The lusty month of June is made up of all its encounters, many of them savage in isolation; but we may look for Roman circuses in vain. Wait all day and no life seems to devour another. Wait all year and you may never see the fight you are looking for. Now and then to be sure, as with an abundance of fish and their marauding predators, you can see savagery and greed confined, but even so the lesson is the same. It is not killing, eating, and aggression which seem paramount but an over-all rhythm and balance in which they are only elements. Later on, between July and December, the young alewives hatched out this spring in pond waters will start returning to the sea. I have often seen them as they go down the fish ladders by which their spawning parents came up. Perhaps through some attraction to the water’s force where it spills down hard over the concrete rims of each pool in the ladder, the fingerlings mass and circle before dropping back downstream. It is here that a number of eels, some of them of large size, coil and slither through the water, and eat large quantities of fish. Eels are largely nocturnal in habit, but they do go through periods of feeding by day. Sometimes they act like eating machines, methodically grabbing one little fish after another; but the alewives continually swim over them, unregarding. Where the fish idle in the stream below, in less turbulent, clearer water, perfectly capable of seeing any eels lying in wait for them, they are in no way affected, so far as I can see. The eels themselves, lying on the stream bottom for long periods after eating, pay no attention while the little alewives swim over them. Here is a strange relation between enemies. It is perfectly true that a young alewife may not know an eel from a stick unless it is directly attacked, being in some respects oblivious to much of anything except the need to migrate to salt water. And yet the point is not that they are “stupid,” but that their crowd lives demand a cohesive rhythm, sensitive enough in action, which is paramount to all risks they encounter. It is in fact their main protection. They school and eat. They school and escape. They school and perpetuate themselves. The solitary alewife is lost. These fish move and intercommunicate in a frame of continuity to which they are forever held. But can we call it a restriction? Its terms may be quite invisible to us. _The Binding Rain_ So this is, or was, Cape Cod, as June booms with fruition. The nights throb; and on a clear one how the long frames of the stars line up overhead! There is no end of internment, no end of use and opening out.