The speed at which they drop over seems to depend on the size and pressure of the oncoming school--population pressure, in other words, unless pressure of numbers is a better term, which must also affect the timing of their entry from the sea. Sometimes they go over: one--two--three--four--one a second; but if the group is small the rate may be ten to twenty a minute. Finally there are those few fish left behind that circle around at the outlet or turn back into deeper water where another school will be coming up. All morning, as the alewives massed, circled, and dropped, there was one fish that kept wandering through and over the others in a puzzling way. It was a conspicuously darker color, which is characteristic of blindness, as I learned later on. Its loss of sight, then, had deprived it to some degree of the community action, though it had been able to feel its way toward the outlet. Occasionally one that looked exceptionally tired and slow would drop over the falls by itself. I noticed also that those which were scarred and infected seemed to have lost some of the fire of communication. To the casual eye the spent fish may not look any thinner or weaker than the rest, though when they hit the seining pool they are obviously in no hurry to move on, but circle slowly around it for some time. Their flesh, for the human carnivore, is of poorer quality than when they came in from salt water. Going back to history again, it seems that the recipients of alewives in the Caribbeans were not always pleased with the product. There were complaints in the eighteenth century, as I have indicated, and in the early nineteenth as well, when plantation owners in the West Indies objected that this food was doing bad things to their slaves. They said that alewives taken when they were going downriver after spawning were “poison fish,” and “the very worst food that can be given to slaves, as it both disheartens them, keeps them continually murmuring, and brings on those scorbutic diseases so common among negroes in that climate.” Bad food or not, they were in all things directional, with the water and the season, moving on and out, taking the rhythms of perpetuation with them, these “reflex machines,” bearers of strong tides. They had been giving me something of a lesson in cosmic weather, though I was still a hopeless beginner. From one place, one road, around one circle, they had led me through so much variety that I was left to wonder at my omissions. The man-made world must still have far to go to learn its inner and outer relations to a greater, expanding world of lives that are given, not made.