I never knew why there was such a curse upon the chest. But I gathered, somehow, that the great-uncle, or grandfather, or whoever he was, who had brought it from foreign parts, had uttered, with his dying breath, a solemn injunction that it was to stay closed. The opening of Pandora's box was to be a holiday recreation compared to opening that green chest. It was no more to be disturbed than Shakespeare's bones. Why he should have transported it such a distance, with such infinite care, and then sealed it up forever, passed my understanding. Did the prohibition extend to grown-ups, or was it only for boys? That, also, I never could find out.
I used to fancy that Jimmy's great-aunt stole down to the basement in the dark hours of night to gloat over the silver sea and its delicate inhabitants. Once, in the late afternoon, I detected her going chestwards, and I followed with beating heart. I got behind an apple barrel and watched her movements. But she only went to an ice-box, from which she took out a plate of mutton chops.
The intolerable curiosity aroused in me by Jimmy's account of the chest was equalled only by the fear I had to make any inquiries about it. I was convinced that a painful family secret overhung that green chest.
Night after night I dreamed that I had been permitted to look within. Sometimes it was all I had imagined, and more. The ships, the mermaids, the turtles, and all the rest were there indeed. And others, new and indescribable forms, floated or swam in that enchanted ocean, glittering, fragile, wonderful. I could take them in my hand, play with them, and set them again in their element.
They did not merely act the lifeless part of china figures in an aquarium. They moved about with an intelligence of their own; the ships spread gauzy sails to catch a magic wind, and flew before it. The whales rose to the surface, disported themselves heavily, like true whales, and blew jets of spray into the air.
In the midst of my rapture I would wake; all the glass toys vanished, and I could have cried to find them gone. In the morning it would be impossible to recall these new figures. I remembered them dimly and more dimly as the hours of the day blurred my dream. The iridescent creatures turned to formless things of gray and drab, and then lost themselves, to be found again only in another dream.