The shells were here, the shells were there, the shells were all around!  Shelf above shelf of them, piled in heaps, lying in solitary splendor, arranged in patterns,—­John had never, in his wildest dreams, seen so many shells.  Half the poetry of his little life had been in the lovely forms and colors that lay behind the locked glass doors in Mr. Scraper’s parlor; for Mr. Scraper was a collector of shells in a small way.  John had supposed his collection to be, if not the only one in the world, at least the most magnificent, by long odds; yet here were the old man’s precious units multiplied into tens, into twenties, sometimes into hundreds, and all lying open to the day, as if anyone, even a small one, even a little boy, who almost never had anything in his hand more precious than his own purple mussel at home, might touch and handle them and feel himself in heaven.

They gleamed with the banded glories of the rainbow:  they softened into the moonlight beauty of the pearl; they veiled their loveliness in milky clouds, through which the color showed as pure and sweet as the cheek of a bride; they glowed with depths of red and flame that might almost burn to the touch.

The little boy stood with clasped hands, and sobbed with excitement.  “Did you dig up all the sea?” he asked, in a wonder that was not without reproach.  “Are there none left any more, at all?”

The Skipper laughed quietly.  “The mermaids see not any difference, sir,” he said.  “Where I take one shell from its rock, I leave a hundred, a thousand.  The sea is a good mother, she has plenty children.  See!” he added, lifting a splendid horned shell, “this is the Royal Triton.  On a rock I found him, twenty fathom down.  It was a family party, I think, for all around they lay, some clinging to the rock, some in the mud, some walking about.  I take one, two, three, put them in my pouch; up I go, and the others, they have a little more room, that’s all.”

John’s eyes glowed in his head.

“I—­I should like to see that!” he cried.  “What is it like down there?  Do sharks come by,—­swish! with their great tails?  And why don’t they eat you, like the man in the geography book?  And is there really a sea-serpent?  And do the oysters open and shut their mouths, so that you can see the pearls, or how do you know which are the right ones?

“There are a great many things that I have thought about all my life,” he said, “and nobody could ever tell me.  The bottom of the sea, that is what I want most in the world to know about.”

He paused, out of breath, and would have been abashed at his own boldness, had not the Skipper’s eyes told him so perfectly that they had understood all about it, and that there was no sort of reason why he should not ask all the questions he liked.