Alewives seemed to me to demand a study of universal motions and their interrelationships. The body of a fish must have in it the declination of the globe and all its years. If I had read some of my limited science reading correctly, there was a time system in the world of life which had nothing to do with clocks, and their specific minutes and hours. It was built into its creatures so that their stages of development, their growth and movements, followed the direction and change of all other forces affecting them. It is a running world; and who, in that context, is more automatic than another? X Transition: Salt and Fresh The change, for those fish that make it in, is from salt to fresh, wide to narrow, deep to shallow. Watched at Paine’s Creek in the first sheltered inland curve, the movement of those I was able to see was like the movement of tides and estuary waters, a flowing back and forth, a waving and interweaving. Some dropped back like leaves, then swam up again with the rest as they all turned together. At the start of an incoming tide--when the salt water moved in under the fresh and the creek began to rise--the fish seemed stimulated and swam faster, back and forth against it. Then gradually, though it was hard to see them in the high tide waters, they appeared to move farther up the inlet. It was an encounter at the dramatic approaches of sea and land, on the long shoreline where continuous transitions are made between water and earth and air.