"Si, Señor!" said Franci, and disappeared down the hatchway.
"Is there?" asked the boy John, with great eyes of wonder. The Skipper smiled, and shook his head.
"Franci understands me," he said. "I wish to tell him that he go about his business, and not linger,—as you say, loaf about the deck. I take a little way round about, but he understands very well, Franci. And of all these exports, what does the young gentleman think I have brought from the Bahamas?"
"I—I was just wondering!" John confessed; but he did not add his secret hope that it was something more interesting than cotton or tobacco.
The Skipper turned and made a quick, graceful gesture with his hand. "Perhaps the young gentleman like to see my cargo," he said. "Do me the favor!" and he led the way down to the cabin.
Now it became evident to the boy that all had indeed been a dream. It sometimes happened that way, dreaming that you woke and found it all true, and then starting up to find that the first waking had been of dream-stuff too, that it was melting away from your sight, from your grasp; even things that looked so real, so real,—he pinched himself violently, and shook his head, and tried to break loose from fetters of sleep, binding him to such sweet wonders, that he must lose next moment; but no waking came, and the wonders remained.
The cabin was full of shells. Across one end of the little room ran a glazed counter, where lay heaped together various objects of jewelry, shell necklaces, alligator teeth and sea-beans set in various ways, tortoise-shell combs, bracelets and hairpins,—a dazzling array. Yet the boy's eyes passed almost carelessly over these treasures, to light with quick enchantment on the shells themselves, the real shells, as he instantly named them to himself, resenting half-consciously the turning of Nature's wonders into objects of vulgar adornment.
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?"