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