"Dead Trees Love the Fire" 165 



room full of nets, poles, and guns. The Cap'n 

 was so much pleased with the sight of his eel- 

 pot half full of the waste from my desk that I 

 can scarcely get him to accept pay for bait, and 

 some day I think that he will show me a few of 

 the places in the bay where weak-fish are really 

 caught, instead of many places where they are 

 not, as is the custom with professional fisher- 

 men. Sure enough, the Cap'n has a bushel of 

 clams in his boat which he is taking over to the 

 beach for a friend, and it is not hard to divert 

 the store to our own purposes. The children 

 come down to the shore and I pull the basket 

 up the bank under the shade of some pines, 

 while they begin to collect firewood enough for 

 a clam-bake at dinner-time. If we cannot get 

 clams at our end of the bay, the water being 

 too fresh so far from an ocean inlet, we can at 

 least have them brought from fifteen to twenty 

 miles farther down, and then they can be 

 thrown into the water, where they will live for 

 months, to be taken up whenever wanted. 



The real work of the day then began. While 

 the ladies sewed and read in the shade, and the 

 children picked late blackberries, we sturdy 



