“We, the undersigned, claim five claims of two hundred feet each, (and one for discovery,) on this ledge or lode of oyster-shells, with all its dips, spurs, angles, variations and sinuosities, and fifty feet on each side of the same, to work it, etc., etc., according to the mining laws of Smyrna.”

They were such perfectly natural-looking leads that I could hardly keep from “taking them up.”  Among the oyster-shells were mixed many fragments of ancient, broken crockery ware.  Now how did those masses of oyster-shells get there?  I can not determine.  Broken crockery and oyster-shells are suggestive of restaurants—­but then they could have had no such places away up there on that mountain side in our time, because nobody has lived up there.  A restaurant would not pay in such a stony, forbidding, desolate place.  And besides, there were no champagne corks among the shells.  If there ever was a restaurant there, it must have been in Smyrna’s palmy days, when the hills were covered with palaces.  I could believe in one restaurant, on those terms; but then how about the three?  Did they have restaurants there at three different periods of the world?—­because there are two or three feet of solid earth between the oyster leads.  Evidently, the restaurant solution will not answer.

The hill might have been the bottom of the sea, once, and been lifted up, with its oyster-beds, by an earthquake—­but, then, how about the crockery?  And moreover, how about three oyster beds, one above another, and thick strata of good honest earth between?

That theory will not do.  It is just possible that this hill is Mount Ararat, and that Noah’s Ark rested here, and he ate oysters and threw the shells overboard.  But that will not do, either.  There are the three layers again and the solid earth between—­and, besides, there were only eight in Noah’s family, and they could not have eaten all these oysters in the two or three months they staid on top of that mountain.  The beasts—­however, it is simply absurd to suppose he did not know any more than to feed the beasts on oyster suppers.

It is painful—­it is even humiliating—­but I am reduced at last to one slender theory:  that the oysters climbed up there of their own accord.  But what object could they have had in view?—­what did they want up there?  What could any oyster want to climb a hill for?  To climb a hill must necessarily be fatiguing and annoying exercise for an oyster.  The most natural conclusion would be that the oysters climbed up there to look at the scenery.  Yet when one comes to reflect upon the nature of an oyster, it seems plain that he does not care for scenery.  An oyster has no taste for such things; he cares nothing for the beautiful.  An oyster is of a retiring disposition, and not lively—­not even cheerful above the average, and never enterprising.  But above all, an oyster does not take any interest in scenery—­he scorns it.  What have I arrived at now?  Simply at the point I started from, namely, those oyster shells are there, in regular layers, five hundred feet above the sea, and no man knows how they got there.  I have hunted up the guide-books, and the gist of what they say is this:  “They are there, but how they got there is a mystery.”