Those who would master the art of talking to the Nassau negro should first brush up on their Bibles; for a pious salutation might almost be said to be Nassau etiquette for opening a conversation.  Of course, this applies mainly to negroes or those “conchs” in whom negro blood predominates.  The average white man in Nassau must not be considered as implicated in this statement, for he seems to take his religion much as the average white man takes it in any other part of the world.

One afternoon, in the course of these rather fruitless if interesting investigations among the picturesque shipyards of Bay Street, I had wandered farther along that historic water front than is customary with sight-seeing pedestrians; had left behind the white palm-shaded houses, the bazaars of the sellers of tortoise-shell, the negro grog-shops and cabins, and had come to where the road begins to be left alone with the sea, except for a few country houses here and there among the surrounding scrub—­when my eye was caught by a little store that seemed to have strayed away from the others—­a small timber erection painted in blue and white with a sort of sea-wildness and loneliness about it, and with large naive lettering across its lintel announcing itself as an “Emporium” (I think that was the word) “of Marine Curiosities.”

A bladder-shaped fish, set thick with spines like a hedgehog, swung in the breeze over the doorway, and the windows on each side of the doorway displayed, without any attempt at arrangement, all sorts of motley treasures of the sea:  purple sea-fans; coral in every fairy shape, white as sea-foam; conches patterned like some tessellated pavement of old Rome; monster star-fish, sharks’ teeth, pink pearls, and shells of every imaginable convolution and iridescence, and many a weird and lovely thing which I had not the knowledge to name; objects, indeed, familiar enough in Nassau, but here amassed and presented with this attractive difference—­that they had not been absurdly polished out of recognition, or tortured into horrible “artistic” shapes of brooch, or earring, or paper-knife, or ash-tray, but had been left with all their simple sea-magic upon them—­as they might have been heaped up by the sea itself in some moonlit grotto, paved with white sand.

I pushed open the door.  There was no one there.  The little store was evidently left to take care of itself.  Inside, it was like an old curiosity shop of the sea, every available inch of space, rough tables and walls, littered and hung with the queer and lovely bric-a-brac of the sea.  Presently a tiny girl came in as it seemed from nowhere, and said she would fetch her father.  In a moment or two he came, a tall weathered Englishman of the sailor type, brown and lean, with lonely blue eyes.

“You don’t seem afraid of thieves,” I remarked.

“It ain’t a jewelry store,” he said, with the curious soft sing-song intonation of the Nassau “conch.”