When life shall mean a living, and not a dress-parade, or an automobile, or a flying-machine, then the clam farm, with its two or three acres of flats, will be farm enough, and its average maximum yield, of four hundred and fifty dollars an acre, will be profits enough. For the clammer’s outfit is simple,--a small boat, two clam-diggers, four clam-baskets, and his hip-boots, the total costing thirty dollars. The old milk farm here under the hill below me, with its tumbling barn and its ninety acres of desolation, was sold not long ago for six thousand dollars. The milkman will make more money than the clam man, but he will have no more. The milk farm is a larger undertaking, calling for a larger type of man, and developing larger qualities of soul, perhaps, than could ever be dug up with a piddling clam-hoe out of the soft sea-fattened flats. But that is a question of men, not of farms. We must have clams; somebody must dig clams; and matters of the spirit all aside, reckoned simply as a small business, clam-farming offers a sure living, a free, independent, healthful, outdoor living--and hence an ample living--to thousands of men who may lack the capital, or the capabilities, or, indeed, the time for the larger undertakings. And viewed as the least part of the coming shell-fish industry, and this in turn as a smallest part of the coming national industry, due to our reclaiming, restocking, and conserving, and wise leasing, the clam farm becomes a type, a promise; it becomes the shore of a new country, a larger, richer, longer-lasting country than our pioneer fathers found here. For behold the clam crop how it grows!--precisely like any other crop, in the summer, or more exactly, from about the first of May to the first of December; and the growth is very rapid, a seed-clam an inch long at the May planting, developing in some localities (as in the Essex and Ipswich rivers) into a marketable clam, three inches long by December. This is an increase in volume of about nine hundred per cent. The little spats, scattered broadcast over the flat, burrow with the first tide into the sand, where with each returning tide they open their mouths, like young birds, for their meal of diatoms brought in by the never-failing sea. Thus they feed twice a day, with never too much water, with never a fear of drouth, until they are grown fat for the clammer’s basket. If, heretofore, John Burroughs among the uncertainties of his vineyard could sing,-- Serene, I fold my hands and wait,-- surely now the clammer in his cottage by the sea can sing, and all of us with him,-- The stars come nightly to the sky; The tidal wave comes to the sea; Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, Can keep my own away from me. IX THE COMMUTER’S THANKSGIVING THE COMMUTER’S THANKSGIVING