“Without anything to eat or drink,” he answered.

“Can the oysters move?”

“Just as much as my shoe.”

But when I caught him saying that they “bedded themselves down in the sand, flat side up, round side down,” I told him that my shoe could not do that, without the aid of my foot in it; at which he said that they merely settled down as they grew; if put down in a square, they would be found so; but the clam could move quite fast.  I have since been told by oystermen of Long Island, where the oyster is still indigenous and abundant, that they are found in large masses attached to the parent in their midst, and are so taken up with their tongs; in which case, they say, the age of the young proves that there could have been no motion for five or six years at least.  And Buckland, in his “Curiosities of Natural History,” (page 50,) says,—­“An oyster, who has once taken up his position and fixed himself when quite young, can never make a change.  Oysters, nevertheless, that have not fixed themselves, but remain loose at the bottom of the sea, have the power of locomotion; they open their shells to their fullest extent, and then suddenly contracting them, the expulsion of the water forwards gives a motion backwards.  A fisherman at Guernsey told me that he had frequently seen oysters moving in this way.”

Some still entertain the question whether the oyster was indigenous in Massachusetts Bay, and whether Wellfleet Harbor was a natural habitat of this fish; but, to say nothing of the testimony of old oystermen, which, I think, is quite conclusive, though the native oyster may now be extinct there, I saw that their shells, opened by the Indians, were strewn all over the Cape.  Indeed, the Cape was at first thickly settled by Indians on account of the abundance of these and other fish.  We saw many traces of their occupancy, after this, in Truro, near Great Hollow, and at High-Head, near East-Harbor River,—­oysters, clams, cockles, and other shells, mingled with ashes and the bones of deer and other quadrupeds.  I picked up half a dozen arrow-heads, and in an hour or two could have filled my pockets with them.  The Indians lived about the edges of the swamps, then probably in some instances ponds, for shelter and water.  Moreover, Champlain, in the edition of his “Voyages” printed in 1613, says that in the year 1606 he and Poitrincourt explored a harbor (Barnstable Harbor?) in the southerly part of what is now called Massachusetts Bay, in latitude 42 deg., about five leagues south, one point west of Cap Blanc, (Cape Cod,) and there they found many good oysters, and they named it Le Port aux Huistres (Oyster-Harbor).  In one edition of his map, (1632,) the “R. aux Escailles” is drawn emptying into the same part of the Bay, and on the map “Novi Belgii” in Ogilby’s “America,” (1670,) the words “Port aux Huistres” are set against the same place.  Also William Wood, who left New England in 1633, speaks, in his