In the angle where the T joined the main wharf, there was a flight of substantial steps, where boats at all times could land, drawing not over two feet of water. This was a great convenience, enabling Sam Burgess, with his fish for the market, lobster boats from the Gurnet, and the Island and Saquish boats, to land without regard to the stage of the tide. Many a householder with his mouth made up for a fish dinner has sat by the hour together at the head of those steps, waiting for Sam. In those days, too, the only purveyor of lobsters was Joseph Burgess, the keeper of the light, and as regular as the day he would appear with his lobsters and wearing his red thrum cap, would wheel his barrow full about the town. There was no talk then of short lobsters, nor of extravagant prices, for nine pence, or twelve and a half cents in the currency of the time, would buy a three or four pound lobster. The scarcity and small size of this delicious shell fish in our day have not been satisfactorily explained. I am inclined to think that the cause is not to be found in the excessive amount of their catch, but in the appearance on our shores, and the increasing numbers, of the tautog, which not only exhausts the food, which the lobster feeds upon, but also feeds on the lobster itself. In my early boyhood, if I am not mistaken, the tautog was an unknown fish north of Cape Cod. The sandy shores of Barnstable county formed an effectual barrier to its northern migration. I think that about 1830 Capt. Josiah Sturgis, commander of the Revenue Cutter Hamilton, brought some live tautog round the Cape and dropped them in Plymouth Bay. A very few years afterwards the first tautog was caught off Manomet, and one or two years later several were caught off the Gurnet, while now they are found all along the shores of Massachusetts and Maine. To this new fish, in my judgment, may fairly be attributed the gradual disappearance of a food fish which was once abundant and cheap.