Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/556

536 little hamlet of New Suffolk was selected to get information and pictures from, because the place has very little else to live upon, and the very air is impregnated with scallops, as you will find if you get to leeward of the great heaps of shells in rear of the shops,



and no stretch of imagination could suggest that the odors came from the spice islands or were wafted from "Araby the blest." Fortunately, the shops are situated where the smell does not offend the noses of the people in the town, and is gone by the time that the few summer visitors arrive. There is a good hotel here—the Grant House—kept by a man well known in Brooklyn as a caterer, and a few families come to this quiet spot for the summer, while sportsmen fond of duck-shooting gather there in the fall. The fame of the fried scallops at the Grant House extends farther than the flavor of the shells, I was fortunate in securing the services of Captain George W. King, who has dragged the scallop from its lair for the past twenty years, and most of my information comes from him that is not taken from my investigations for the United States Fish Commission in 1880. Opposite New Suffolk is Robbins Island, where the famous club of that name turns out thousands of quail and other game yearly, for their fall shooting.

The dredge is similar to that used for oysters, consisting of an iron frame about three feet long by half as high, to which the