All the other merpeople have the greatest objection to human beings, and shun all inhabited coasts, seaport towns and ships. But every once in a while a member of this race would show the oddest fancy for the shore and a kind of longing after human society--a longing which of course they never could gratify, for they could not live out of the water, and if they had been able to desert the sea, the forked ends of their long tails would have been of no use on land. A few years before the family left the English coast, a younger son had actually married a human girl who went back to her friends and deserted him on the shamefully false pretence that she wanted to go to church. The poor merman went out of his wits and died, and was ever afterward held up as an example to any of the younger ones who showed any signs of similar weakness. To care anything for human creatures is counted disgraceful in mer society, and the older members of the family for the most part felt it their duty to express the greatest possible animosity to the whole human race. The old professor of magic had once said that he would swim a hundred miles to see a shipwreck if he were only sure the people would all be drowned, but he was strongly suspected of having saved a drunken sailor who fell overboard from a Cape Cod schooner. The professor himself used to deny this story with great indignation, and say it was of a piece with the slanderous invention about his family’s connection with Gulnare of the sea and her misalliance. His grandson, however, if the story was hinted at in his presence, would look grave and say that he had never supposed the story was true, but if it were, his grandfather had only obeyed the dictates of mermanity. This was a shocking speech in the ears of the merpeople. Our young merman, however, had distinguished himself in the war, and no one cared to quarrel with him. So they contented themselves with calling him “queer,” and saying that “oddity ran in the family.” * * * * *