“Oh, I’d love to be there,” cried Polly her eyes sparkling with excitement. “And do they open them right in front of you so you can see them find the pearls?”
“Some do. And when a pearl of great price is found, even to-day the bidding jumps like magic over that catch the same as in the old days of the parable. The merchants will still go and sell all they have to buy the one pearl if they can get it.”
“I wonder why it is everybody loves pearls so,” said Ruth thoughtfully. “I do myself, better than diamonds, or any of the colored stones. They seem different, almost as if they had life. Were they ever alive inside the shells, Doctor Smith?”
“Let me see,” mused the doctor. “Are pearls alive? I’ve wondered that myself. The scientists tell us, though, that a pearl is a disease of the oyster, and others say it is only a grain of sand that has slipped inside the shell and irritates the mollusc, so it wraps it about with a secretion of its own that hardens and, after a while, you have the pearl. The Chinese open oyster shells and slip inside tiny images of Buddha, and the oyster covers them with mother-of-pearl.”
“Oh, Polly, don’t you know how we studied last year about the Malays, and their pearl legend?” exclaimed Ted, eagerly. “They say at the full of the moon the pearl oyster rises to the surface of the water and opens its shell, and a dew drop falls into it, and is crystallized. And they say the pearl is colored by the weather at the time it was born. If the night is clear, the pearl is perfect, and if it is cloudy, the pearl will be opalescent and dim, and if there’s a flash of lightning, the shell shuts up instantly and the pearl will be dwarfed.”
“It makes me think of the Polynesian way of catching pearls,” said the doctor. “They send out a long boat at sunrise, a canoe, with some old tribesman playing a weird, plaintive melody on a sort of flute, to scare away evil spirits. Young girls are chosen to dive for the shells, generally the fairest and purest in the village and they poise themselves in the prow of the canoe and dive just as the sun rises.”
“I shall try it to-morrow morning,” said Polly promptly, her eyes dancing with mischief. “Ted and Sue shall play on their mandolins for me, and I will dive for pearls.”