By The Sea

By The Sea, by Heman White
Chaplin

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Title: By The Sea 1887
Author: Heman White Chaplin
Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #23001]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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SEA ***

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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