and bring them to the consistence of a paste, which being done, take them out and mould them to what bigness, form, and shape you please.  Your mould must be of fine silver, the inside gilt; you must also refrain from touching the paste with your fingers, but use silver-gilt utensils, with which fill your moulds.  When they are moulded, bore them through with a hog’s bristle or gold wire, and then tread them again on gold wire, and put them into a glass, close it up, and set them in the sun to dry.  After they are thoroughly dry, put them in a glass matrass into a stream of running water and leave them there twenty days; by that time they will contract the natural hardness and solidity of pearls.  Then take them out of th matrass and hang them in mercurial water, where they will moisten, swell, and assume their Oriental beauty; after which shift them into a matrass hermitically closed to prevent any water coming to them, and let it down into a well, to continue there about eight days.  Then draw the matrass up, and in opening it you will find pearls exactly resembling Oriental ones.” (Here follows a recipe for making the mercurial water used in the process, with which I need not occupy more space.)

A similar formula, “To make of small pearls a necklace of large ones,” is given in the “Lady’s Magazine” for 1831, vol. iv., p. 119, which is said to be extracted from a scarce old book.  Thus, whatever mystery may surround the art is Asiatic countreis there is evidently none about it in Europe.  The process appears to be somewhat tedious and complicated, but is doubtless profitable.

In Philostratus’ Life of Appolonius there is a curious passage about pearl-making which has been generally considered as a mere “traveller’s tale”:  Apollonious relates that the inhabitants of the shores of the Red Sea, after having calmed the water by means of oil, dived after the shell-fish, enticed them with some bait to open their shells, and having pricked the animals with a sharp-pointed instrument, received the liquor that flowed from them in small holes made in an iron vessel, in which is hardened into real pearls.—­It is stated by several reputable writers that the Chinese do likewise at the present day.  And Sir R. F. Burton informs me that when he was on the coast of Midian he found the Arabs were in the habit of “growing” pearls by inserting a grain of sand into the shells.

         Thesinger and the druggist.—­Vol.  XI. p. 136.

The diverting adventures related in the first part of this tale should be of peculiar interest to the student of Shakspeare as well as to those engaged in tracing the genealogy of popular fiction.  Jonathan Scott has given—­for reasons of his own—­a meagre abstract of a similar tale which occurs in the “Bahar-i-Danish” (vol. iii.  App., p. 291), as follows: 

Persianversion

A young man, being upon business in a certain city,