Nautilus | Page 5

said. "I wish to tell him that he go about
his business, and not linger,--as you say, loaf about the deck. I take a
little way round about, but he understands very well, Franci. And of all
these exports, what does the young gentleman think I have brought
from the Bahamas?"
"I--I was just wondering!" John confessed; but he did not add his secret
hope that it was something more interesting than cotton or tobacco.
The Skipper turned and made a quick, graceful gesture with his hand.
"Perhaps the young gentleman like to see my cargo," he said. "Do me
the favor!" and he led the way down to the cabin.
Now it became evident to the boy that all had indeed been a dream. It
sometimes happened that way, dreaming that you woke and found it all
true, and then starting up to find that the first waking had been of
dream-stuff too, that it was melting away from your sight, from your
grasp; even things that looked so real, so real,--he pinched himself
violently, and shook his head, and tried to break loose from fetters of
sleep, binding him to such sweet wonders, that he must lose next
moment; but no waking came, and the wonders remained.
The cabin was full of shells. Across one end of the little room ran a
glazed counter, where lay heaped together various objects of jewelry,
shell necklaces, alligator teeth and sea-beans set in various ways,
tortoise-shell combs, bracelets and hairpins,--a dazzling array. Yet the
boy's eyes passed almost carelessly over these treasures, to light with
quick enchantment on the shells themselves, the real shells, as he
instantly named them to himself, resenting half-consciously the turning
of Nature's wonders into objects of vulgar adornment.
The shells were here, the shells were there, the shells were all around!
Shelf above shelf of them, piled in heaps, lying in solitary splendor,
arranged in patterns,--John had never, in his wildest dreams, seen so
many shells. Half the poetry of his little life had been in the lovely
forms and colors that lay behind the locked glass doors in Mr. Scraper's
parlor; for Mr. Scraper was a collector of shells in a small way. John
had supposed his collection to be, if not the only one in the world, at

least the most magnificent, by long odds; yet here were the old man's
precious units multiplied into tens, into twenties, sometimes into
hundreds, and all lying open to the day, as if anyone, even a small one,
even a little boy, who almost never had anything in his hand more
precious than his own purple mussel at home, might touch and handle
them and feel himself in heaven.
They gleamed with the banded glories of the rainbow: they softened
into the moonlight beauty of the pearl; they veiled their loveliness in
milky clouds, through which the color showed as pure and sweet as the
cheek of a bride; they glowed with depths of red and flame that might
almost burn to the touch.
The little boy stood with clasped hands, and sobbed with excitement.
"Did you dig up all the sea?" he asked, in a wonder that was not
without reproach. "Are there none left any more, at all?"
The Skipper laughed quietly. "The mermaids see not any difference,
sir," he said. "Where I take one shell from its rock, I leave a hundred, a
thousand. The sea is a good mother, she has plenty children. See!" he
added, lifting a splendid horned shell, "this is the Royal Triton. On a
rock I found him, twenty fathom down. It was a family party, I think,
for all around they lay, some clinging to the rock, some in the mud,
some walking about. I take one, two, three, put them in my pouch; up I
go, and the others, they have a little more room, that's all."
John's eyes glowed in his head.
"I--I should like to see that!" he cried. "What is it like down there? Do
sharks come by,--swish! with their great tails? And why don't they eat
you, like the man in the geography book? And is there really a
sea-serpent? And do the oysters open and shut their mouths, so that you
can see the pearls, or how do you know which are the right ones?
"There are a great many things that I have thought about all my life," he
said, "and nobody could ever tell me. The bottom of the sea, that is
what I want most in the world to know about."

He paused, out of breath, and would have been abashed at his own
boldness, had not the Skipper's eyes told him so perfectly that they had
understood all about it, and that there was no sort of reason why he