Also the woman living in the house called “St. Magloire” opposite the site of his old chapel, said she supposed “Monsieur Magloire” was the first _man_ who came to these islands, and when I asked her who were living here when he came, she said “Oh, ‘little people,’ who lived in the cromlechs.” Mermaids. “I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall.” --_Shakespeare._ “Thou rememb’rest Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back, Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song.” --_Shakespeare._ A belief in the existence of mermaids is not quite extinct, although no tales relating to them appear to have been preserved among the people. An old man, living in the parish of the Forest, of the name of Matthieu Tostevin, whose word might be implicitly relied on, affirmed to Mr. Denys Corbet, the master of the parochial school, that on one occasion, being on the cliffs over-looking Petit-Bôt Bay, he saw a company of six mermaids, or, as he termed them “_seirênes_,” disporting themselves on the sands below. He described them as usually depicted, half woman, half fish. He hastened down to the beach as fast as he could, to get a nearer sight of them, but, on his approaching them, they took to the sea, and were immediately out of sight. [Illustration: “Looking down Smith Street, 1870.”] It was doubtless a flock of seals which he saw, for, although these animals are no longer found in numbers on our coasts, a stray one is occasionally, though very rarely, to be seen. They are known to exist on the opposite shores of Brittany and Normandy, and the few specimens that have been taken in our seas are of the same variety as those found on the French coast. It is not improbable that they may have been more common in former days; and it is possible that “Le Creux du Chien,” a large cavern at the foot of the cliffs to the eastward of Petit-Bôt Bay, may have been so named from being the resort of one of these amphibians.[112] [112] From Mr. Denys Corbet. EDITOR’S NOTE.--In Sark as well as in Guernsey they still believe in sirens, and an old man there, who had been a fisherman in his youth, told me of these women who used to sit on the rocks and sing before a storm. In Sark they are considered young and beautiful, but Guernsey fishermen talk of _old_ women who sit on the rocks and sing, and the ships are brought closer to the rocks by the curiosity of those on board to hear this mysterious music, and then the storm comes, and the ships go to pieces on the rocks, and the sirens,--whether young or old,--carry down the sailors to the bottom of the sea, and eat them. So the tradition goes. Referring to the legend of the Changeling, as related on pages 219-220, Paul Sébillot also tells a story very similar to this. Tome I. p. 118-119.