Hitherto we have reaped where we have not sown, and gathered where we have not strawed. But that was during the days of our industrial pilgrimage. Now our way no longer threads the wilderness, where manna and quails and clams are to be had fresh for the gathering. Only barberries, in my half-wild uplands, are to be had nowadays for the gathering. There are still enough barberries to go round without planting or trespassing, for the simple, serious reason that the barberries do not carry their sugar on their bushes with them, as the clams carry their salt. The Sugar Trust carries the barberries’ sugar. But soon or late every member of that trust shall leave his bag of sweet outside the gate of Eden or the Tombs. Let him hasten to drop it now, lest once inside he find no manner of fruit, for his eternal feeding, but barberries! We have not sown the clam hitherto: we have only digged; so that now, for all practical purposes, that is to say, for the old-time, twenty-five-cent, rock-weed clambake, the native, uncultivated clam has had its day; as the unenterprising, unbelieving clammers themselves are beginning to see. The Providence River fishermen are seeking distant flats for the matchless Providence River clams, bringing them overland from afar by train. So, too, in Massachusetts, the distinguished Duxbury clams come out of flats that reach all the way from the mouth of the St. Johns, on the down-east coast, to the beds of the Chesapeake. And this, while eight hundred acres of superb clam-lands lie barren in Duxbury town, which might be producing yearly, for the joy of man, eighty thousand bushels of real Duxbury clams! What a clambake Duxbury does not have each year! A multitude of twice eighty thousand might sit down about the steaming stones and be filled. The thought undoes one. And all the more, that Duxbury does not hunger thus alone. For this is the story of fifty other towns in Massachusetts, from Salisbury down around the Cape to Dighton--a tale with a minus total of over two million bushels of clams, and an annual minus of nearly two millions of dollars to the clammers.