Care should always be taken to leave the small water tank filled unless you plan to secure your supply from a friend or neighbor.
Your pots and pans, cutlery, dishes, and glasses should always be washed and put away in order before leaving, ready for instant use.
A little system will make all the difference in the world in the comfort and enjoyment of such an outing, and will save labor, so that your actual work will be done in much less time and the daylight hours can be given over to the outdoor life which endears the place to each and every member of your family.
Whether it be a canoe, a knockabout, a gun, or a fishing-line, the life outside the cottage will be a reflection of that within and your enjoyment will come from the facility with which you manage the essentials of simple living. And so after you have enjoyed your day in the open, you will return to the cottage and discover that the simple comforts which it offers, while perhaps lacking the luxury of your daily routine at home, will be enjoyed with a relish far beyond that existence in a brick block, amid a mass of bric-à-brac and surrounded by servants. In its place you will devour an unusual amount of food which tastes the better because you have cooked it, and later you will fall asleep with the wind singing in the trees, and the waves lapping the shores. The occasional barking of a dog will arouse no apprehension, and the dread of haunted houses, of mysterious deeds accomplished behind closed shutters, will have vanished until you are safe home again with a “thriller” to pass away the time before it is seasonable to retire.
III
THE UBIQUITOUS CLAM
“They scattered up & down ... by yᵉ waterside, wher they could find ground nuts and clams.” (William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, II, 130.)
Surprising as it may seem, the clam, at least under his own name, does not appear in the Encyclopædia Britannica. And yet the clam is proverbial, metaphorical, and substantial, so substantial, in fact, that individuals of uncertain digestion have been rendered distinctly unhappy after a hearty encounter. But what is more surprising to the average person, and especially to the novice in clamming, is where all the clams come from for the unending clam-bakes, clam-chowders, and the various concoctions necessitating a generous supply of these silent shellfish. A journey to the beach at low tide (for all clammers know from the reference to that animal’s joyous spirit at high water that clamming is useless at that period) generally fails to accomplish more than a very lame back, muddy feet, and a paltry dozen or more specimens of the clam family, generally of immature age. The profusion of empty shells scattered about encourage the clammer into the belief that here, at least, is a favorable locality for his first efforts, and he grasps his fork and bends low, thrusting the implement into the black ooze with keen anticipation that the mud will disclose a whole family of clams, ready at hand for capture; but, instead, he is rewarded by finding a number of white shells, seemingly clams, but in reality merely their shells held closely together by mud and sand, the skeletons of former bivalves whose souls have fled to other worlds and whose bodies have long since disappeared the way of all flesh. And so he seeks another spot, and the same process is repeated. Each time he is conscious of an increasing stiffening of the back, recalling former twinges of lumbago, and after an hour or so the tide forces him to retreat, and he returns dejectedly to partake of a thin clam-broth, upon the top of which, as a consolation prize, his wife has tactfully placed a little whipped cream.