Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
In the dead, hushed calm of a summer evening, when the lifted oar rests on the gunwale, unwilling to disturb with its dip the glassy surface, one has a strange, dreamy sense of being suspended in space, the sky, in all its changing beauties, being accurately reflected in illimitable depth by the still water, until the charm is broken by the splash and ripple of a school of nomadic alewives or the gliding, sinuous fin of a piratical shark.
Coot, sea duck, loons, black duck, grebes, dotted the surface of the pond and in all the sandy shallows spawning alewives splashed and played thousands of them. I had thought spawning a serious business with fish, not to be entered upon lightly or without due consideration. Yet these made a veritable romp of it.
But honestly, they say that immense numbers of little herring, or alewives, a little fish very much like a herring, are caught on western shores of the Atlantic, pickled, packed in oil, and sold for sardines. Isn't it all very funny? If I eat sardines and call them herring, and folks eat herring and call them sardines, why are we not square?
There were several, moreover, who seemed better to do in the world than the rest; who were well furnished with hams, cheese, Bologna sausages, Dutch herrings, alewives, and other delicacies adapted to the contingencies of a voyager in the steerage.
Thence, passing on to Port Royal, he found Biard, Masse, their servant-boy, an apothecary, and one man beside. Biencourt and his followers were scattered about the woods and shores, digging the tuberous roots called ground-nuts, catching alewives in the brooks, and by similar expedients sustaining their miserable existence. Taking the two Jesuits on board, the voyagers steered for the Penobscot.
When we question our hostess as to the species of finny tribes found in these waters, she mentions menhaden, mackerel, alewives, herring, etc; and, proud of her English, concludes her enumeration with, "Dat is de most only feesh dey kotch here."
The fish referred to by Washington were in all probability river-herring, or alewives, used as fertilizer at such times as they were caught in greater abundance than the food market could absorb. The probable yield of his fish trade was always carefully calculated, even when the pressure of national affairs required his absence from home.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking