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Her face was to him as a flower in the desert, or a piece of fruit hanging from the tree when one is very, very thirsty. His steps were checked halfway by a familiar but unsettling sound: the hollow wail of human breath through a conch-shell. 'What was that? asked the girl, stretching, now awake. The sound came again, faintly louder. 'I must leave here, he answered.
The notes are clear and fine, and the instrument admits of much delicacy of touch. Beside these the Siamese have the guitar, the violin, the flute, the cymbals, the trumpet, and the conch-shell. There is the luptima also, another very curious instrument, formed of a dozen long perforated reeds joined with bands and cemented at the joints with wax.
Dhritarashtra with his sons would be guilty of the sin of intestine dissension, were he, like a bad man, to bear ill-will towards you who are righteous. O king of men, they remember thy prowess on the field, and that of Arjuna, who taketh the lead in the field of battle. They remember Bhima wielding his mace when the sound of the conch-shell and the drum rises to the highest pitch.
The fine old doorway, brass-knockered, arched by a spray of crimson rambler, was flanked on one hand by a great conch-shell, on the other by an enormous specimen of branch-coral, thus subtly intimating to passers-by that the owner of the house had been in "foreign parts."
Next morning we are awaked by a blast from a conch-shell. It is 6.30, and the mist still clings in the valley; the sun will not be over the hills for another hour or more, so in the cool we join the labourers on the mule-track to the higher land, and for a mile or more follow a stream into the heart of the estate.
But in the midst of all the trouble, May would come tripping over the rocks, a little sunburnt girl now, with tattered clothes and bare feet, and she would bring a pretty pink conch-shell or the lovely rose-colored sea-mosses, and tell her funny little story of where she found them.
Imitations are made from porcelain, but very likely grandma's or great-auntie's will be the real conch-shell. Perhaps you did not know that there are fair and beautiful gardens in my watery home. You may have picked up sprays or bunches of seaweed when running along the beach, and some were perhaps quite pretty, while others had turned brown and looked much like leather.
And now let me put this p'int to you: if you had a big king conch-shell, the prettiest you ever seed, and it was on the middle of the mantelpiece, and you had a gilded idol in another place, would you put the idol where the conch-shell was, and the conch-shell where the idol was, or would you leave 'em both jes where they was afore? "The young woman laughed merrily.
But I'll tell you what I'd do if I was you. I'd put that king conch-shell on the mantelpiece, or I would put the gilded idol there, it wouldn't matter much which, and then I'd put the other one handy, so that when she fust come in, and you could see she didn't like whatever it was that was in the middle of the mantelpiece, you could whip it off and put the other thing there almost afore she knowed it.
They were very gentle and dove-like. They staid with us only that day. The last thing that I saw at night, far into the dark, was one flying after us; and, the next morning, we heard of the birth of the baby. She was christened in the cabin, the day after, by the Micronesian missionary, in the presence of a large company. A conch-shell from the reef served as the christening-basin.
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