"Alewife" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... discussion of an act relating to the fisheries of alewife and shad, speaking to men who felt them obliged to stand by their duty, though never expecting to see shad, or alewife, or ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... ALEWIFE. We doubt if Mr. Bartlett is right in deriving this from a supposed Indian word aloof. At least, Hakluyt speaks of a fish called "old-wives"; and in some other old book of travels we have seen the name derived ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... folk they met until they had reached the village of Puttenham. Already there, was a hot sun and just breeze enough to send the dust flying down the road, so they were glad to clear their throats with a glass of beer at the ale-stake in the village, where the fair alewife gave Nigel a cold farewell because he had no attentions for her, and Aylward a box on the ear ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... may be attractive for his sturdy patriotism, or his adventurous and wayward spirit, or his glimpses of superstition and romance. The racy downrightness of his talk; the axioms, such as that to the Welsh alewife, "The goodness of ale depends less upon who brews it than upon what it is brewed of"; or the sarcastic touches as that of the dapper shopkeeper, who, regarding the funeral of Byron, observed, "I, too, am frequently unhappy," may each and all have their votaries. His literary ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... is lost in a very old Greek word, meaning eat or gnaw. Perch harks back to the Latin perca, and the Romans had it from the Greeks, among whom it meant spotted. The Romans said minutus when they meant small, and nowadays when we speak of any very small fish we say minnow. Alewife in old English was applied to the women, usually very stout dames, who kept alehouses. The corpulency of the fish to which the same term ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe |
