32. Pearls

Pearls "No mention shall be made of coral or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies."—Job 28:18.

"Who, when he had found one pearl of great price_יwent and sold all that he had, and bought it."—Matthew 13:46. The Paris correspondent of the "Daily News" of June 11, writes:" The French have grown so clever at imitating pearls, that a jeweller in this Exhibition shows a necklace which purports to be a mixture of true pearls and false, and he challenges his customers to single out the real ones if they can. Nobody had yet succeeded when I myself made an ineffectual attempt." The art of pearl-making is by no means a new discovery; by various methods imitation pearls have been manufactured in divers countries for many years. The French have, however, proved themselves superior to all competitors. Specimens of their artificial productions exhibited at the Exposition of 1867 could neither in their lustre nor colour be distinguished from oriental pearls, even when the genuine and the sham were laid side by side. We are told that there is only one way by which they can be detected, and that is by their specific weight, they are much lighter than the real pearls.

There is" one pearl of great price" about whose genuineness there can never be a question, but all the goodly pearls which this world can yield need to be weighed before we may conclude them to be of any great value; indeed, the choicest pearls of earth are insignificant in price compared with him who is more precious than rubies, and of whom it is written, that" all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto him." Even real pearls, the best of them, fit to adorn an emperor's crown, and to heighten the beauty of the fairest of maidens, have been known to sicken and die and vanish in a day. Every now and then we hear of magnificent ancestral pearls, the pride of noble families, turning of a sickly colour and crumbling into dust. Not long ago the crown-jeweller of France solemnly applied to the Academy of Science for the means of preventing the decay and corruption of the precious gems in the royal crown. No satisfactory answer was given, and many highly-prized jewels have since then passed away. "Behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit." In a work entitled "The Wonders of the Deep," M. Schele de Vere tells us the following story, of which we leave our readers to draw the moral for themselves: "A dusky fisherman in the far-off seas of India once found a pearl in an oyster. He had heard of such costly gems, and sold it to an Arab for a gold coin which maintained him for a whole year in luxury and idleness. The Arab exchanged it for powder and shot furnished him by a Russian merchant on board a trading vessel, who even yet did not recognise the dirty, dust-covered little ball as a precious jewel. He brought it home as a present for his children on the banks of the Neva, where a brother merchant saw it and bought it for a trifle. The pearl had at last found one who could appreciate its priceless value, The great man—for it was a merchant of the first class, the owner of a great fortune—rejoiced at the silent fraud by which he had obtained the one pearl of great price, without selling all and buying it fairly, and cherished it as the pride of his heart. Visitors came from all parts of the world to see the wonder. He received them in his merchant's costume in a palace plain without but resplendent inside with all that human art can do to embellish a dwelling, and led them silently through room after room, filled with rare collections and dazzling by the splendour of their ornaments. At last he opened with his own key the carved folding-doors of an inner room which surprised the visitor by its apparent simplicity. The floor, to be sure, was inlaid with malachite and costly marble, the ceiling carved in rare woods, and the walls hung with silk tapestry; but there was no furniture, no gilding, nothing but a round table of dark Egyptian marble in the centre. Under it stood a strong box of apparently wonderful ingenuity, for even the cautious owner had to go through various readings of alphabets, and to unlock one door after another, before he reached an inner cavity, in which a plain square box of Russia leather was standing alone. With an air akin to reverence, the happy merchant would take the box and press it for a moment to his bosom, then devoutly crossing himself and murmuring an invocation to some saint, he would draw a tiny gold key, which he wore next his person, from his bosom, unlock the casket, and hold up his precious pet to the light that fell from a large grated window above.

"It was a glorious sight for the lover of such things. A pearl as large as a small egg, of unsurpassed beauty and marvellous lustre. The sphere was perfect, the play of colours, as he would let it reluctantly roll from his hands over his long white fingers down on the dark table, was only equalled by the flaming opal, and yet there was a soft, subdued light about the lifeless thing which endowed it with an almost irresistible charm. It was not only the pleasure its perfect form and matchless beauty gave to the eye, nor the overwhelming thought of the fact that the little ball was worth any thing an emperor or a millionaire might choose to give for it—there was a magic in its playful everchanging sheen as it rolled to-and-fro—a contagion in the rapt fervor with which the grim old merchant watched its every flash and flare, which left few hearts cold as they saw the marvel of St. Petersburg For such it was, and the Emperor himself, who loved pearls dearly, had in vain offered rank and titles and honours for the priceless gem.

"A few years afterwards a conspiracy was discovered, and several great men were arrested. Among the suspected was the merchant. Taking his one great treasure with him, he fled to Paris. Jewellers and amateurs, Frenchmen and foreigners, flocked around him, for the fame of his jewel had long since reached France. He refused to show it for a time. At last he appointed a day when his great rival in pearls, the famous Dutch banker, the Duke of Brunswick, and other men well known for their love of precious stones and pearls, were to behold the wonder. He drew forth the golden key, he opened the casket, but his face turned deadly pale, his eyes started from their sockets, his whole frame began to tremble, and his palsied hand let the casket drop. The pearl was discoloured! A sickly blue colour had spread over it, and dimmed its matchless lustre. His gem was diseased. In a short time it turned into a white powder, and the rich merchant of St. Petersburg, the owner of the finest pearl known to the world was a pauper! The pearl had avenged the poor Indian of the East, the Arab, and the poor traveller, and administered silent justice to the purchaser who paid not its price.