“My,” said the boy named Billy. “I nearly broke my tooth on the
bone of this oyster. Isn’t it funny? It’s as round as a shot and
just as hard.”
Everybody laughed, but Somebody said, “That isn’t a bone, Billy;
old Mr. Oyster has no bones. That’s a pearl. Too bad you didn’t
find it before it was cooked, because then you might have had it
set in a pin to wear in your scarf. Now that it has been cooked,
it is worthless.”
“I’m in luck, anyhow,” said Billy, “because I didn’t break my
tooth. But how did a pearl ever get inside an oyster?”
“It makes its home there,” said Somebody. “Lives snugly year
after year inside Mr. Oyster’s shell and pays no rent at all.”
“Tell me about it,” demanded the boy named Billy. “I always
supposed that pearls grew at the bottom of the sea.”
“So they do,” said Somebody, “about fifteen fathoms deep is where
the pearl bearing oyster lives. He is rather particular about
his home and selects a place where there is a swift current of
water. There he and his family lie on the hard bed of the ocean
and wait for the current to bring their food. Sometimes they
prefer to attach themselves to an overhanging ledge, where they
live closely huddled together. The ancient peoples had all sorts
of beliefs and ideas about the origin of the pearl. One of the
most poetical was that it was made from a drop of dew which the
oyster came up to the top of the ocean to get. Another was that
pearls were the tears of angels who wept over the sorrows of the
world.”
“But what are they really?” asked the boy named Billy, his eyes
big with interest.
“Science has discovered,” said Somebody, “that Mr. Oyster
accidentally gets a grain of sand, or a small insect inside his
shell, which becomes uncomfortable; but as the oyster has no way
of opening his door and putting an unwelcome guest outside, it
remains. Very likely the unwelcome guest hurts. So Mr. Oyster
says, ‘All right, then stay if you want to. But you can’t go on
hurting me if I know myself.’ And so he builds a wall of the
stuff that the inside of his shell is made of between himself
and the cause of the trouble. After about four years the oyster
is likely to be caught by pearl fishers, the pearl found, and
the shell used for inlaid work on boxes, knife handles and other
things.
“The finest pearls are gathered in the East, the most valuable,
worth tens of thousands of dollars, coming from the oysters of
the Persian Gulf. The largest pearl fishery in America is that
of lower California, from which come the largest and the finest
black pearls on the market.
“Carl von Linné, the great Swedish naturalist and botanist,
discovered that pearls could be grown by opening the shell of the
oyster and slipping a small bead of lead or wax inside the shell
and then putting the oyster back in his bed for three or four
years. Acting upon that idea, the Chinese and Japanese people
have established great pearl raising industries and turn out a
large amount of pearls every year. They are very pretty, and of
good color, but being flat on one side they cannot be made into
necklaces. In several of our states the fresh water clams are
pearl bearers; the Mississippi River industry being the one of
most value. The shells are used for pearl buttons and the flesh
of the mussels are fed to the pigs.”
“Makes you think of that verse in the Bible about casting your
pearls before swine, doesn’t it?” laughed Billy.