See that beauty, wide open and shaped like a saucer.  Dear me, hold it a little toward the light, and there gleams every color of the rainbow on the polished surface.  Here is another, striped with hair-like lines in red, yellow, blue, and brown.  There is a fan, wide open, beautifully polished; it has no handle, but its coloring is in nearly all tints, and changeable in the light.  What a lovely thing is this heart-shaped shell, with a line along the centre, and beautifully blending colors on either side.  There are many of these scattered around.

Now, how can I describe these singular yet perfect shapes banked up against rocks that are completely hidden on the inside of the cave?

Over there is a funny, snarly head, with fine shreds of hair laced over a smooth shell.  Ah, what gleams of colored light shoot through the hair!  Here is a bird’s nest on a bar, lying side of a wide fan, shaped like a palm leaf; in the plaitings are curled all colors, pink, blue, yellow, and green.

This shell is like a foot with eighteen or twenty toes, smooth, shining, and of flesh-like tints.  This is like a bat’s wing, with lines and webs finely tinted.  Look at that enamelled jug with a pipe at the top.  Near by is a perfect leaf on a small branch.

Do see this worm, ringed around with dark purple stripes.  Isn’t it queer?  In that corner is a trumpet, splendidly colored inside.  That shape over there must be a fool’s cap, one mass of sheeny tints inside.  Here are beautifully rounded little bowls, all scalloped around the top; ah, see them glisten and change shades as the light strikes them!

See the beetle-bugs, with horns sticking out in every direction.  And if here isn’t a perfect shape of a lady’s slipper!  The lady should wear it inside out, so all could see its exquisite mother-o’-pearl.

Here are shells exactly like the feathery wing of a bird, and how birdie would enjoy snuggling his soft head against the exquisite smoothness of these shells!

Is that a large carrot split lengthwise?  It looks like it, but no carrot split along its length ever brought to light such rainbows as glint along these.  Those shells looking so much like rattles would amuse a lot of babies if they could play in the mermaid’s cave.  They would try to catch the fine colors, and might cry when they changed and changed, and then appeared to dance away.

Those serpents, some half uncoiled, some out straight, will not bite.  Those flashes are not from dangerous eyes, but are only fine shell tints.

Here are a lot of squat jars for holding small ornaments.  They are ornaments themselves.  Are they not?  And what queer combs with three shining rows of teeth, each tooth a point of color.

Really, I might as well stop.  There would be no use in trying to describe a third of these shapes, and as to coloring, with all I have said, you can have but a faint idea of the soft, brilliant, ever changing hues and gleams in the mermaid’s cave.