She was so industrious that I did not venture to disturb her,
as I passed; but an hour or two afterward I overtook her going homeward
across the peninsula with her invalid husband, and she showed me her
pail full of the tiny coquina clams, which she said were very nice for
soup, as indeed I knew. Some days later, I found a man collecting them
for the market, with the help of a horse and a cylindrical wire roller.
With his trousers rolled to his knees, he waded in the surf, and
shoveled the incoming water and sand into the wire roller through an
aperture left for that purpose. Then he closed the aperture, and drove
the horse back and forth through the breakers till the clams were washed
clear of the sand, after which he poured them out into a shallow tray
like a long bread-pan, and transferred them from that to a big bag. I
came up just in time to see them in the tray, bright with all the colors
of the rainbow. "Will you hold the bag open?" he said. I was glad to
help (it was perhaps the only useful ten minutes that I passed in
Florida); and so, counting quart by quart, he dished them into it. There
were thirty odd quarts, but he wanted a bushel and a quarter, and again
took up the shovel. The clams themselves were not, canned and shipped,
he said, but only the "juice."
Many rudely built cottages stood on the sand-hills just behind the
beach, especially at the points, a mile or so apart, where the two
Daytona bridge roads come out of the scrub; and one day, while walking
up the beach to Ormond, I saw before me a much more elaborate Queen Anne
house.
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