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Updated: May 18, 2025
And how many people and things he loves that most of us love! it would take all night to enumerate them the good authoritative pater- and materfamilias; the delightful little girls; the charming cheeky school-boys; the jolly little street Arabs, who fill old gentlemen's letter-boxes with oyster-shells and gooseberry-skins; the cabmen, the busmen; the policemen with the old-fashioned chimney-pot hat; the old bathing-women, and Jack-ashores, and jolly old tars his British tar is irresistible, whether he is hooking a sixty-four pounder out of the Black Sea, or riding a Turk, or drinking tea instead of grog and complaining of its strength!
Clients danced attendance on eminent jurists, and received promises, smiles, and oyster-shells. It was, too, often better to submit to an injury than seek to redress it. Cases were decided against justice, if some technical form or ancient usage favored the more powerful party. Lawyers formed a large and powerful class, and they had fortunes to make.
But I at once knew that very valuable pearls must often be found in conch-shells and deep-sea oyster-shells, as the diver scraped in all of both that he could find. Remember! All kinds of shell-fish are called "mollusca," have white blood, and breathe not only in the water, but also in the air. And will you believe it?
Your laughter would be justified by the fact that all experience tends to show that oyster-shells are formed by the agency of oysters, and in no other way. And if there were no better reasons, we should be justified, on like grounds, in believing that Globigerina is not the product of anything but vital activity.
Should you, however, still more unfortunately, through any ignorance of etiquette, or any inattention to those minor forms of breeding with which every native is conversant, offer umbrage, however slight and unintentional, to those dread functionaries, the “new police;” were you by chance to gaze longer into a jeweller’s window than is deemed decorous; were you to fall into any reverie which should induce you to slacken your pace, perchance to hum a tune, and thus be brought before the awful “Sir Peter,” charged by “G 743” with having impeded the passengers collected a crowd being of suspicious appearance, and having refused “to tell who your friends were” the odds are strongly against you that you perform a hornpipe upon the treadmill, or be employed in that very elegant chemical analysis, which consists in the extraction of magnesia from oyster-shells.
"We are sailing to sea," whispered the Jew. "It is too late to escape. The next billow may fling us apart, and our bones shall descend amongst the oyster-shells to build houses for the nutritious beings of the water. Thence, some day, my son, from the heavens God may drop His tongs and draw us up to Him, as on this night thy father and I drew the casket, many years ago. Look there! Look there!"
It was very soon known to all the world that there was war to the knife between Lord Drummond and the Prime Minister. And, strange to say, there seemed to be some feeling of general discontent on this very trifling subject. When Aristides has been much too just the oyster-shells become numerous.
At the end of this thoroughfare our unconscious guide plunged into a still darker and fouler impasse, hung across from side to side with rows of dingy linen, and ornamented in the centre with a mound of decaying cabbage-leaves, potato-parings, oyster-shells, and the like.
The greatest prize which Madam Liberality had gained from her wanderings by the seashore was a complete scallop-shell. When washed the double shell was as clean and as pretty as any china muffin-dish with a round top; and now her ambition was to get four more, and thus to have a service for doll's feasts which should far surpass the oyster-shells.
Even today certain poor children the poor never budge from their hiding-places learn of the arrival of winter only by the odor of roasted chestnuts; of spring, by the boxes of gilly-flowers in the fruiterer's stall; of summer, by the water-carts passing, and of autumn, by the heaps of oyster-shells at the doors of wine-shops.
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