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.