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The Family of the Agate 71
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"Have you gone crazy?" she asked. "What am I to do with it when I have it? "
"Mourning rings!" I said in her ear. "All the people are wearing black for the Crown Prince."
"Not a bad idea," she said grudgingly, "but if I get stuck with them—"
"You won't," said I with the confidence of youth.
Herr Grahle, who could not know that mother had already made up her mind, redoubled his efforts to make her buy. The result was that he left behind all of his five gross of black onyx rings and had entered into a contract to deliver ten gross each week for the next two months, binding himself to supply no other firm in Austria-Hungary either directly or indirectly. And as it happened, the public fell for black onyx rings and we had a monopoly in them pro tern. I still feel kindly towards onyx.
Now the onyx is only one of a large number of stones belonging to the agate family. All agates are a form of non-crystalline silica and have a more or less banded structure, occurring in streaks of varying colours. The name is derived from the word Achates, a river in Sicily which is now known as the Drillo, where agate was found in the river bed, having been brought down from the mountains.
A great property of agate, from the commercial point of view, is that the mineral—owing to its porous structure —is easily stained by artificial means in a variety of colours and tints. In the art of staining agate the inhabitants of the Idar valley, particularly the citizens of Idar and Oberstem, have become past masters.
The agate deposits of the districts had not proved to be
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