A town is a thing like a colonial animal.  A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet.  A town is a thing separate from all other towns, so that there are no two towns alike.  And a town has a whole emotion.  How news travels through a town is a mystery not easily to be solved.  News seems to move faster than small boys can scramble and dart to tell it, faster than women can call it over the fences.

Before Kino and Juana and the other fishers had come to Kino's brush house, the nerves of the town were pulsing and vibrating with the news - Kino had found the Pearl of the World.  Before panting little boys could strangle out the words, their mothers knew it.  The news swept on past the brush houses, and it washed a foaming wave into the town of stone and plaster.  It came to the priest walking in his garden, and it put a thoughtful look in his eyes and a memory of certain repairs necessary to the church.  He wondered what the pearl would be worth.  And he wondered whether he had baptized Kino's baby, or married him for that matter.  The news came to the shopkeepers, and they looked at men's clothes that had not sold so well.

The news came to the doctor where he sat with a woman whose illness was age, though neither she nor the doctor would admit it.  And when it was made plain who Kino was, the doctor grew stern and judicious at the same time.  "He is a client of mine," the doctor said.  "I'm treating his child for a scorpion sting."  And the doctor's eyes rolled up a little in their fat hammocks and he thought of Paris.  He remembered the room he had lived in there as a great and luxurious place, and he remembered the hard-faced woman who had lived with him as a beautiful and kind girl, although she had been none of these three.  The doctor looked past his aged patient and saw himself sitting in a restaurant in Paris and a waiter was just opening a bottle of wine.