By and by, being “finished” by travel, he gets off his vehicle at some convenient station, drops into the mud, and is ready to lecture, or so I fancy it, before any of the unio women’s clubs on the world as he has seen it. Not until then does the unio, and then only if he is a margaritifera, begin to accumulate pearls.
By what mystery of sunlight and shallow water the unio has acquired the lucent green and gold of the epidermis of his outer shell I do not know, any more than I know what pigments paint or what naiad fingers hold the brush that paints the gold in the heart or the pinky green in the outer sepals of the water-lily. The two find their sustenance in the same mud.
But even if I could tell this I might well pause in wonder over the beauty of the inner shell of this pulseless creature of the ooze. Perhaps the golchidium, darting back and forth beneath the ripples of the surface during its days of travel, catches the radiant blue of the sky, the rosy flush of dawn, and the glory of the rainbow all shivered together in exultant light to make the nacre of the inner surface of its growing shell. For nowhere else in nature may we find such softness of coloring holding such gleams of azure and of fire. The opal beside it is garish and crude. Mother-of-pearl we call it, for out of the same source is born the gem which may be worth the price of a king’s ransom.
The unio is the good girl of the fairy tale, for from its lips fall pearls that confound the divers of the Orient. Not from Ceylon nor Sulu nor the Straits of Sunda nor the Gulf of California have come such pearls of bewildering color and fascinating shapes as have been taken from the river mussels of our American streams. For all I know the shallows of my pond may hold a necklace of such value that its fellow has never yet circled the throat of a queen. If so I hope no one will ever find it out, for an ebb tide such as this comes only once in a score or so of years, and when the next one is here I want still to find the beach beautiful with the green and gold and mother-of-pearl of the unios.
HOW THE RAIN CAME
HOW THE RAIN CAME
THE Spiranthes gracilis is commonly called ladies’ tresses, which is a very polite name for it, for nothing can be more beautiful than the tresses of ladies. It is like its name in that it is beautiful, but not otherwise, for it is a flower not of tresses, but of fine eyelashes of pearl set in a spiral on jade. The rain this morning dropped transparent, colorless pearl tears on the tips of these eyelashes, and as they twinkled toward shy smiles the tears ran down the spiral to be eagerly kissed away by the small grasses that always cling about the feet of the spiranthes in mute adoration.
Near by slender varieties of gerardia held up rosy cups to drink these clear pearls, finding in them a medicine that shall cure all ills. In the rain the fountain of youth wells up in the cup of every flower that waits in the soft pasture grasses and the grasses themselves drink eagerly. The cedars deck themselves in these clear pearls, wearing garments fringed with them and ropes and necklaces without number, and letting their prim propriety be so softened that they are no longer firm and erect but take on curves of soft roundness that should go with pearl-embroidered garments.
Yesterday there was in all the pasture people a certain puritanical sternness of demeanor, a set holding fast to the narrowing good of life, a tightening of the muscles that are weary with a long strain but may not for the good of the soul loose their firm grip, for yesterday the pasture was dry and hard with the leanness of the long summer drought.
To-day has come the first of the fall rains and these puritans are stern and set no longer, but relax into swaying curves of lissome beauty that entrance you. It is as if, after coming as you thought to a Sunday service of the old Calvinists, you found it transformed into a grange picnic of wood nymphs.