ad in turn
acquired household or animal instincts, if not human sympathies. And as
the younger the race the more it seeks for poets and orators to express
in thought what it only feels, so these dumb pillars and plants found
their poet and orator in the fountain which sang or spoke for them
strangely and sweetly all night and day, uttering for them not only their
waking thoughts, but their dreams. It gave a voice, too, to the ancient
Persian tiles and the Cufic inscriptions which had seen the caliphs, and
it told endless stories of Zobeide and Mesrour and Haroun al Raschid.

Beyond the door which, when opened, gave this sight was a dark ancient
archway twenty yards long, which opened on the glaring, dusty street,
where camels with their drivers and screaming _sais_, or carriage-runners
and donkey-boys and crying venders, kept up the wonted Oriental din. But
just within the archway, in its duskiest corner, there sat all day a
living picture, a dark and handsome woman, apparently thirty years old,
who was unveiled. She had before her a cloth and a few shells; sometimes
an Egyptian of the lower class stopped, and there would be a grave
consultation, and the shells would be thrown, and then further solemn
conference and a payment of money and a departure. And it was world-old
Egyptian, or Chaldean, as to custom, for the woman was a Rhagarin, or
gypsy, and she was one of the diviners who sit by the wayside, casting
shells for auspices, even as shells and arrows were cast of old, to be
cursed by Israel.

It is not remarkable that among the myriad _manteias_ of olden days there
should have been one by shells. The sound of the sea as heard in the
nautilus or conch, when

"It remembers its august abode
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there,"

is very strange to children, and I can remember how in childhood I
listened with perfect faith to the distant roaring, and marveled at the
mystery of the ocean song being thus forever kept alive, inland. Shells
seem so much like work of human hands, and are often so marked as with
letters, that it is not strange that faith soon found the supernatural in
them. The magic shell of all others is the cowrie. Why the Roman ladies
called it _porcella_, or little pig, because it has a pig's back, is the
objective explanation of its name, and how from its gloss that name, or
porcellana, was transferred to porcelain, is in books. But there is
another side to the shell, and anot