By The Sea / 1887

by Heman White Chaplin

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 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.