“New England’s Prospect,” published in 1634, of “a great oyster-bank” in Charles River, and of another in the Mystic, each of which obstructed the navigation.  “The oysters,” he says, “be great ones, in form of a shoe-horn; some be a foot long; these breed on certain banks that are bare every spring-tide.  This fish without the shell is so big that it must admit of a division before you can well get it into your mouth.”  Oysters are still found there. (See, also, Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan,” page 90.)

Our host told us that the sea-clam, or hen, was not easily obtained; it was raked up, but never on the Atlantic side, only cast ashore there in small quantities in storms.  The fisherman sometimes wades in water several feet deep, and thrusts a pointed stick into the sand before him.  When this enters between the valves of a clam, he closes them on it, and is drawn out.  The clam has been known to catch and hold coot and teal which were preying on it.  I chanced to be on the bank of the Acushnet at New Bedford one day, watching some ducks, when a man informed me, that, having let out his young ducks to seek their food amid the samphire (Salicornia) and other weeds along the river-side at low tide that morning, at length he noticed that one remained stationary amid the weeds, something preventing it from following the others, and on going to it he found its foot tightly shut in a quahaug’a shell.  He took up both together, carried them home, and his wife, opening the shell with a knife, released the duck and cooked the quahaug.  The old man said that the great clams were good to eat, but that they always took out a certain part, which was poisonous, before cooking them.  “People said it would kill a cat.”  I did not tell him that I had eaten a large one entire that afternoon, but began to think that I was tougher than a cat.  He stated that peddlers came round there, and sometimes tried to sell the women-folks a skimmer, but he told them that their women had got a better skimmer than they could make, in the shell of their clams; it was shaped just right for this purpose.  They call them “skim-alls” in some places.  He also said that the sun-squawl was poisonous to handle, and when the sailors came across it, they did not meddle with it, but hove it out of their way.  I told him that I had handled it that afternoon, and had felt no ill effects as yet.  But he said it made the hands itch, especially if they had previously been scratched,—­or if I put it into my bosom, I should find out what it was.

He informed us that ice never formed on the back side of the Cape, or not more than once in a century, and but little snow lay there, it being either absorbed or blown or washed away.  Sometimes in winter, when the tide was down, the beach was frozen, and afforded a hard road up the back side for some thirty miles, as smooth as a floor.  One winter, when he was a boy, he and his father “took right out into the back side before daylight, and walked to Provincetown and back to dinner.”