Trout Breeding. 129 



only to find the best food but also the cheapest. I began 

 with the old standard food, beef livers, but they were 

 only to be had from New York City, thirty-two miles 

 by rail, as no one butchered regularly in that part of 

 Long Island. Then we tried the black mussels, Myti- 

 lus edulis, which we boiled for convenience in opening, 

 and the fish appeared to thrive on them for a few 

 months, when some sloops came into the inner harbor 

 loaded with mussels for the city market, and so cleaned 

 up the crop that my men could not make it profitable to 

 collect them any longer. These salt water mussels at- 

 tach themselves to rocks, timbers or any stationary ob- 

 ject, and were plenty. They hang in crowded bunches, 

 which can be gathered in great numbers. The gray 

 mussel was not so plenty there and is not eaten by men, 

 and I can't speak of it as fish food. I made a mussel 

 shucker, which worked well. It used to take a man 

 half a day to cook and open two bushels of these mol- 

 lusks, and, believing that something could be devised to 

 do the work quicker, I made a cylinder of wire-cloth of 

 three-quarter inch mesh, with wooden ends, and hung 

 so as to be revolved by a crank. A door in the netting 

 admitted the boiled mussels and a few revolutions 

 dropped the meat into a box below, leaving the shells in 

 the cylinder. But the usefulness of the "mussel jerker," 

 as the men termed it, was cut short by the loss of the 

 mussels, as related. 



SOFT CLAMS. 



Then we tried the soft clams, or manninose, Mya are- 

 raria, both raw and cooked. We liked them and the 

 fish took them well, but our yield of eggs was scant 

 that fall, as there were more barren trout than usual. 



