By The Sea | Page 5

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,