Some diamond-back terrapin are supplied for the Baltimore market from North Carolina, but these, my marketman assured me, are inferior to those of Chesapeake Bay.

(Everything in, or from, North Carolina seems to be inferior, according to the people of the other Southern States.) Although there is a closed season for terrapin, the value of the diamond-back causes him to be relentlessly hunted during the open season, with the result that, like the delectable lobster, he is passing.

As the foolish lobster-fishermen of northern New England are killing the goose--or, rather, the crustacean--that lays the golden eggs, so are the terrapin hunters of the Chesapeake.

Two or three decades ago, lobster and terrapin alike were eaten in the regions of their abundance as cheap food.

One Baltimore lady told me that her father's slaves, on an Eastern Shore plantation, used to eat terrapin.
Yet behold the cost of the precious diamond-back to-day! In his smaller sizes, according to my marketman, he is worth about a dollar an inch, while when grown to fair proportions he costs as much as a railroad ticket from Baltimore to Chicago.