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Part of the building stone of the Great Pyramid in Egypt is composed, I am told, entirely of them. And how did they get into the chalk? Ah! How indeed? Let us think. The chalk must have been laid down at the bottom of a sea, because there are sea-shells in it. Besides, we find little atomies exactly like these alive now in many seas; and therefore it is fair to suppose these lived in the sea also.
These ranges are separated from each other by flat spaces, composed of stiff impure red clay, in which, at the distance of about two miles from the coast, I found by digging a few minute fragments of sea-shells. The sand-dunes extend several miles inland, and stand on a plain, which slopes up to a height of between one hundred and two hundred feet.
But it ran all the while in Keola's head if he were lazy before he would now do nothing. "Why should I work," thought he, "when I have a father-in-law who makes dollars of sea-shells?" Presently his share was spent. He spent it all upon fine clothes. And then he was sorry: "For," thought he, "I had done better to have bought a concertina, with which I might have entertained myself all day long."
From that moment until the final transformation scene, when scintillating sea-shells yielded up one by one their dazzling burdens of female loveliness and a rather Hebraic Cupid descended from an invisible wire to wish everybody a happy New-Year in words appropriately rhymed, there was no halt to the wonders disclosed.
She carried a Cuban fan in her hand which was as large as a parasol, and Drollo, walking behind, fairly clanked with the chain of sea-shells which she had wound around him from head to tail. The droll tableau and the supreme pride on Felipa's countenance overcame me, and I laughed aloud.
Yet, somehow, specimens of these colored rocks lose all their brilliancy and beauty when removed from their environment, like sea-shells from the beach; a verification of the sentiment so beautifully expressed in the lines of Emerson: "I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar."
Typhon was once master of all Egypt, i.e., Egypt was once covered by the sea, which is proved by the sea-shells which are dug out of the mines, and are found on the tops of the hills. Herakles accompanies the Sun, and Hermes the Moon. In Sec. XLII. Plutarch connects the death-day of Osiris, the seventeenth of Hathor, with the seventeenth day of the Moon's revolution, when she begins to wane.
Little white boys looked naked without their clothes, but Pola in a strip of muslin, with his wreath of flowers, or sea-shells, some ferns twisted about one ankle, perhaps, or a boar's tusk fastened to his left arm with strands of horse-hair, looked completely, even handsomely, dressed.
It was a low, old-fashioned room ornamented with a couple of sea-shells, and an earthen-ware figure on the mantel-piece; also with advertisements of Allsop's ale, and other drinks, and with a pasteboard handbill of "The Ancient Order of Foresters"; any member of which, paying sixpence weekly, is entitled to ten shillings per week, and the attendance of a first-rate physician in sickness, and twelve pounds to be paid to his friends in case of death.
Every thing indicates that the physical changes of which tradition has preserved the remembrance, exhibit but a feeble image of those gigantic catastrophes which have given mountains their present form, changed the positions of the rocky strata, and buried sea-shells on the summits of the higher Alps.
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