“That’s just what I was thinking it was,” I said.

“I know what you mean,” he replied, his lonely face lighting up as faces do at unexpected understanding in a stranger.  “Of course, there are some that feel that way, but they’re few and far between.”

“Not enough to make a fortune out of?”

“O!  I do pretty well,” he said; “I mustn’t complain.  Money’s not everything, you see, in a business like this.  There’s going after the things, you know.  One’s got to count that in too.”

I looked at him in some surprise.  I had met something even rarer than the things he traded in.  I had met a merchant of dreams, to whom the mere handling of his merchandise seemed sufficient profit:  “There’s going after the things, you know.  One’s got to count that in too.”

Naturally we were neck-deep in talk in a moment.  I wanted to hear all he cared to tell me about “going after the things”—­such “things"!—­and he was nothing loth, as he took up one strange or beautiful object after another, his face aglow, and he quite evidently without a thought of doing business, and told me all about them—­how and where he got them, and so forth.

“But,” he said presently, encouraged by my unfeigned interest, “I should like to show you a few rarer things I have in the house, and which I wouldn’t sell, or even show to every one.  If you’d honour me by taking a cup of tea, we might look them over.”

So we left the little store, with its door unlocked as I had found it, and a few steps brought us to a little house I had not before noticed, with a neat garden in front of it, all the garden beds symmetrically bordered with conch-shells.  Shells were evidently the simple-hearted fellow’s mania, his revelation of the beauty of the world.  Here in a neat parlour, also much decorated with shells, tea was served to us by the little girl I had first seen and an elder sister, who, I gathered, made all the lonely dreamer’s family.  Then, shyly pressing on me a cigar, he turned to show me the promised treasures.  He also told me more of his manner of finding them, and of the long trips which he had to take in seeking them, to out-of-the-way cays and in dangerous waters.

All this I really believe the reader would find as attractive as I did; still, as I am under an implied contract to tell him a story, I am not going to palm off on him merely descriptive or informative matter, except in so far as such matter is necessary, and I have only introduced him to my dreamer in “marine curiosities” for a very pertinent reason, which will immediately appear.

He was showing me the last and rarest of his specimens.  He had kept, he said, the best to the last.  To me, as a layman, it was not nearly so attractive as other things he had shown me—­little more to my eye than a rather commonplace though pretty shell; but he explained—­and he gave me its learned name, which I confess has escaped me, owing, doubtless, to what he was next to say—­that it was found, or had so far been found, only in one spot in the islands, a lovely, seldom-visited cay several miles to the north-east of Andros Island.