the only tidings ever heard of them. Mermaids have frightened many a brave man; and, in several of the monthly magazines published in the last century their existence was as seriously discussed as apparitions of sea-serpents have been in our own day. Andrew Brands saw one. “I recollect Andrew perfectly well. He was a stout man, with a broad good-humoured face, and dark hair, who wore his bonnet upon the back of his head.” Occasionally employed as a boatman or pilot, he looked more like a jolly sailor than a sleepy fisherman. One summer day Andrew was found lying insensible on the hill of Torry which faces the sea upon the side of the river Dee, opposite to Footdee. When roused, he spoke confusedly and incoherently. He was thought to be deranged. He was carried to the ferry and rowed home. After several weeks of delirious fever he became low and melancholy, and declined to give any account of his illness. Under medical treatment he recovered, although reduced to a skeleton. The fearful belief spread through the village that Andrew Brands had seen something. When questioned after his recovery, he said in substance: “I was upon the outlook lying upon my breast, and looking over the top of the rocks, when I saw a creature like a woman sitting upon a stone. She seemed to have something like a white sheet, or grave-clothes wrapped around her. Sometimes she combed her hair, and sometimes she tossed her arms in the air. All her ways were fearsome, and at last she rushed into the sea, and vanished beneath the waves. My heart lap (leapt), I grew blind, and I remember nothing more until I awoke with all my bones sore, and the men lifting me up.” The medical theory of his illness, as expounded by his doctor, was, that he had gone out with incipient fever upon him, had fallen asleep in an exposed situation, and the hallucinations of delirium had done all the rest. My informant who remembered him well, maintained he had been unwittingly the Actæon of a bathing Diana at a time when ladies rarely bathed in Scotland, and had been punished by the vengeance of the goddess. Probably, however, an accumulation of foam among the stones of the beach had taken the flickering form of a woman. The white scum would seem to rise up amidst the black stones, and Andrew Brands was frightened by a mermaid because he had never been taught the effects of perspective. Was it in some such way as this that Cytherea herself was seen by the poetic eyes of a fisherman of Cyprus, issuing from the froth of the sea until she was wafted in a shell to the shore by Zephyrus, where the Graces received and adorned her for presentation to the celestials of Olympus?