“Well, as long as he behaves himself I don’t care. But I didn’t suppose you liked the fellow, Phin.”
“I don’t. It was Hobson’s choice, Miss,” returned the sailor.
Phineas, the girls found, was a very pleasant and entertaining man. And he knew all about fishing. He had supplied the bait for tautog, and the girls and boys of the party, all having lived inland, learned many things that they hadn’t known before.
“Look at this!” cried Madge Steele, the first to discover a miracle. “He says this bait for tautog is scallops! Now, that quivering, jelly-like body is never a scallop. Why, a scallop is a firm, white lump––”
“It’s a mussel,” said Heavy, laughing.
“It’s only the ‘eye’ of the scallop you eat, Miss,” explained Phineas.
“Now I know just as much as I did before,” declared Madge. “So I eat a scallop’s eye, do I? We had them for breakfast this very morning–with bacon.”
“So you did, Miss. I raked ’em up myself yesterday afternoon,” explained Phineas. “You eat the ‘eye,’ but these are the bodies, and they are the reg’lar natural food of the tautog, or blackfish.”
“The edible part of the scallop is that muscle which adheres to the shell–just like the muscle that holds the clam to its shell,” said Heavy, who, having spent several summers at the shore, was better informed than her friends.
Phineas showed the girls how to bait their hooks with the soft bodies of the scallop, warning them to cover the point of the hooks well, and to pull quickly if they felt the least nibble.