"Do me the favor!" and he led the way down to the cabin.
Now it became evident to the boy that all had indeed been a dream.

It sometimes happened that way, dreaming that you woke and found it all true, and then starting up to find that the first waking had been of dream-stuff too, that it was melting away from your sight, from your grasp; even things that looked so real, so real,--he pinched himself violently, and shook his head, and tried to break loose from fetters of sleep, binding him to such sweet wonders, that he must lose next moment; but no waking came, and the wonders remained.
The cabin was full of shells.

Across one end of the little room ran a glazed counter, where lay heaped together various objects of jewelry, shell necklaces, alligator teeth and sea-beans set in various ways, tortoise-shell combs, bracelets and hairpins,--a dazzling array.

Yet the boy's eyes passed almost carelessly over these treasures, to light with quick enchantment on the shells themselves, the _real_ shells, as he instantly named them to himself, resenting half-consciously the turning of Nature's wonders into objects of vulgar adornment.
The shells were here, the shells were there, the shells were all around! Shelf above shelf of them, piled in heaps, lying in solitary splendor, arranged in patterns,--John had never, in his wildest dreams, seen so many shells.

Half the poetry of his little life had been in the lovely forms and colors that lay behind the locked glass doors in Mr.Scraper's parlor; for Mr.Scraper was a collector of shells in a small way.