Perhaps, young readers, some of you have never read the story of the Soul Cages. It is a long one, and I am not going to repeat it here, only to say a word or two about it, for which I have a reason. Jack Dogherty--so the story goes--had always longed to see a Merrow. Merrow is the Irish name for seafolk; indeed, it properly means a mermaid. And Jack, you know, lived in a fairy tale, and not in lodgings at a watering-place on the south coast; so he saw his Merrow, though we never saw Shriny. I do not think any of the after-history of the Merrow is equal to Mr. Croker's account of his first appearance to Jack: afterwards "Old Coo" becomes more like a tipsy old fisherman than the man-fish that he was. The first appearance was on the coast to the northward, when "just as Jack was turning a point, he saw something, like to nothing he had ever seen before, perched upon a rock at a little distance out to sea; it looked green in the body, as well as he could discern at that distance, and he would have sworn, only the thing was impossible, that it had a cocked-hat in its hand. Jack stood for a good half-hour, straining his eyes and wondering at it, and all the time the thing did not stir hand or foot. At last Jack's patience was quite worn out, and he gave a loud whistle and a hail, when the Merrow (for such it was) started up, put the cocked-hat on its head, and dived down, head foremost, from the rocks." For a long time Jack could get no nearer view of "the sea-gentleman with the cocked-hat," but at last, one stormy day, when he had taken refuge in one of the caves along the coast, "he saw, sitting before him, a thing with green hair, long green teeth, a red nose, and pig's eyes. It had a fish's tail, legs with scales on them, and short arms like fins. It wore no clothes, but had the cocked-hat under its arm, and seemed engaged thinking very seriously about something." As I copy these words--_It wore no clothes, but had the cocked-hat under its arm, and seemed engaged thinking very seriously about something_--it seems to me that the portrait is strangely like something that I have seen. And the more I think of it, the more I am convinced that the type is familiar to me, and that, though I do not live in a fairy story, I have been among the Merrows. And further still that any one who pleases may go and see Coomara's cousins any day. There can be no doubt of it! I have seen a Merrow--several Merrows. That unclothed, over-harnessed form is before me now; sitting motionless on a rock, "engaged thinking very seriously," till in some sudden impulse it rises, turns up its red nose, makes some sharp angular movements with head and elbows, and plunges down, with about as much grace as if some stiff, red-nosed old admiral, dressed in nothing but cocked-hat, spectacles, telescope, and a sword between his legs, were to take a header from the quarter-deck into the sea.