Beyond was an impenetrable tangle of woods and thickets and an old abandoned house, reproachfully dying, with large empty eyes where the windows were, tall, unpainted, with dark-brown clapboards, and broken inside. You could reach this house from a side road off the highway. To one side of it was a small pond, which I had caught a glimpse of before, covered with water lilies in the summertime. I went in over a long high bank, part of an old road, that ran back of the house between the tangled ditches and the pond. There seemed to be no access from one side to the other; but toward the middle, on the side of the bank where the ditches ended, I saw a few alewives circling in a pool of still water. Then I heard a light splashing on the other side. I walked over through the thickets and saw a number of fish wiggling and thrashing up and over a little neck of water that ran out of the pond. On one side this action, and on the other an apparently aimless moving through rocks and sodden branches in the water. Undoubtedly there was an old, hidden culvert that ran under the bank, but the underground passage must have been partly clogged and certainly very small. So the alewives that came into Quivett Creek spawned in that pond. Most of them had probably been hatched there. The flow from the sea had a logical termination. What else, the fish might ask me, had I expected? XIV Spawning: the Dance During the third week in May, when the run seemed about over I had still not seen them spawning, although I had heard a description of it from my local authority, Mr. Alexander. “A kind of swish dance is what they do,” said he, giving a hula-hula motion with his hands. Harry also described them as sidling up at the shallow edges of the ponds, rocking as you would rock a baby; and then shooting out the spawn, their fins lifting up with the effort. The pond suckers, as he related it, would swim up to grab the eggs almost as soon as they came out of their bellies. What about that school I had seen running along the shore of the Upper Mill Pond? “Well, they were kind of getting acquainted, you know. Just cuddling together!”