"How do you know?"
"Why, we know how many bushels we plant and how many we ketch when they're old enough to be dredged. We plant about 500 bushels to an acre and we'd like to plant a thousand if we could get 'em. They're about the size of your thumb nail and there's about 700 to 900 seed-oysters in a bushel. By the time we dredge 'em we won't get more'n a basket for every bushel we planted. How many's that? You ought to know. You counted oysters all day yesterday."
"A basket contains 68 casts," said Alec proudly, "and that's 136 oysters."
"Correct. And if you multiply that number by six, you'll have just about the number of seed-oysters in a bushel."
"If the loss is so great, I should think you would plant the full thousand bushels per acre instead of five hundred."
"We would if we could get 'em, son. But you know we get our seed-oysters out of the natural beds, and we can't dredge there except in May and June, between sunrise and sunset each day. We get all we can, of course. And then we buy some from the bushelmen."
"What are they?"
"Oh! Fellows that have small boats but no beds. They dredge what they can get and sell the seed to planters."
"They're something like the stake stickers."
"Most of 'em are stake stickers. They ketch seed-oysters in spring and stick stakes in fall."