296 LITTLE FOLKS 
When she has a pile of them, she takes a long wooden needle, 
with a string for thread, strings them just like dried apples, and 
hangs them up to smoke in her smoke-house — the top of the 
vam. 
Madam Squaw has to prepare a good many strings of dried 
Clams before summer is over, or else she and her babies would 
starve in winter ; and they don't like starving any better than you 
do, if they do eat such horrible looking things. 
I suppose you'd almost starve before you could eat the dried 
Clams, for white people, who have tasted them, say they taste like 
old rope, flavored with tar. I don't believe you'd like that very 
much. 
