'Yes, I shot her, to my undoing and the undoing of our fair haven,' groaned Tristram Bird; and he told them all about it--where he had seen the beautiful Mermaid, of his bewitchment from the moment he saw her face of haunting charm looking up at him from the Mermaid's Glass, and of the curse she uttered ere she fell back dead into the pool. All the smiles went out of the bright faces of the Padstow maids, as he told his tale. 'What a pity, Tristram Bird, you should have been so foolish as to shoot a Mermaid!' they said; and they did not go and pick flowers as they had intended, but went back to their homes instead, and Tristram Bird went on to Higher St. Saviour's, where he lived in a little house overlooking Padstow Town nestling like a bird in its nest. A fearful gale blew on the night of the day Tristram Bird shot the Mermaid, and all the next day, too, and the next night; and through the awful howling of the gale was heard the bellowing of the wind-tormented sea. Such a terrible storm had never been known at Padstow Town within the memory of man, so the old Granfer men said, and never a gale lasted so long. When the wind went down the natives of Padstow ventured out to see what the gale had wrought, and sad was the havoc it had made; and some went out to Chapel Stile, where a small chapel stood overlooking the haven, and what should meet their horrified gaze but a terrible bar of sand which the Mermaid's curse had brought there; and it stretched from Hawker's Cove to the opposite shore, and what was worse, the great sand-bar was covered with wrecks of ships and bodies of drowned men. 'It is the bar of doom brought there by the fearful curse of the maid of the sea whom I shot with my brand-new gun,' cried Tristram Bird, who was one of the first to reach the stile when the wind had gone down; and he told them all, as he had told the Padstow maids, of what the Mermaid had said before and after he had shot her. 'And because of the wicked deed I did,' he said, 'I have brought a curse on my native town, and Padstow will never be blessed with a safe and beautiful harbour till the poor Mermaid's death be avenged.'