Farm Haven looked beautifully fresh from the rains. I found the garden still more choked with weeds, and the potatoes mostly gone to seed. I gathered a few to roast in the embers for my dinner, but most of them had begun to decay. The Indian corn was ripe, and I took this occasion to gather it all, a good heap of perhaps ten bushels, which I carried little by little to a sheltered nook under the rocks and piled up without removing the husks. I started a good fire to roast some corn and potatoes. After dressing the coon I swung it by a cord in front of the fire where it was slowly turned by the twist of the cord first in one direction and then in the other, requiring only an occasional twirl to keep it going.
While the dinner was cooking, Duke and I looked about the valley to see what could be found. We went over to the north of the mouth of the rivulet among some willows, to gather a few wands for basket-making. As soon as we reached the other side of the stream I noticed a strong stench as of decayed animal matter. The source of this smell was soon disclosed in a great heap of oysters. Great bivalves, some of them eight or more inches across, lay rotting in a pile on the pebbly shore. All about were heaps of open shells and decayed shell-fish. It occurred to me at once that I had chanced upon the headquarters of a pearl fishery; and this accounted most satisfactorily for the encampment, but not for the hurried departure of the campers. There was at least a ton of unopened oysters lying in the rotting drying-heap, and I determined to examine them as soon as we had finished dinner.
There was a wooden tub lying near the oyster heap, which I conjectured was for holding water in which to open and separate the oysters in the examination for pearls. I filled this tub at the stream and set it in the shade of the willows. Then, with bared arms, and nostrils plugged with leaves, I began the disgusting task of examining the oysters carefully one by one. The second oyster I opened contained fifteen little seed pearls not much larger than a grain of mustard seed. Then I drew blank after blank in the lottery, until I had opened perhaps fifty shells. Then a great prize came out in the shape of a beautiful pear-shaped pearl of the size of a small hazel-nut, rainbow tinted and lustrous as a moon-lit cloud. Thus it went with varying fortune all the afternoon, until the heap was exhausted and I had collected two hundred and fifty seed pearls, ninety-seven small pearls, and a hundred and sixteen larger ones, some of them of great lustre and beauty. What the value of these pearls would prove to be I had no means of estimating, but it doubtless would be considerable. I tied them carefully in my handkerchief and put them in my pocket. The smell of the decayed shell-fish is something frightful to remember, and after I had finished and washed myself thoroughly in the stream it still seemed to cling to me and to permeate everything in the neighborhood. Why I had not noticed this awful stench on my first visit was strange to me, and must have been due to the course of the wind at that time.