The painted top is rather a large shell, for it is often nearly an inch in height from the peak to the margin. But the Grey Top, which is even commoner still, is a good deal smaller. It is not nearly so brightly tinted as the painted top, for it is yellowish grey in colour, with zigzag black streaks running round and round it, which give it rather a mottled look. Still, it is a very pretty shell indeed.
If you look at a top shell from underneath, you will always find that there is a small hole in the bottom. This is the entrance to a passage which runs right up into the peak of the shell. In the grey top this hole is just about big enough to admit a rather fine needle.
PLATE XII
THE COWRY (3)
No doubt you have often found this very pretty shell, for on the sandy parts of our coasts it is sometimes very common. You may often find twenty or thirty cowries, indeed, in one of those ridges of pebbles and small coal which are washed up by every tide. But if you were to see the living animals crawling about I do not think that you would ever guess what they were, for their soft bodies come outside their shells, which they cover up so completely that you can hardly see them at all.
If you look on the upper part of the shell, you will see that a pale streak runs across it from one side to the other. This streak marks the line where the edges of the two sides of the body almost meet.
In some parts of the world cowry shells are used instead of money. It seems rather an easy way of getting rich, doesn’t it, just to go and pick up shells on the sea-shore? But then fifteen hundred of these cowries are only worth about a shilling, so that you would have to pick up a very great many even if you only wanted to do a day’s shopping! And then they are ever so much bigger than our English cowries, so that it would not be very easy to carry them about. You would have to take several sacks full of cowries with you when you went to make a purchase, instead of just keeping your money in a purse!
PLATE XII
THE CHITON (4)
The chiton is one of the oddest of all the shell-bearing molluscs; for it does not look like a mollusc at all. It looks much more like a kind of sea woodlouse, or a very tiny armadillo. For instead of having a single shell like a whelk or a periwinkle, or a double one like a cockle or an oyster, it has eight shelly plates on its back which overlap one another, just like the tiles on the roof of a house. And if you touch it, it will often roll itself up into a kind of ball, just like the pill-millepedes, or “monkey-peas,” which are so common in our gardens.