192 MANSUCKERS. 
sure as shooting; so I cracked up the clam 
with the butt of my old gun, and bagged the 
mallard.’ 
* Any one who has travelled in America must 
have eaten clam-chowder, or, more probably per- 
haps, tried to eat it. It is a sort of intermediate 
affair between stew-proper and soup. How it 
is made I do not know, but I do know that to 
my palate it is the vilest concoction I ever tasted ; 
and I always look upon a man who can eat clam- 
chowder with a kind of admiration almost akin 
to envy; for I feel and know that if he can eat 
chowder, short of cannibalism he can eat any- 
thing. I have tried smoked clam, but that I 
cannot say I enjoy; it is remarkably like chew- 
ing good old tarry ropeyarn, and, save the 
slight difference in nutritive power, about an 
equally agreeable repast. 
If any of my readers should be curious to see 
the shells of these monster clams, they will find 
many I have recently brought home in the Shell 
Room of the British Museum. 
Mansuckers.—The three kinds of cuttlefish 
best known in British seas are, first, the sepia, 
the creature whose backbone is the ‘cuttlefish’ 
of the apothecaries’ shops ; second, the ‘ loligo,’ 
or ‘calamary,’ that has a beautiful penlike bone, 
