The Mermaid

been found asleep in a field, where, after wandering a little while, they had succumbed to the influence of some drug, which had evidently been given them by the moth

r husband's churlishness, no one knew. The husband was a taciturn man, and appeared to sulk under the scrutiny of the neighbourhood. The more

uisite but fugitive beauties of the spring, lent emphasis to his mood, and because his home was not a soil congenial to the growth of any but the more ordinary sentiments, he began at this time to seek in natural solitudes a more fitting environment for his musings. More than once, in the days that immediately followed, he soug

lue water. Just here, where the mother had sought out a precipice under which the tide lay deep, there was a natural water-wall of

ad sands of red gold; level it was and covered with gr

on this beach there showed a purple band, shading upward into the dark jasper red of damp earth in the lower cliff. The upper part of the cliff was

mbling lens of evaporating water, glistened with almost pearly brightness between the b

requented, for the land near was not fertile, and a wooded tract intervened between it and the better farms of the neig

or the tablet and cemented it there, its face slanting upward to the blue sky for greater safety. He knew even then that the soft rock would not hold it many years, but it gave him a poetic pleasure to contemplate the ravages of time as he worked, and to

l, while he was by habit of mind a Puritan. His composition was one at which pagan god and Christian angel must have smiled had they viewed it; but perhaps they would have we

ed what Caius was about, and came to lo

the edge of the cliff with infirm step, and talking about the lost child, whom he also had loved, about the fearful visitation of the mother's madness, and, with Caius, condemning unsparingly the brutality

did at last begin, had not been exceedingly thick, standing in a short red brush round his head. With the exception of this peculiar forehead, Jim was an ordinary freck

t; still, he was not insensible to the local fame thus acquired. His father, it was true, had not much opinion of his feat, but his mother, as mothers will, treasured all the admiring remarks of the neighbours. All the women loved

for murder, and pronounced insane. She had before