IN Uncle Paul’s room was a drawer full of shells of all sorts. One of his friends had collected them in his travels. Pleasant hours could be passed in looking at them. Their beautiful colors, their pleasing but sometimes odd shapes, diverted the eye. Some were twisted like a spiral stair-case, others widened out in large horns, still others opened and closed like a snuff-box. Some were ornamented with radiating ribs, knotty creases, or plates laid one on another like the slates of a roof; some bristled with points, spines, or jagged scales. Here were some smooth as eggs, sometimes white, sometimes spotted with red; others, near the rose-tinted opening, had long points resembling wide-stretched fingers. They came from all parts of the world. This came from the land of the negroes, that from the Red Sea, others from China, India, Japan. Truly, many pleasant hours could be passed in examining them one by one, especially if Uncle Paul were to tell you about them.

One day Uncle Paul gave his nephews this pleasure: he spread before them the riches of his drawer. Jules and Claire looked at them with amazement; Emile was never tired of putting the large shells to his ear and listening to the continual hoo-hoo-hoo that escapes from their depths and seems to repeat the murmur of the sea.

Cassis

“This one with the red and lace-like opening comes from India. It is called a helmet. Some are so large that two of them would be as much as Emile could carry. In some islands they are so abundant that they are used instead of stones and are burnt in kilns to make lime.”

“I would not burn them for lime,” said Jules, “if I found such beautiful shells. See how red the opening is, how beautifully the edges are pleated.”

“And then what a loud murmur it makes,” added Emile. “Is it true, Uncle, that it is the noise of the sea echoed by the shell?”

Spiny Mollusk

“I do not deny that it resembles a little the murmur of waves heard at a distance; but you must not think that the shell keeps in its folds an echo of the noise of the waves. It is simply the effect of the air going and coming through the tortuous cavity.

“This other belongs to France. It is common on the shores of the Mediterranean and belongs to the genus cassis.”

“It goes hoo-hoo, like the helmet,” Emile remarked.

“All those that are rather large and have a spiral cavity do the same.

“Here is another which, like the preceding, is found in the Mediterranean. It is the spiny mollusk. The creature that inhabits it produces a violet glair, from which the ancients derived, for their costly stuffs, a magnificent color called purple.”

Paludinid?

“How are shells made?” asked Claire.

“Shells are the dwellings of creatures called mollusks, the same as the spiral snail’s shell is the house of the horny little animal that eats your young flowering plants.”

“Then the snail’s house is a shell, the same as the beautiful ones you have shown us,” Jules observed.

“Yes, my child. It is in the sea that we find, in greatest number, the largest and most beautiful shells. They are called sea-shells. To these belong the helmet-shell, cassidula, and spiny mollusk. But fresh waters, that is to say streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, have them too. The sm............