed what James and his wife had said. There could be
+      no question what the mother had desired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Baker ventured out upon the thin ice of cross-examination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She must have talked about her father-in-law, Captain Pelham?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; said the woman, &ldquo;often.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She seemed to be attached to him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, indeed,&rdquo; said the woman, quickly; &ldquo;she was always telling how good
+      he was to her; I have heard her say there was n't no better man in the
+      world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She must have talked about what he could do for the boy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the woman. &ldquo;She expected him to do for Joe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did n't she ever say,&rdquo; and the lawyer looked round at James,&mdash;&ldquo;did
+      n't you ever hear her say that she was worried sometimes for fear her
+      father would not be careful enough about the boy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman hesitated a moment. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I have heard her say so,
+      but that 's what every mother says.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What reason did you ever hear her give,&rdquo; the lawyer asked, &ldquo;why she would
+      rather have him stay over there than to go and be brought up by his
+      grandfather Pelham?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman looked around timidly at the judge. &ldquo;Be I obliged to answer?&rdquo;
+       she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman looked toward Captain Pelham with an embarrassed air. He was the
+      best friend she had in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I rather not say nothing about that,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;it 's no account,
+      anyway.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, tell us what she said,&rdquo; said Mr. Baker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt that he had made some progress up to that point with his
+      cross-examination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it was n't much,&rdquo; said the woman; &ldquo;it was only like this. I have
+      heard her say that Miss Captain Pelham was a good woman and meant to do
+      what was right, but she was n't a woman that knew how to mother a little
+      boy.&rdquo; And here the witness began to cry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge moved slightly in his chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was more or less rambling talk about the way the boy was allowed to
+      run loose on the shore, and some suggestions were made in the way of
+      conversational argument about his being allowed to go barefoot, and to go
+      in swimming when he pleased; but the judge seemed to pay very little
+      attention to that. &ldquo;That 's the way we were all brought up,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It
+      is good for the boy; he 'll learn to take care of himself, and his mother
+      knew all about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is plain enough,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;that there would be some
+      advantages to the boy in going to live with Captain Pelham; but there is
+      one thing that has been overlooked which would probably have been
+      suggested if the petitioner Parsons had had counsel. It has been assumed
+      that the boy would be cut loose in future from his grandfather Pelham
+      unless he was put under his guardianship; but that is n't so. All his
+      grandparents will look out for him, and when he gets older, and wants to
+      go into business, here or elsewhere, Captain Pelham will look after him
+      just the same as if he were his guardian. The other grandfather has n't
+      got the means to advance him. I am not at all afraid about that,&rdquo; he said;
+      &ldquo;the only question here is, where he shall be deposited for the next five
+      or six years. Either place is good enough. His father had a right to fix
+      it by will if he had chosen to; but he did n't, and I think we must
+      consider it a matter for the women to settle: they know best about such
+      things. It is plain that his mother thought it would be best for him to
+      stay where he is, and she knew best. He 's wonted there, and wants to
+      stay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he took up his pen and wrote on Captain Pelham's petition an order of
+      dismissal. On the other he filled out and signed the decree granting
+      guardianship to James Parsons, and approved the bond. Then he handed the
+      papers to the register and called the next case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this day on, little was seen of Captain Pelham at James's house.
+      Sometimes he would stop in his buggy and take the boy off with him for a
+      little stay; but Joe soon wearied of formality, and grew restless for
+      James, for his grandmother Parsons, for the free life of the little wharf
+      and the shore. Life always opened fresh to him on his return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once and only once Captain Pelham entered James's door-yard. James was
+      sitting in an armchair under an apple-tree by the well, smoking and
+      reading the paper. The Captain began, this time, with no introduction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fred Gooding,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;tells me you are talking of letting Joe go out
+      with Pitts in his boat You know Pitts is no fit man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You tell Fred Gooding he don't know what he 's talking about,&rdquo; said
+      James, as he rose from his chair, holding the paper in his hand. &ldquo;What I
+      told Pitts was just the contr'y,&mdash;the boy should n't go along o'
+      him.&rdquo; Then his anger began to rise. &ldquo;But what right you got,&rdquo; he demanded,
+      &ldquo;to interfere? 'T ain 't none of your business who I let him go along of.
+      It's me that's the boy's guardeen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; said the Captain. &ldquo;Only I tell you fairly,&mdash;the first
+      time I get word of anything, I 'll go to the probate court and have you
+      removed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      James followed him down the path with derisive laughter. &ldquo;Why don't you go
+      to the probate court?&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;you hed great luck before!&rdquo; And as the
+      Captain drove away, James shouted after him, &ldquo;Go to the probate court! Go
+      to the probate court!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There is a low, pleasant boat-shop, close on the shore of a little arm of
+      the sea. The tide ebbs and flows before its wide double doors, and
+      sometimes rises so high as to flow the sills; then you have to walk across
+      in front of the shop on a plank, laid upon iron ballast. There is a little
+      wharf or pier close at hand, the outer end of which is always going to be
+      repaired. There are two or three other shops near by, and about them is
+      the pleasant litter of a boat-yard. In the cove before them lie at their
+      moorings in the late afternoon a fleet of fifteen or twenty fishing and
+      pleasure boats, all cat-rigged, all of one general build, wide, shoal,
+      with one broad sail, all painted white, by the custom of the place, and
+      all or nearly all kept neat and clean: they are all likely enough to be
+      called upon now and then for sailing-parties. Often of a bright afternoon
+      in summer the sails will all be up, as the boats swing at their floats:
+      then you have all the effect of a regatta in still life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shop faces down the bay of which this inlet is the foot, and as you
+      look out from your seat within, on a wooden stool, the great door frames
+      in a landscape of peaceful beauty. The opening to the sea is closed to the
+      view. Simply you can see the two white sand-cliffs through which it makes.
+      The bay is a mile in length, perhaps, and of half that width. From its
+      white, sandy shores rise gentle hills, bare to the sun or covered with a
+      low growth of woods. To the right are low-lying pastures and marshes, with
+      here and there a grazing cow. At the head of the bay the valley of a
+      stream can be faintly distinguished, while in the distance there is a
+      faint suggestion of a few scattered houses on the upper waters. At one or
+      two points masts of boats rise from the grass of the inland, and sometimes
+      a sail is seen threading its slow way amid the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shop is a favorite resort. You may go there in the early morning, in
+      the late forenoon, or in the afternoon; whenever you go you will find
+      there more or less company. There is a sort of social, hospitable
+      atmosphere about the place which is attractive in the extreme. Sometimes
+      there is a good deal of conversation; sometimes there is a comfortable
+      silence of good-fellowship. There is more or less knitting there and
+      crocheting; often in the afternoon the women from near by take their work
+      there to enjoy the view, and the fresh air which draws up there as nowhere
+      else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a good deal of religious discussion there, although the
+      atmosphere of the shop is not entirely religious, as you may see by some
+      of the papers lying about, and the cuts pasted up on the walls. Chief is a
+      picture representing a scene in the life of the prophet Jonah. Jonah and
+      the seamen are drawing lots to see who shall be cast over. Jonah has just
+      drawn the ace of spades.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are various other pictures on the walls,&mdash;prints of famous
+      yachts, charts, advertisements of regattas, sailing rules of yacht-clubs.
+      Nowhere is the science of boat-building and boat-sailing studied with
+      greater closeness than in that shop. Many a successful racer has been
+      built there. There are models of boats pinned up against the wall,&mdash;models
+      which to the common eye hardly vary at all, but to a trained perception
+      differ widely. There are oars lying about the shop, oil-skin suits, a
+      compass, charts, in round tin cases, boat hardware, and coils of new rope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little pier has its periods of activity and life, like the great world
+      outside. At three or four o'clock, in the gray dawn, fishermen appear,
+      singly, or two by two; there is often then a failure of wind, and they
+      have to get out to sea by heavy rowing or by the drift of the tide. Then
+      there is silence for some hours, and when the world awakes the cove is
+      nearly deserted. At seven o'clock begins the life of the shop. Amateur
+      fishermen appear,&mdash;boarders from New York or visiting sons from
+      Brockton. Later still, little parties come down,&mdash;a knot of young
+      fellows and laughing girls with bright-colored wraps, bound on a
+      sailing-party to Katameset, with a matron, and with some well-salted man
+      to steer the boat, perhaps in slippers and a dressing-gown. They go
+      singing out to sea. Then come a party of bathers,&mdash;ladies and little
+      children, with towels and blue suits, and all the paraphernalia of pails
+      and wooden shovels. Then will come perhaps a couple of girls, to sketch.
+      They will encamp anywhere upon the shore, call into their service some
+      small amphibious creature to tip a skiff up on its side to make an
+      effective scene, and proceed with the wonders of their art. Soon the
+      bathers return. They have been only a little way down the narrows, and
+      come back to dinner at one. The fishermen come in from three to four,
+      unless they happen to be becalmed; there is a bustle then of getting out
+      ice; of slitting and weighing and packing fish, and loading them into
+      wagons to be carted to the railway. Then there is a lull until the
+      sailing-parties return, perhaps at five, perhaps at six, perhaps not until
+      the turn of the tide or the evening breeze brings them home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the time the quiet life of the boat-shop goes on,&mdash;its labor, its
+      discussions on politics and religion, its criticism of yachts. All day
+      long small boys play about the pier, race in skiffs or in such
+      insignificant sailing-craft as may be available, and every half-hour, at
+      the initiative of some infant leader, all doff their little print waists
+      and short trousers and &ldquo;go in,&rdquo; regardless of the sketchers on the shore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a bright, fresh day. The air was as clear as crystal. Joe had been
+      gone since dawn with Henry Price. The wind had been blowing hard from the
+      north for a dozen hours, and, as the saying is, had kicked up a sea. On
+      the shoal the waves were rolling heavily, and since three o'clock the tide
+      had been running against the wind, and the seas had been broken every way.
+      But to Henry Price, and with that boat, rough seas, from March to
+      November, were only what a rude mountain road would be to you or me. If
+      his wife, toward afternoon, shading her eyes at the south door, ever felt
+      anxious about him, it was a woman's foolish fear; it was only because she
+      thought with concern of that&mdash;internal neuralgia was it?&mdash;which
+      her husband brought back from the war; which seized him at rare intervals
+      and enfeebled him for days. He made light of it, and never spoke of it out
+      of the house. There was no better boatman on that shore. Let alone that
+      one possibility of weakness, and the ocean had a hard man to deal with
+      when it dealt with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had been gone all day. It had been rough, and they would come in wet.
+      This wind would not die down; they were sure to make a quick run, and
+      would be in before dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was late in the afternoon. James was sitting in the shop with one or
+      two companions, engaged in a loud discussion. He had been discoursing upon
+      all his favorite themes. He had been declaiming upon the dangers from
+      Catholic supremacy and the subserviency of the Irish vote to the Church of
+      Rome, and upon the absolute necessity of the supremacy of the Democratic
+      party; upon the Apocalypse and the seven seals. He had been maintaining
+      the literal infallibility of the Scriptures, and the necessity of treating
+      some portions as legendary. It would be hard to say what inconsistent
+      views he had not set forth within the space of the past hour; and all this
+      with the utmost intensity, and yet with the utmost good-humor, always
+      ready to acknowledge a point against himself,&mdash;the more readily if
+      entirely fallacious,&mdash;with a burst of hearty laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last there was a pause. Something had called out of doors the two or
+      three men who were within. There was nothing to disturb the peaceful
+      beauty of the afternoon. It was blowing hard outside, but this was a
+      sheltered spot, and the wind was little felt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As James sat there silent, with no one at hand but the owner of the shop,
+      who was busy upon the keel of a new boat, a fisherman came in and took a
+      seat, with an affectation of ease and nonchalance; in a moment another
+      followed; two or three more came in, then others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The carpenter stopped his work, and shading his eyes with his hand, seemed
+      to be looking down the bay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a dead silence for a few moments. Then James spoke. But it was
+      not the voice of James. It was not that cheery and hearty voice which had
+      just been filling the shop with mirth. It was a voice harsh, forced,
+      mechanical,&mdash;the voice of a man paralyzed with terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don't you tell me?&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;is it Henry, or&mdash;is it the boy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But no one spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't need to tell me nothing,&rdquo; he said, in the same strange tone of
+      paralysis and fear, &ldquo;I knowed it when Bassett first come in. I knowed it
+      when the rest come in and closed in round me and did n't say nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat still a moment. Then he rose abruptly and turned to the landward
+      door. He stumbled over a stool which was in his way, and would have fallen
+      but that one of the men sprang forward and held him. He plunged hastily
+      out of the door. Just outside, in the shade of a small wild cherry-tree,
+      was a bucket of clams which he had dug; across the bucket was an old hoe
+      worn down to nothing. He stopped and mechanically took up the pail and
+      hoe. Bassett stood by the door and looked after him as he went along the
+      foot-path toward his home. There was a scantling fence close by. He went
+      over it in his old habitual fashion: first he set over the bucket of clams
+      and the hoe; then one leg went over and then the other; he sat for an
+      instant on the top slat and then slid down. He took up his burden and went
+      his way over the fields. In a moment he was lost to sight behind a bit of
+      rising ground. Then he reappeared, making his way over the fields at his
+      own heavy gait, until he was lost to sight behind a clump of trees close
+      to his own door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They did not find Henry and the boy that night. It was not until the next
+      day that the bodies were washed ashore. One of the searchers, walking
+      along the beach in the early dawn, found them both. He came upon Henry
+      first; he was lying on the sand upon his face. A little farther on, gently
+      swayed by the rising tide, lay Joe and his dog. Joe lay on his side,
+      precisely as if asleep; the dog was in his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy lies in the burying-ground on the hill, near the stone and the
+      weeping-willow which mourn the youth who met his untimely death in 1830,
+      in the launching of the brig. There is a rose-bush at the grave, and few
+      bright days pass in summer that there is not a bunch of homely flowers
+      laid at its foot. It is the spot to which all Mrs. Parsons's thoughts now
+      tend, and her perpetual pilgrimage. It is too far for her to walk both
+      there and back; but often a neighbor is going that way, with a lug-wagon
+      or an open cart or his family carriage,&mdash;it makes no difference
+      which,&mdash;and it is easy to get a ride. It is a good-humored village.
+      Everybody stands ready to do a favor, and nobody hesitates to ask one.
+      Often on a bright afternoon Mrs. Parsons will watch from her front window
+      the &ldquo;teams&rdquo; that pass, going to the bay. When she sees one which is likely
+      to go in the right direction on its return from the bay,&mdash;everybody
+      knows in which direction she will wish to go,&mdash;she will run hastily
+      to the door, and hail it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whoa! Sh-h! Whoa! How d'do, Mis' Parsons?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be you going straight home when you come back? Well, then, if it won't
+      really be no trouble at all, I 'll be at the gap when you come by; I won't
+      keep you waiting a minute. It 's such a nice, sunshiny afternoon, I
+      thought I 'd like to go up and sit awhile, and take some posies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>