Having got the clam out, the next thing is to preserve it for winter: this is effectually accomplished by stringing-up and smoking. A long wooden needle, with an eye at the end, is threaded with cord made from native hemp; and on this the clams are strung like dried apples, and thoroughly smoked, in the interior of the lodge. A more effectual smoking-house could hardly be found. I can imagine nothing in the ‘wide, wide world’ half as filthy, loathsome, and disgusting as the interior of an Indian house. Every group has some eatable—fish, mollusc, bird, or animal—and what the men and squaws do not consume, is pitched to the dusky little savages, that, naked and dirty, are thick as ants in a hill; from these the residue descends to the dogs, and what they leave some lower form of animal life manages to consume. Nothing eatable that is once brought in is ever by any chance swept, or carried, out again, and either becomes some other form of life, or, decomposing, assumes its elemental condition. An old settler once told me a story, as we were hunting together, and I think I can vouch for the truth of what he related, of having seen a duck trapped by a clam:—‘You see, sir, as I was a-cruising down these flats about sun-up, the tide jist at the nip, as it is now, I see a whole pile of shoveller ducks snabbling in the mud, and busy as dogfish in herring-time; so I creeps down, and slap I lets ’em have it: six on ’em turned over, and off went the pack gallows-scared, and quacking like mad. Down I runs to pick up the dead uns, when I see an old mallard a-playing up all kinds o’ antics, jumping, backing, flapping, but fast by the head, as if he had his nose in a steel trap; and when I comes up to him, blest if a large clam hadn’t hold of him, hard and fast, by the beak. The old mallard might a’ tried his darndest, but may I never bait a martin-trap again if that clam wouldn’t a’ held him agin any odds ’til the tide run in, and then he’d a’ been a gone shoveller sure as shooting; so I cracked up the clam with the butt of my old gun, and bagged the mallard.’ Any one who has travelled in America must have eaten clam-chowder, or, more probably perhaps, tried to eat it. It is a sort of intermediate affair between stew-proper and soup. How it is made I do not know, but I do know that to my palate it is the vilest concoction I ever tasted; and I always look upon a man who can eat clam-chowder with a kind of admiration almost akin to envy; for I feel and know that if he can eat chowder, short of cannibalism he can eat anything. I have tried smoked clam, but that I cannot say I enjoy; it is remarkably like chewing good old tarry ropeyarn, and, save the slight difference in nutritive power, about an equally agreeable repast. If any of my readers should be curious to see the shells of these monster clams, they will find many I have recently brought home in the Shell Room of the British Museum.