By The Sea | Page 4

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