that
with him discretion was not the better part and that he paid dearly for
transgressing against the strict laws relating to I.D.B. He had left
behind in Europe the wife of his bosom and did not return to her for
thirty years. She could have presumed his death and remarried, but this
she steadfastly refused to do. There were many who admired her
faithfulness, and at last this was rewarded. Her errant spouse returned
to her. Then at last was her tongue unloosed. As an eye-witness later
told me, she gave him such a complete dressing-down that he fled back
whence he had come and never saw his Griselda again, no doubt
preferring his final fate as a Rhodesian lion's dinner.
Other
pioneers were a cousin of mine whose intrepidity helped to make known
in the eighties of last century the pleasing if not first-rate pearls
of California, and two other cousins who braved fevers and discomforts
galore when Panama was still an unhealthy spot. For one succumbed to
Yellow Jack on the Isthmus and the other paid with life-long ill health
for such competency as he had acquired from dealing in the pearls of
that region.
One
of my mother's cousins was amongst the first in recent years to carry
on a lively trade in Venezuela pearls. Later on he pioneered in
North-Western Australia among the pearl-fishing centres south of Java
Head, several years before I myself went to that unhealthy coast. I met
his widow once after his death, and in a burst of confidence she told
me of a spot far up the Amazon where her husband had adventured once
upon a time and found some huge priceless pearls, only to have them
stolen from under his pillow by one of the ship's crew as he journeyed
down
