THF WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN. 
75 
He thouglit well of the Bible, or at least he s'poke 
well, and did not think ill, of it, for that would not have 
been prudent for a man of his age. He said that he 
had read it attentively for many years, and he had much 
of it at his tongue’s end. He seemed deeply impressed 
with a sense of his own nothingness, and would repeat¬ 
edly exclaim, — 
I am a nothing. What I gather from my Bible is 
just this: that man is a poor good-for-nothing crittur, 
and everything is just as God sees fit and disposes.” 
May I ask your name: ” I said. 
“ Yes,” he answered, “ ^ am not ashamed to tell my 
name. My name is-. My great-grandfather came 
over from England and settled here.” 
He was an old Wellfieet oysterman, who had acquired 
a competency in that business, and had sons still engaged 
in it. 
Nearly all the oyster shops and stands in Massachu¬ 
setts, I am told, are supplied and kept by natives of 
Wellfieet, and a part of this town is still called Billings¬ 
gate from the oysters having been formerly planted there; 
but the native oysters are said to have died in 1770. 
Various causes are assigned for this, such as a ground 
frost, the carcasses of black-fish, kept to rot in the har¬ 
bor, and the like, but the most common account of the 
matter is, — and I find that a similar superstition with 
regard to the disappearance of fishes exists almost every¬ 
where,— that when Wellfieet began to quarrel with the 
neighboring towns about the right to gather them, yel¬ 
low specks appeared in them, and Providence caused 
them to disappear. A few years ago sixty thousand 
bushels were annually brought from the South and 
planted in the harbor of Wellfleet till they attained “ the 
