this snug retreat. We felt that such a poor handful of sane men as we composed, could not individually combat fairly with the insane multitude outside these walls, so we clubbed and collected together for mutual support and protection. With all your confirmed lunacy, you have occasionally very decided bursts of what I may almost call reason, or lucidity; and I’m very proud to see you here. Not but what,” and he sank his voice to a low whisper, “I cannot refrain from mentioning to you, that there are some who have got into this institution who have clearly very little title to be in it. Look here, now,” and he pointed through an open doorway to a little wizen old man in a velvet cap, busily occupied in writing letters; “he’s not altogether sound: he’s not free, entirely, from the ‘bee in the bonnet.’ This is one of his bad days. Quite forgotten himself—quite oblivious of everything. He is the rightful heir to the throne of Siam, and is unjustly deprived of his inheritance by the Hudson’s Bay Company. His usual uniform consists of three peacock’s feathers in his cap, worn very much in the style of our Prince of Wales, you know. Curious similarity, is it not? He’s a wonderful hand at cribbage. But to-day, you see, he’s quite quiet, and has forgotten all about his lawful claims. He’s writing home to his grandson, who manages his affairs for him. He’s clearly not sound. I am indeed glad to have seen you. Many, many thanks for this visit, my dear friend. I only wish you were properly qualified, and I could propose you as a member of this delightful institution. But, alas! alas! you know that cannot be. Good-bye, good-bye.”
“Curious case, isn’t it?” said Dr. Johnston, as we moved away. “He’ll probably get quite round again in time, though he may be liable to a return of the attack. He’s intensely happy. I’m not sure that he wants our pity much. I think the dinner must be ready—come along.”
I went home with rather entangled views about the sanity question. As to who had, and who hadn’t, “a bee in his bonnet?” I wondered whether I had. Really I thought I must consider before I answer: and I went to sleep without giving one.
OYSTERS AND PEARLS.
Looloo, Mootoo, Mootie, Margaritæ, Perles, Perlii, Perlas: all sweet, pretty, mouth-rounding names, but worthy to be applied to the lustrous and beautiful spheres which we call pearls. Principium culmenque omnium rerum pretii tenent: “Of all things, pearls,” said Pliny, two thousand years ago, “kept the very top, highest, best, and first price.” What was true then is true now. There are few things so immortal as good taste. Let us pay something “on account” of our debt to the oyster. I propose to regard that placid creditor, not as an article of food, but as an assistant at the toilet. And looking at him in that point of view, here is not a bad instalment of the aforesaid debt. It is contributed by Barry Cornwall:
Within the midnight of her hair,
Half-hidden in its deepest deeps,
A single peerless, priceless pearl
(All filmy-eyed) for ever sleeps.
Without the diamond’s sparkling eyes,
The ruby’s blushes,—there it lies,
Modest as the tender dawn,
When her purple veil’s withdrawn,—
The flower of gems, a lily cold and pale.
Yet, what doth all avail?—
All its beauty, all its grace?
All the honours of its place?
He who pluck’d it from its bed,
In the far blue Indian Ocean,
Lieth, without life or motion.
In his earthy dwelling—dead!
All his children, one by one,
When they look up to the sun,
Curse the toil by which he drew
The treasure from its bed of blue.
Well, pearls are costly. Yet they are merely the calcareous production of the class Mollusca. Diamonds, as a certain pen has elsewhere noted, have been shown to be merely charcoal; the pearl is little else but concentric layers of membrane and carbonate of lime. All the class Mollusca are instances of that beneficent law of nature, that the hard parts accommodate themselves to the soft. The common naked snail, the mussel, cockle, oyster, garden helix, strombus, and nautilus, elegant or rough, rare or common, each illustrate this grand law. The body of a soft consistence is enclosed in an elastic skin. From this skin calcareous matter is continually exuded. This protects the animal, and forms the shell. Where the waves are rough, and rocks superabundant, then the shell is rough, hard, stony, fit to weather anything; where only smooth water and halcyon days are to be looked for, Nature, who never works in vain, provides but paper sides and an egg-shell boat, such as the little nautilus navigates and tacks and steers in.
Besides forming the rough outside, the calcareous exuvium, the mucus of the oyster and other mollusca, forms that beautiful substance, so smooth, and polished, and dyed with rainbow tints, and a glorious opalescence, which, be it as common as luxury has made it, still charms the eye. This is the lining of the shell, the mother-of-pearl, nacre. “The inside of the shell,” said old Dampier, that old sailor with a poet’s mind, “is more glorious even than the pearl itself.”
It is glorious, it has the look of the morning, and the tint of the evening sky; the colours of the prism chastened, softened, retained, and made perpetual in it: this is mother-o’-pearl.
To render its bed always soft and cosy, to lie warm, packed as one might at Malvern in wet sheets, seems to be the oyster’s pleasure. This singular exuvium, this mucus, not only creates pleasure, but alleviates pain. Some irritating substance, some internal worry and annoyance, it may be a dead embryo, or a grain of sand insinuates itself, and, lo! the creature covers it with this substance to ease off its unkind tooth, and converts it into a pearl.
That is the way they are made, these wondrous beauties!
“If,” said Sir Everard Home, “if I can prove that this, the richest jewel in a monarch’s crown, which cannot be imitated by any art of man” (he