ew 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
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