The Project Gutenberg EBook of By The Sea, by Heman White Chaplin

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Title: By The Sea
1887

Author: Heman White Chaplin

Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #23001]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BY THE SEA ***

Produced by David Widger

BY THE SEA

1887

By Heman White Chaplin

I.

On the southeastern coast of Massachusetts is a small village with
which I was once familiarly acquainted. It differs little in its general
aspect from other hamlets scattered along that shore. It has its one
long, straggling street, plain and homelike, from which at two or three
different points a winding lane leads off and ends abruptly in the
water.

Fifty years ago the village had a business activity of its own. There
still remain the vestiges of a wharf at a point where once was a
hammering ship-yard. Here and there, in bare fields along the sea,
are the ruins of vats and windmills,--picturesque remains of ancient
salt-works.

There is no visible sign left now of the noisy life of the ship-yards,
except a marble stone beneath a willow in the burying-ground on the
hill, which laments the untimely death of a youth of nineteen, killed in
1830 in the launching of a brig. But traces of the salt-works everywhere
remain, in frequent sheds and small barns which are wet and dry, as
the saying is, all the time, and will not hold paint. They are built of
salt-boards.

There were a good many of the people of the village and its adjoining
country who interested me very greatly. I am going to tell you a simple
event which happened in one of its families, deeply affecting its little
history.

James Parsons was a man perhaps sixty years of age, strongly built,
gray-haired, cleanshaven except for the conventional seaman's fringe of
beard below the chin, and always exquisitely neat. Whether you met him
in his best suit, on Sunday morning, or in his old clothes, going to
his oyster-beds or his cranberry-marsh, it was always the same. He was
usually in his shirt-sleeves in summer. His white cotton shirt, with
its easy collar and wristbands, seemed always to have just come from the
ironing-board.