am under petticoat-government here."

The family consisted of the old man, his wife, and his daughter, who
appeared nearly as old as her mother,--a fool, her son, (a
brutish-looking, middle-aged man, with a prominent lower face, who was
standing by the hearth when we entered, but immediately went out,) and a
little boy of ten.

While my companion talked with the women, I talked to the old man. They
said that he was old and foolish, but he was evidently too knowing for
them.

"These women," said he to me, "are both of them poor good-for-nothing
critturs. This one is my wife. I married her sixty-four years ago. She
is eighty-four years old, and as deaf as an adder, and the other is not
much better."

He thought well of the Bible,--or at least he _spoke_ 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 repeatedly 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,--"I am not ashamed to tell my name. My name is ----.
My great-grandfather came over from England and settled here."

He was an old Wellfleet oysterman, who had acquired a competency in that
business, and had sons still engaged in it.

Nearly all the oyster-shops and stands in Massachusetts, I am told, are
supplied and kept by natives of Wellfleet, and a part of this town is
still called Billingsgate, 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 harbor, 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 everywhere,--that,
when Wellfleet began to quarrel with the neighboring towns about the
right to gather them, yellow 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 proper relish of Billingsgate"; but now they are
imported commonly full-grown,