Oysters _ad libitum_, (which, being translated, means as fast
as three men could open them,) one of Dona Maria's best dinners, and a
bath in the bay at bedtime calmed our appetites and restored our
energies, and we went to sleep with the gratified consciousness that we
had successfully taken the first step in the prosecution of our great
enterprise.
I have alluded to the oysters of La Union; but I should prove
ungrateful indeed, after the manifold delicious repasts which they
afforded us, were I to deny them the tribute of a paragraph. It is
generally believed that the true oyster of our shores is found nowhere
else, or at least only in northern latitudes. But an exception must be
made in favor of the waters of the Bay of Fonseca. Here they are found
in vast beds, in all the subordinate bays where the streams deposit
their sediment, and where, with the rise and fall of the tide, they
obtain that alternation of salt and brackish water which seems to be
necessary to their perfection. They are the same rough-coated,
delicious mollusks as those of our own coasts, and by no means to be
degraded by a comparison with the muddy, long-bearded, and, to
Christian palates, coppery abominations of the British Islands, which
in their flattened shape and scalloped edges seem to betray an impure
ancestry,--in point of fact, to be a bad cross between the scallop and
the oyster.
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