But even this recognition must have been the growth of years, possibly of ages, for not until the understanding of worth has become general among a people is value established, and only things valuable are stored. As desire for a thing for its inherent qualities spreads, there is added a larger number of those who seek to possess it for the profit they can make in supplying that desire. Not many years ago, fishermen along the streams of remote parts of Kentucky had no eye for the beauty of a pearl, and no knowledge that men and women lived who prized them. If while fishing, the fisherman's hook fell between the gaping valves of a mollusk it was immediately seized. The disgusted angler thereupon angrily pulled the nuisance out, and if upon disengaging the hook from the bivalve, he found within the shells a pearl, it was immediately tossed back into the stream for luck; for the beginning of a day's sport with a catch of that kind was ill-luck and the fates could only be appeased by the finding of a pearl, or a "mussel egg" as he would call it, in the mollusk, and its return to the water. There lives yet on the banks of the Clinch River, an old pearler, the distress of many a speculator for his knowledge of pearls and their value, who sometimes sorrowfully relates how he thus in bygone years angrily threw away many good pearls, one of them the finest "ball" pearl he has ever seen. If these gems were so regarded by the ignorant white settlers of the west until the advent of men who had learned to appreciate them either for their beauty or the price they would bring from the outside world, it may be surmised that the awakening of the ancient Indian to their beauty, must have been a much slower process, unassisted as it was by men from beyond their limits who had long regarded them as precious. At first, probably, pearls were thrown to the children as playthings, as diamonds were in the Cape: then the young squaws gradually opened their eyes to the fact that the white shining things enhanced the charms of their smooth copper skins by contrast: the brave sought them to please the maid he would bring to his tepee: perhaps rovers brought news that in the far south, in lands of houses and teocalli and much magnificence, or farther off among the Incas, these baubles were prized by the chiefs. So gradually it dawned upon some that the "eggs" of the mollusk were beautiful, and upon others that they could be bartered for skins, blankets, or arrows, possibly for a pony, and so they came to be gathered and stored and displayed as things which enriched the owner.