To the English colonists an alewife was also an alehouse keeper. _A Dictionary of Americanisms_ quotes a volume printed in 1675 which said: “The alewife is like a herrin’, but it has a bigger bellie, therefore called an alewife.” (Let that quotation be of some comfort to the proponents of herrin’. The name has a formal heritage.) The writer was surely not making a direct physical analogy between a woman and a fish. The original alewife he probably has reference to is a shad, but _Pomolobus pseudoharengus_ does have a deep body and is heavily built forward, so perhaps a comparison with a hearty alewife of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century England would not be too far-fetched. The poet Skelton described an alewife, Eleanor Rummying by name, who lived in the time of Henry VIII. She brewed a “hoppy ale,” and “her face was wondrously wrinkled, lyke a rost pigges eare bristled with here”--at which point I will let the analogy go on its merry way. The alewife has had a variety of local and common names, the kind that indicate touch and sight, the handing on of natural meetings--the signposts of its contacts with man and his history on the eastern shores of this continent. It is known as “sawbelly,” for example, referring to the fine sharp little notches or teeth on the midline of its belly; and for the large eyes, set on each side of its small head, it has been called “wall-eyed herring,” “big-eyed herring,” or “blear-eyed herring.” It is also the “spring herring,” “branch herring,” “river herring,” or “fresh-water herring.” This old New England name of alewife has its modifications in “Ellwife” and “Ellwhop” on the Connecticut River, and there were variant pronunciations in other regions. In the state of Rhode Island alewives were called “buckies” and in Maine “cat-thrashers.” In Canada the name is “Gaspereau,” sometimes “Gasparot.” The term “alewife” is uncommon in the maritime provinces. There seem to be three Gaspereau Rivers, two in New Brunswick and one in Nova Scotia, in addition to a town of that name in New Brunswick, and a lake in Nova Scotia. Apparently the place name derives from the fish, and not the other way around. In its 15th Report, for 1917, the Geographic Board of Canada says “after a fish,” in explaining the name of the Gaspereau River. Another Canadian term for alewife is “kyak” or “kyack,” which sounds like a derivation from northern Indians. Mr. A. H. Leim of the Biological Station at St. Andrews, New Brunswick, writes me that he has only heard “one or two fishermen call them ‘kyacks’; one of these was an old poacher on the Shubenacadie River in Nova Scotia who always used this name. I assume the word is of Indian origin.”