ANTIQUITY OF THE PEARL
stored.
As desire for a thing for its inherent qualities spreads, there is
added a larger number of those who seek to possess it for the profit
they can make in supplying that desire. Not many years ago, fishermen
along the streams of remote parts of Kentucky had no eye for the beauty
of a pearl, and no knowledge that men and women lived who prized them.
If while fishing, the fisherman's hook fell between the gaping valves
of a mollusk it was immediately seized. The disgusted angler thereupon
angrily pulled the nuisance out, and if upon disengaging the hook from
the bivalve, he found within the shells a pearl, it was immediately
tossed back into the stream for luck; for the beginning of a day's
sport with a catch of that kind was ill-luck and the fates could only
be appeased by the finding of a pearl, or a "mussel egg" as he would
call it, in the mollusk, and its return to the water. There lives yet
on the banks of the Clinch River, an old pearler, the distress of many
a speculator for his knowledge of pearls and their value, who sometimes
sorrowfully relates how he thus in bygone years angrily threw away many
good pearls, one of them the
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