TWO carriage-loads of people were at Pleasure Bay, wandering about under the trees in front of the hotel. Down between them and the bank was a lot of men piling up a heap of round stones and crossing sticks of wood over them till a high sort of a cross-beam pinnacle was built, to which one of the men set fire. Mercy, how it blazed up and flashed through the cracks in the wood! They seemed to enjoy the blaze, and worked like beavers around it—though I don't know how a beaver works, never having seen one.
Some of the men went down to the water, and, dragging up great armfuls of dark green and yellow grass, swelled out here and there with bulbs and blisters, laid it in a heap before the fire. Some of the others sat down on the rocks, with pails of potatoes and sweet corn between their knees, which they began to wash and tie up in their husks.
I was awful curious to know what all this was about, but made up my mind to wait and see; for Mr. Burke seemed so anxious and busy that I didn't want to stop him by asking questions.
When the wet weeds, potatoes, and corn came on, I thought that the next thing would be some clam-bake; but instead of that, a fellow came down from the house with a lot of young chickens, picked clean, which he carried by the legs, and another loafed up from the water with three great horrid green monsters, like crabs swelled out—green as the sea-weed, and so dreadfully crawly that the very sight of them made me creep all over.
"What on earth are those creatures?" says I to Dempster; "mammoth cockroaches that have taken to a seafaring life, or what?"
"Why, lobsters," says he.
"Lobsters!" says I. "Not a bit of it. All the lobsters I have ever seen were bright red, and still as mice."
"That was after they were cooked," says he. "Wait till these come out, and they'll be red enough, I promise you."
Well, I waited and watched, for what these men were up to was more than I could make out. When the wood was all burned down they brushed the coals and ashes away with an old broom, and two colored men came up from the shore, carrying a two-bushel basket full of little longish-round creatures, hard as stone, and with a long black sort of a knot hanging out of one end. They were dripping wet, and pieces of sea-weed clung to them, as if they grew in the water like the crabs and lobsters.