tory is told of a family in Hadley,
Massachusetts, who were about to dine on shad, that, hearing a knock at
the door, they would not open it till the platter holding the obnoxious
shad had been hidden. At first they were fed chiefly to hogs. Two shad
for a penny was the ignoble price in 1733, and it was never much higher
until after the Revolution. After shad and salmon acquired a better
reputation as food, the falls of various rivers became great resorts for
American fishermen as they had been for the Indians. Both kinds of fish
were caught in scoop-nets and seines below the falls. Men came from a
distance and loaded horses and carts with the fish to carry home. Every
farmhouse near was filled with visitors. It was estimated that at the
falls at South Hadley there were fifteen hundred horses in one day.

Salted fish was as carefully prepared and amiably regarded for home use
in New England and New York as in England and Holland at the same date.
The ling and herring of the old countries of Europe gave place in
America to cod, shad, and mackerel. The greatest pains was taken in
preparing, drying, and salting the plentiful fish. It is said that in
New York towns, such as New York and Brooklyn, after shad became a
popular fish, great heaps were left when purchased at each door, and
that the necessary cleaning and preparation of the shad was done on the
street. As all housewives purchased shad and salted and packed at about
the same time, those public scavengers, the domestic hogs who roamed
the town streets unchecked (and ever welcomed), must have been specially
useful at shad-time.

Not in the waters, but of it, were the magnificent tribes of marine fowl
that, undiminished by the feeble weapons and few numbers of the Indians,
had peopled for centuries the waters of the New World. The Chesapeake
and its tributaries furnished each autumn vast feeding-grounds of wild
celery and other aquatic plants to millions of those creatures. The
firearms of Captain John Smith and his two companions were poor things
compared with the fowling-pieces of to-day, but with their three shots
they killed a hundred and forty-eight ducks at one firing. The splendid
wild swan wheeled and trumpeted in the clear autumn air; the wild geese
flew there in their beautiful V-shaped flight; duck in all the varieties
known to modern sportsmen--canvas-back, mallard, widgeon, redhead,
oxeye, dottrel--rested on the Chesapeake waters in vast flocks a mile
wi