My Snail Was A Periwinkle
David Bunch
I cleared my laboratory table of the most pressing messes, and seeing no immediate squall in prospect out at sea; I started for the Nonsuch tide-pools. My artist called to me for criticism of a colored plate of snail drawings. She had just completed the delineation of one of the most beautiful things in the world, but one, which, like sunshine and peacocks, has become aesthetically oxidized in our minds through over-familiarity. I suppose if rainbows were never absent from sunsets, and our woods were filled with morpho butterflies, we would begin to appreciate moths and the hundred marvellous grays of clouds. I returned to the laboratory and compared the painting with the subject. I found nothing to criticize about the first-there was Snail, both in and out of his house, as true as life. Then I looked at the little creature itself and I forgot about the tide-pools.
He was in a glass dish, and I transported both snail and myself to a place where the outside world does not dare to bother-my own private Nonsuch den, and my diminutive Shellfish and myself looked at each other eye to eye. It struck me at once how perfectly silly it would be to call human beings "white-oaks," for no man is an oak and only a certain proportion are white. But it is equally illogical to indicate snails and oysters and octopuses by the term "shellfish" for none of them are fish and many have no shells.
However we cannot give up "starfish" or "crayfish" and editors have an unreasonable objection to newly coined words. Mollusk is really the best general name, for all shellfish are soft. Whichever way we look at it, the English language is very often scant when we require exactness. But we need not pause for such discussion.
My snail was a periwinkle, or winkle as they called him in the days of Good King Wenceslas, and of gastronomic King Hal as well, for dozens of generations of humans have proved hundreds of generations of winkles palatable. At present he was quiet and conservative-deep within his shell with his door shut tight- thinking the periwinklish thoughts which one does when deep within one's shell.
I filled his dish with salt water, and however tight his brown mahogany swirl of a door seemed to be, yet knowledge of the change in the outer element somehow trickled through. The lid lifted-a dark finger of a tentacle wavered tentatively, an eye glinted in the portico and out came the owner. His ancestors, like mine, unquestionably came from the sea, but his scientific god-fathers for once have christened him reasonably and he is Littorina-a shore creature.
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