Thus armed, they begin to dig up the mud-homes of the unsuspecting clam: guided by the jets of water, they push down the bent stick, and experience has taught them to make sure of getting it well under the shell: placing a stone behind the stick, against which the squaw fixes her foot firmly, she lifts away: the clam comes from darkness into daylight ere he knows it, and thence into the Indian’s basket. The basket filled, the clam-pickers trudge back again to the lodge—and next to open him. He is not a _native_ to be astonished with an oyster-knife; once having shut his mouth, no force, saving that of dashing his shell into atoms, will induce him to open it. But the wily redskin, if she does not know the old fable of the wind and the sun trying their respective powers on the traveller, at least adopts the same principle on the luckless clam; what knife and lever fail to do a genial warmth accomplishes. The same plan the sun adopted to make the traveller take off his coat (more persuasive, perhaps, than pleasant) the Indian squaw has recourse to in order to make the clam open his shell. Hollowing out a ring in the ground, about eight inches deep, they fill the circle with large pebbles, made red-hot in the camp-fire near by, and on these heated stones put the bivalve martyr. The heat soon finds its way through the shelly armour, the powerful ropes that hold the doors together slacken, and, as his mansion gradually grows ‘too hot to hold him,’ the door opens a little for a taste of fresh air. Biding her chance, armed with a long, smooth, sharp-pointed stick, sits the squaw—dusky, grim, and dirty—anxiously watching the clam’s movements. The stronghold opens, and the clam drinks draught after draught of the cool lifegiving air; then down upon him the savage pounces, and astonishes his heated and fevered imagination by thrusting, with all her force, the long sharp stick into the unguarded house: crash it goes through the quivering tissues; his chance is over! Jerked off the heated stones, pitilessly his house is forced open; ropes, hinges, fastenings crack like pack-thread, and the mollusc is ruthlessly dragged from his shelly home, naked and lifeless.