By The Sea | Page 8

to be brought
ingloriously home by a farmer, made fast on the top of a load of sweet,
salt hay.
He would tease like a child to be allowed to go. He would listen with
an unsatisfied and appealing look while Joe, with an exuberant but
regretful air, explained to him in detail the reasons which made it
impossible for him to go. But in a few months, as the dog grew older,
he prevailed, and although he would generally retire into the shelter of
the cabin, he was nevertheless the boy's almost inseparable companion
on the water as on the shore. The relation between the two was always
touching. It evidently never crossed the dog's mind that he was not a
younger brother.
Now, to complete the picture of James Par-sons's household, add in this
boy; for while it is but just now that he is strictly of it, he has been for

years its mirth and life.
I remember that quiet household before it knew him,--cosey, homelike,
with a pervading air even then of genial humor, but with long hours of
silence and repose,--geraniums and the click of knitting-needles in the
sitting-room; faint odors of a fragrant pipe from the shed kitchen; no
stir of boisterous fun, except when some bronzed, solemn joker, with
his wife, came in for a formal call, and solemnity gave way, by a
gradual descent, to merriment. Joe had given no new departure, only an
impulse. "James used to behave himself quite well," Mrs. Parsons
would say, archly raising her eyebrows, "before Joe's time; but now
there 's two boys of 'em together, and the one as bad as the other, and I
can't do nothing with 'em. And then,"--with a mock gesture of
despair,--"that dog!"

IV.
While Joe's mother was lying ill, and after it had become certain that
she would soon leave this world forever, the question had been
freely-discussed as to what her boy's future should be. In Captain
Joseph Pelham's mind there was only-one answer to this question,--that
the lad should come to him. He bore the Captain's name; he represented
the Captain's son; he should take a place now in the Captain's home.
It was now about three weeks since Joe's mother had been buried. The
stone had not yet been cut and set over her grave. But the Captain
thought it time to drive over to James Parsons's and take the boy. That
James would make any serious opposition perhaps never entered his
mind. It was a bright, charming afternoon; with his shining horse, in a
bright, well-varnished buggy, the Captain drove over the seven miles of
winding roads through the woods, and along the sea, to the village
where James Parsons lived. He tied his horse to the hitching-post in
front of the broad cottage house, went down the path to the L door,
knocked, and went in.
James was sitting in a large room which served in winter as a kitchen

and in summer as a sort of sitting-room, smoking a pipe and gazing
vacantly into the pine-branches in the open fireplace before him. He
had been out all day on his marsh, but he had been home a couple of
hours. His wife--kindly soul--received Captain Pelham at the door,
wiping her hands upon her apron, and modestly showed him into the
sitting-room; then she retired to her tasks in the shed kitchen. She
moved about mechanically for a moment; then she ran hastily out into
the lean-to wood-shed, shut the door behind her, sat down on the worn
floor where it gives way with a step to the floor of earth by the
wood-pile, hid her face in her apron, and burst into tears.
Joe was at the wharf with his comrades playing at war.
Now, if there ever was a hospitable man,--a man who gave a
welcome,--a rough but merry welcome to every one who entered his
doors, it was James Parsons. He had a homely, jocose saying that you
must either make yourself at home or go home. But on this occasion he
rose with a somewhat forced and awkward air, laid his pipe down on
the mantel-piece, and nodded to the Captain with an air of embarrassed
inquiry. Then he bethought himself, and asked the Captain to sit down.
The Captain took the nearest chair, beside the table, where Mrs.
Parsons had lately been sitting at her work. James's chair was directly
opposite. The table was between them.
James rose and went to the mantel-piece, scratched a match upon his
boot-heel, and undertook to light his pipe. It did not light; he did not
notice it, but put the pipe in his mouth as if it were lighted.
It occurred to Captain Pelham now, for the first time, absorbed as he
had