. The story of old Nantucket; a brief history of the island and its people from its discovery down to the present day . ies and early seventiesnow became very valuable. Old places in the town werebought and made over, and rents were unbelievablyhigh. Houses which had formerly rented for five dol-lars a month now brought five hundred for a singlesummer. H they had a good view, even a thousandwas not unusual, just for three months use. But the winters dragged, and there was still muchunemployment for part of every year. The summerswere short and a long way apart, and three thousandpeople could n
. The story of old Nantucket; a brief history of the island and its people from its discovery down to the present day . ies and early seventiesnow became very valuable. Old places in the town werebought and made over, and rents were unbelievablyhigh. Houses which had formerly rented for five dol-lars a month now brought five hundred for a singlesummer. H they had a good view, even a thousandwas not unusual, just for three months use. But the winters dragged, and there was still muchunemployment for part of every year. The summerswere short and a long way apart, and three thousandpeople could not live on three months business. Then,all at once, it seemed, someone discovered that scallopswere good to eat, and would bring a good price in NewYork. The flats and shoal waters round the island werefairly covered with these heretofore despised bivalves,and the writer actually remembers having been threat-ened with an emetic by an anxious parent on his con-fession that, with several other boys, he had that dayroasted and eaten a lot of the nasty things down onBrant Point. He cfTcctcd a compromise on tincture of. FROM MEMORYS PAGE 101 rhubarb, but as no unfavorable symptoms developed, heknew that the nasty things were good to eat; and finallythe world at large awoke to the fact. This gave many Nantucket men a new winter oc-cupation, and since those days hundreds of thousandsof gallons of eyes have been shipped from the isl-and, bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars of goodmoney to the tov/nspeople. Of the events recorded in this chapter up to thispoint the writer may truly say all of which I saw,and part of which I was, but in 3 885, like most ofhis contemporaries, on approaching manhood, he emi-grated to America; and though, in the thirty yearswhich have since passed, he has returned to the islandas often as circumstances would permit, and remainedas long as possible each time, keeping always in fairlyclose touch with its concerns, the few succeeding pagesmust of necessi
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