cal effect, and an unprecedented attendance, for it was equal to
announcing a lottery with that many tickets, and who knows how few
prizes!

The student seeking to determine the eighth wonder of the world should
not overlook the city of Marichchikkaddi. Stories of towns rising
overnight wherever gold is found, or diamonds discovered, or oil struck,
have become common to the point of triteness. Tales of the uprising of
Klondike and South African cities, once amazing, fade to paltriness in
the opinion of one who has seen the teeming city of Marichchikkaddi. In
a sense it is a capital, yet it is found in no geography; no railway
connects it with the world, yet a dozen languages are spoken in its
streets. Marichchikkaddi's population numbers no young children, no
persons too aged to toil, and the four or five hundred women sojourners
merit the right of being present through serving as water-carriers to
camp and fishing fleet.

[Illustration: COOLIES CARRYING PEARL OYSTERS FROM THE BOATS TO THE
"KOTTU," OR GOVERNMENT STOCKADE]

This place with double-mouthful name, almost defying pronunciation, is
the pearl metropolis of the universe. Probably there is not a stocked
jewel-case that does not contain gems that have been filtered through
this unique city by the sea. For a dozen reasons it is a wonderful town,
and the foremost of these is that it is the only city of size that comes
and goes like the tide's ebbing and flowing.

When a fishery is proclaimed, Marichchikkaddi is only a name--a
sand-drifted waste lying between the jungle of the hinterland and the
ocean. Yet nine months before forty thousand people dwelt here under
shelter of roofs, and here the struggle for gain had been prosecuted
with an earnestness that would have borne golden fruit in any city in
the Western world. There, where lies the skeleton of a jackal
half-buried in sand, an Indian banker had his habitat and office only a
few months before, with a lakh of rupees stacked in a conspicuous place
as glittering earnest of his ability to pay well for anything remarkable
in the way of a pearl. And beyond, where occurs the rift in the sand,
stood the shanty in which venturesome divers whiled away time and money
in trying to pitch rings upon the ends of walking-sticks, as do farmers'
boys at New England county fairs.

With the license permitting the calling of a pile of buildings formed of
stucco a "White City," this metropolis might with propriety be named the