My Indiana man was far from being alone in his cheerful pursuit.  If strangers, men or women, met me on the beach and wished to say something more than good-morning, they were sure to ask, “Have you found any pretty shells?” One woman was a collector of a more businesslike turn.  She had brought a camp-stool, and when I first saw her in the distance was removing her shoes, and putting on rubber boots.  Then she moved her stool into the surf, sat upon it with a tin pail beside her, and, leaning forward over the water, fell to doing something,—­I could not tell what.  She was so industrious that I did not venture to disturb her, as I passed; but an hour or two afterward I overtook her going homeward across the peninsula with her invalid husband, and she showed me her pail full of the tiny coquina clams, which she said were very nice for soup, as indeed I knew.  Some days later, I found a man collecting them for the market, with the help of a horse and a cylindrical wire roller.  With his trousers rolled to his knees, he waded in the surf, and shoveled the incoming water and sand into the wire roller through an aperture left for that purpose.  Then he closed the aperture, and drove the horse back and forth through the breakers till the clams were washed clear of the sand, after which he poured them out into a shallow tray like a long bread-pan, and transferred them from that to a big bag.  I came up just in time to see them in the tray, bright with all the colors of the rainbow.  “Will you hold the bag open?” he said.  I was glad to help (it was perhaps the only useful ten minutes that I passed in Florida); and so, counting quart by quart, he dished them into it.  There were thirty odd quarts, but he wanted a bushel and a quarter, and again took up the shovel.  The clams themselves were not, canned and shipped, he said, but only the “juice.”

Many rudely built cottages stood on the sand-hills just behind the beach, especially at the points, a mile or so apart, where the two Daytona bridge roads come out of the scrub; and one day, while walking up the beach to Ormond, I saw before me a much more elaborate Queen Anne house.  Fancifully but rather neatly painted, and with a stable to match, it looked like an exotic.  As I drew near, its venerable owner was at work in front of it, shoveling a path through the sand,—­just as, at that moment (February 24), thousands of Yankee householders were shoveling paths through the snow, which then was reported by the newspapers to be seventeen inches deep in the streets of Boston.  His reverend air and his long black coat proclaimed him a clergyman past all possibility of doubt.  He seemed to have got to heaven before death, the place was so attractive; but being still in a body terrestrial, he may have found the meat market rather distant, and mosquitoes and sand-flies sometimes a plague.  As I walked up the beach, he drove by me in an open wagon with a hired man.  They kept on till they came to a log which had been cast up by the sea, and evidently had been sighted from the house.  The hired man lifted it into the wagon, and they drove back,—­quite a stirring adventure, I imagined; an event to date from, at the very least.