By The Sea | Page 5

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