"Scrub them!" exclaimed Alec. "What do you mean?"
"Can't you understand English? I mean just what I say—scrub 'em, to get the dirt off."
Alec still looked incredulous. "How?" he demanded.
"Oh! We drag the dredges over the beds without any bags on. It scours 'em off pretty well. They are pretty clean before we get through."
"But is it really necessary? Did anybody ever see a tiny oyster make fast to an old shell?"
"I don't know, son. But I know this: We have to make sure our shells is clean. We wait till the oysters is about ready to tie up to something and then we scrub the shells."
"My gracious! If there are so many little oysters and you put down so many shells to catch them, I should think there would be more oysters than you would know what to do with."
"Does seem that way, don't it? Fact is, though, that mighty few of them little ones ever gits to be oysters."
"Why not?"
"I reckon it's largely on account of what doctors would call 'infant mortality.' All sorts of things eats 'em. Mussels, and clams, and barnacles, and old oysters, and turtles, and worms, and sea-squirts, and drills, all eat oysters at some time or other. Down east the starfish plays hob with the oyster-beds. We don't have many of them things here, and I'm glad of it. If we did, I don't know how we'd ever raise any oysters. Why, even as it is, we don't get more than one oyster out of every six we plant."