It is hard to find smoked herring these days. It is a skill that seems to have almost gone; and I am told that there used to be a good deal of variation in the product. Smoked fish are now easier to find in Maine than on Cape Cod. I bought a pair recently in a small general store in Maine at the excessive price of fifteen cents. A dried alewife was handsomer than I had suspected, and the smell not unpleasant, although I might not say as much for a barnful. The head and eye sockets were encrusted with salt, and the hard thin body was colored a bronze and smoky gold as though heat still roamed the scales. I was reminded for some reason of a metal bowl I had once seen that came from the land of the Incas. I peeled off the scales and chawed a toast to our ancestors. IV The Reproductive Urge The fishing operation near the old grist mill was in full swing after the twenty-third of April. The _Salvadore_ crew was hauling in their net with the aid of a winch. It was loaded with fish, enough to fill four or five barrels. The victims were flipping and flashing with a whirring violence, a high sound going up in the gray morning air, a beautiful iridescence in their white-silver sides. The whole dripping net was heavy and alive with their shivering, thrashing, and dying. Heads butted through the mesh and gills caught, in their frantic, vibrating despair ... and all for lobster bait, worth six dollars a barrel. The early colonists spoke of alewives coming up their streams in “incredible” numbers, and so it still looks, though Stony Brook, for one, is narrow in its upper reaches, and when the fish are forced into it they are crowded beyond all proportion. The inland stream, with its fresh-water grasses, insects, and small fish is suddenly host to a large and almost foreign form of life, except that they are both closely joined to the sea.