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But the mussel, particularly the one found in the James river, yields an iridescent pearl of some little value.
His return was effected more slowly than his departure; and it could be seen that he was heavily weighted. On getting back into the gorge, he was at once relieved of his load; which proved to consist of about three hundred "cockles", as he called the shell-fish he had collected, and which were found to be a species of mussel.
As everyone knows, the Mussel and the Oyster live between two hinged shells. In the last lesson we called them bi-valve molluscs, which is only another way of saying "soft-bodied animals with two shells." Have you ever opened an Oyster? It is a tug-of-war, your skill and strength against the muscles of the animal inside the tight shells.
The Mussel or Oyster, with shells gaping wide open, is bound to get some of this food with the water which enters the shells. The Oyster has no "foot," and is fixed in one place nearly all its life. It is an interesting animal; and one of such value as food, that hundreds of thousands of Oysters are reared in special "beds," and sent to the market at the proper season.
There he stood thinking and wondering what he could do, when all of a sudden he saw three fishes swimming along, and recognised them as the very same whose lives he had saved. The middle fish held a mussel in its mouth, which it laid at the young man's feet, and when he picked it up and opened it, there was the golden ring inside.
In the shell-fish, on the other hand, the principle of armour-plating has its greatest development. It is assuredly a long and obscure way that leads from the ancestral type of animal we have been describing to the headless and shapeless mussel or oyster. Such a degeneration is, however, precisely what we should expect to find in the circumstances.
A foli is a huge mussel, with an edge as keen as that of a razor. Mrs.
Black-and-white oyster-catchers were always to be found chattering over the great mussel patches at low water. With their reddish bills, what a trophy a bunch of them made as we bore them proudly home over our shoulders! Then there were the big long-billed curlews. What a triumph when one outwitted them!
I was anxious to have seen these natives, and, as their hut was not very far from us, we walked to it in the cool of the afternoon, but they had left, and apparently gone to the N.E.; we found some mussel shells amongst the embers of some old fire near it. Our latitude at this point was 28 degrees 3 minutes S., at a distance of 86 miles from the Park.
Then the bottom was all renewed with fresh gravel and stones; fresh-water plants put in; and all the inhabitants restored to their glass home to dash about with delight; while, as soon as he felt himself in fresh-water, a great mussel, that lay down at the side, put out his pretty white mantle; the snails began sailing up and down, and the water spiders began to pop in and out among the fresh plants and weave webs, just as if they were out of the water, and did not have to carry their supply of air down in a bright silvery-looking bubble attached to their bodies.
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