“I saw the captain get out his boat,” said he; “he had one little one; and then they jumped into it, one after another, down as straight as an arrow.  I counted them.  There were nine.  One was a woman, and she jumped as straight as any of them.  Then they shoved off.  The sea took them back, one wave went over them, and when they came up there were six still clinging to the boat:  I counted them.  The next wave turned the boat bottom upward, and emptied them all out.  None of them ever came ashore alive.  There were the rest of them all crowded together on the forecastle, the other parts of the ship being under water.  They had seen all that happened to the boat.  At length a heavy sea separated the forecastle from the rest of the wreck, and set it inside of the worst breaker, and the boat was able to reach them, and it saved all that were left, but one woman.”

He also told us of the steamer Cambria’s getting aground on his shore a few months before we were there, and of her English passengers who roamed over his grounds, and who, he said, thought the prospect from the high hill by the shore “the most delightsome they had ever seen,” and also of the pranks which the ladies played with his scoop-net in the ponds.  He spoke of these travellers, with their purses full of guineas, just as our Provincial fathers used to speak of British bloods in the time of King George III.

Quid loquar? Why repeat what he told us?

    “Aut Scyllam Nisi, quam fama secuta est,
    Candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris,
    Dulichias vexasse rates, et gurgite in alto
    Ah timidos nautas canibus lacerasse marinis?”

In the course of the evening I began to feel the potency of the clam which I had eaten, and I was obliged to confess to our host that I was no tougher than the cat he told of; but he answered, that he was a plain-spoken man, and he could tell me that it was all imagination.  At any rate, it proved an emetic in my case, and I was made quite sick by it for a short time, while he laughed at my expense.  I was pleased to read afterward, in Mourt’s Relation of the Landing of the Pilgrims in Provincetown Harbor, these words:—­“We found great muscles,” (the old editor says that they were undoubtedly sea-clams,) “and very fat and full of sea-pearl; but we could not eat them, for they made us all sick that did eat, as well sailors as passengers, ... but they were soon well again.”  It brought me nearer to the Pilgrims to be thus reminded by a similar experience that I was so like them.  Moreover, it was a valuable confirmation of their story, and I am prepared now to believe every word of Mourt’s “Relation.”  I was also pleased to find that man and the clam lay still at the same angle to one another.  But I did not notice sea-pearl.  Like Cleopatra, I must have swallowed it.  I have since dug these clams on a flat in the Bay, and observed them.  They could squirt full ten feet before the wind, as appeared by the marks of the drops on the sand.