FROM under the curling shingles of a garret the writer once drew forth a plaything, forgotten by children whom the voice of decades had called from their fun into fields of purpose; it was an old dust-encrusted shell, a Triton's horn, within whose chambers generations of alert spiders had draped the gossamer tapestries of their looms. From its obscurity it was carried into the sunlight and cleansed of its gray wrappings of dust and web, till each delicate whorl and shimmering cell was opalescent with original beauty.
There is a legend of parental tyranny which the green-and-silver sea holds over each and every shell that has been borne inland, however distant, and he whose heart famishes for the music of sea-chords, need only raise to his ear a Triton's horn to hear the far-away voice of strident flood-tide, the toppling turnabout of distant waters, crashing billow, and crooning ebb. As this suggestion sweeps the strings of memory, human sense, gently awakened and expectant, may receive from the sighing shell the ceaseless canticle of the sea in the sea's own voice; such is the seeming power with which imagery and legend have idealized the rough husk of a perished mollusk.
From the time-stained exterior of the shell's turreted cone one failed to reckon the number of full-spun years since the little mollusk had quitted these pink-and-pearl cloisters and passed forever down the spiral staircase. What men would call the life of the shell had long since obscurely perished, yet the conspiracy of time and distance had failed to sunder the song of the sea from one of the least of its playthings.
