We have still another recorded instance--and in Scotland. In the year
1857 two fishermen on the Argyleshire coast declared that when on their
way to the fishing-station, Lochindale, in a boat, and when about four
miles south-west from the village of Port Charlotte, about six o'clock
in a June evening, they distinctly saw, at about six yards distance, an
object in the form of a woman, with comely face and fine hair hanging
in ringlets over the neck and shoulders. It was above the surface of
the water gazing at the fishermen for three or four minutes--and then
vanished! Yet this declaration was officially attested!
In 1863 Mermaids were supposed to abound in the ponds and ditches of
Suffolk, where careful mothers used them as bugbears to prevent little
children from going too near the water. Children described them as
"nasty things that crome you (hook you) into the water;" others as "a
great big thing like a feesh," probably a pike basking in the shallow
water.
Sometimes the Mermaid has assumed a picturesqueness in fairy tale; and
her impersonation has been described by Dryden as "a fine woman, with a
fish's tail." And, laying aside her scaly train, she has appeared as a
lovely woman, with sea-green hair; and Crofton Croker relates, in his
"Fairy Legends," a marriage between an Irish fisherman and a "Merrow,"
as the Mermaid is called in Ireland.
IS THE UNICORN FABULOUS?
To this question we may reply, in the words of a writer of 1633,
"Concerning the Unicorn, different opinions prevail among authors:
some doubt, others deny, and a third class affirm its existence." The
question has lasted two thousand years, and is every now and then kept
alive by fresh evidences.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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