By The Sea

There is a story about it a story too long to tell here. Suffice it to say that the Captain's ancestor, who settled early in New England, came from Leyden shortly after Mr. John Robinson. A hundred years later and more, in the oddest way, an acquaintance sprang up with certain Dutch connections, and in the course of it this Bible, then new 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.