"Well, think of it this way. Mrs. Brace-Gideon has been gone a long, long time. Long before our fathers and mothers were born, even. So now she's like someone in a book, or in history. If we were a couple of archaeologists digging up a buried palace that had belonged to an ancient queen or something, we wouldn't feel wrong about it, would we?" "No, I suppose not." "Well, there you are," Julian said handily, and Portia felt better. Among the large trunks there was a very small one, a box really, covered with cowhide and bearing on its curved lid the initial D, made of brass nailheads. She lifted the lid cautiously (she had been very cautious since opening the fur trunk) and saw that the little chest was filled to the brim with yellowed paper bundles. "Jule, come here; let's see what these are." The paper was so old that it crumbled and powdered when she opened the first bundle; and what it had contained was a sea shell, curved and dappled as a little quail. "Why, how pretty!" "Look, it's got a label on it, too." And so it had; a tiny glued-on label with the Latin name of the shell written on it in meticulous old-fashioned handwriting. "_Cypraea zebra_," Julian read, pronouncing the _zebra_ part correctly. Portia had opened another bundle and held out a brown shell, fancy as a fern. "_Murex palmarosae_," read Julian, stabbing wildly at pronunciation. Then he undid a bundle himself. "Anyway, I know what this one is," he said, showing her a large ear-shaped shell, lined with the luminous greens and blues of peacock feathers. "It's an abalone. But that's not what it _says_ it is; it says it's a _Haliotis_ something or other. I give up. I can't wait till I study Latin. How are you going to be a scientist without it?" "I don't look forward to it in the least," said Portia. "And I'm never going to be a scientist." Happy and absorbed, they sat cross-legged on the floor, taking out bundle after bundle. Outside of a museum they had never seen such shells: they were shaped like fans, lockets, towers, pin wheels, hearts, trumpets. They were pleated and patterned, tinted with pink, rose, crimson, yellow, mother-of-pearl; there were several pairs that looked as if they had petals and that were colored like dahlias. "I'm going to take these down to show Mother, later," Portia said. "This is as good as a Christmas stocking, isn't it, Jule?" "Better. More in it. I wonder who collected them all and marked them all?" "There's an initial on the lid: the letter D." "Oh. Then obviously it must have been that ancestor of Mrs. Brace-Gideon's: that Captain Deuteronomy Dadware. He must have sailed to every beach on earth!" "The lucky!" "I know," agreed Julian.