And the gulls proclaimed their coming. Out in the Bay, they began to gather by the hundreds, clambering up with a scrambled yelping and hollering. The last smoky, red line of sunset was disappearing and they hovered over it in a maddened, high, wide swarm like huge bees. It grew darker, and a black-crowned night heron, or “quawk,” sometimes “quok,” a name true to the sound it makes, flew by with rounded wings against a star. The gulls began to disappear, streaming faintly like ashes against the last fires on the sea, but still crying vastly and collectively toward a world of distances. And in terrible simplicity, the alewives were swimming toward the inland gauntlet they would have to run, having a title, by their common, wild, and ancient advent, to all great kindled things. Who will see more than that in his short life, with its many meetings and separations? I by an old and natural right felt a fierce water-deep wonder of the spirit. The beyondness in me went back to its beginnings. I thought of the nights on which children I have known were born, and of the voyages of war, leave-takings at railroad stations and at ports of embarkation, and of dreams in which I struggled toward new meetings and other lives. The wind blew through the arches of the stars, and the surfaces of the dipping earth, water, and sky in their lasting communion made me dizzy. I felt a cold inevitable grandeur, below consciousness, a swim and go in an uttermost wild world, past home or my life’s memory. So by this evidence the alewives came in at night, and, as a further discovery not to be denied, so had I. Perhaps it was the closest I would ever get to the non-human fish in a darkness where all the components of existence ran the same race. That real depth, fish-oriented, nakedly omnipotent, fills men when they recognize it with more awe than their limited worlds can encompass.