By The Sea | Page 3

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