Did the alewives choose the night or late evening hours to come in by? So I had been told. By daylight evidence, the fish population increased at the Herring Run on the mornings following a nightly high tide. I had also heard that there were more alewives running during the tides of the full moon, in the farthest monthly reaches of ebb and flood; but this was a correlation that would be hard for me to make without more years to judge by. In the middle of May on the days just after the first quarter of the moon, which came on the sixteenth, the fish seemed to be running just about as hard as they did during the days preceding the full moon in April, which had appeared on the twenty-fourth. Judging accordingly, it seemed as though their migration had its own ebb and flood during those months. All this was not much better than impression plus hearsay, but there seemed to be some justice to the night tide theory, so, to begin with, I went down to the shore late one evening during an incoming tide to see if there might be any sign of the alewives. About eight o’clock, an hour before high tide, the tide was running strongly in at Paine’s Creek. The channel in the marshes flooded over its banks and marsh grasses were floating and stirring as the swaying waters rose around them. It was near dark. I could see some seaweed flinging by against the sandy bottom at the mouth of the creek, and a big, ghostly green eel slithered up at the edge of the bank the waves were licking, seemed to look up at me, looped back into the water, and disappeared; but it was too dark to see much more than those black clumps of seaweed racing by. I saw a group of gulls standing in shoal waters beyond the beach, where waves were rolling in hard under a steady northwest wind. The sun’s cauldron had dropped down, a raw, glistening orange-red, into the sea and back of the curved horizon, leaving its horizontal flush behind. [Illustration] I walked back under the lee of the sand banks bordering the curving creek. The tide was pulsing and roaring, its waters loping in to the creek which began to turn a harder, darker blue under the sky. Then I began to hear the innumerable soft slaps of fish breaking the surface. The alewives were making their entry from the sea.