and laid down near their markets, at
Boston and elsewhere, where the water, being a mixture of salt and
fresh, suits them better. The business was said to be still good and
improving.

The old man said that the oysters were liable to freeze in the winter,
if planted too high; but if it were not "so cold as to strain their
eyes," they were not injured. The inhabitants of New Brunswick have
noticed that "ice will not form over an oyster-bed, unless the cold is
very intense indeed; and when the bays are frozen over, the oyster-beds
are easily discovered by the water above them remaining unfrozen, or, as
the French residents say, _degele_." Our host said that they kept them
in cellars all winter.

"Without anything to eat or drink?" I asked.

"Without anything to eat or drink," he answered.

"Can the oysters move?"

"Just as much as my shoe."

But when I caught him saying that they "bedded themselves down in the
sand, flat side up, round side down," I told him that my shoe could not
do that, without the aid of my foot in it; at which he said that they
merely settled down as they grew; if put down in a square, they would be
found so; but the clam could move quite fast. I have since been told by
oystermen of Long Island, where the oyster is still indigenous and
abundant, that they are found in large masses attached to the parent in
their midst, and are so taken up with their tongs; in which case, they
say, the age of the young proves that there could have been no motion
for five or six years at least. And Buckland, in his "Curiosities of
Natural History," (page 50,) says,--"An oyster, who has once taken up
his position and fixed himself when quite young, can never make a
change. Oysters, nevertheless, that have not fixed themselves, but
remain loose at the bottom of the sea, have the power of locomotion;
they open their shells to their fullest extent, and then suddenly
contracting them, the expulsion of the water forwards gives a motion
backwards. A fisherman at Guernsey told me that he had frequently seen
oysters moving in this way."

Some still entertain the question whether the oyster was indigenous in
Massachusetts Bay, and whether Wellfleet Harbor was a natural habitat of
this fish; but, to say nothing of the testimony of old oystermen, which,
I think, is quite conclusive, though the native oyster may now be
extinct there, I saw that their shells, opened by the Indians, were
strewn all over the Cape. Indeed, th