These tiny gems delight me.  They seem like teeth, like little morsels of candy, like jewelry, like calcified butterflies, like — what do you think they’re like?

Each part is about half an inch long or less.  The shine lets them leap to one’s eyes when scanning the sand.  There are stones and pebbles of all those sizes and colors, there are big black mussel shells and orange peachy brown scallop shells and unknown many-marked shells and various fragments of shells and bits of kelp — and yet these minuscule treasures demand attention.  They got mine.