I do not know, Tom: but I, too, suspect not; and I do know that honest men’s guesses are sometimes found by science to have been prophecies, and that there is no smoke without fire, and few universal legends without their nucleus of fact. After all, those sea-ladies are too lovely a dream to part with in a hurry, at the mere despotic fiat of stern old Dame Analysis, divine and reverend as she is. Why, like Keats’s Lamia, ‘Must all charms flee, At the mere touch of cold Philosophy,’ who will not even condescend to be awe-struck at the new wonders which she herself reveals daily? Perhaps, too, according to the Duke of Wellington’s great dictum, that each man must be the best judge in his own profession, sailors may know best whether mermaids exist or not. Besides, was it not here on Croyde Sands abreast of us, this very last summer, that a maiden—by which beautiful old word West-country people still call young girls—was followed up the shore by a mermaid who issued from the breakers, green-haired, golden-combed, and all; and, fleeing home, took to her bed and died, poor thing, of sheer terror in the course of a few days, persisting in her account of the monster? True, the mermaid may have been an overgrown Lundy Island seal, carried out of his usual haunts by spring-tides and a school of fish. Be it so. Lundy and its seals are wonderful enough in all reason to thinking men, as it looms up there out of the Atlantic, with its two great square headlands, not twenty miles from us, in the white summer haze. We will go there some day, and pick up a wild tale or two about it. But, lo! a black line creeps up the western horizon. Tom, gesticulating, swears that he sees ‘a billow break.’ True: there they come; the great white horses, that ‘champ and chafe, and toss in the spray.’ That long-becalmed trawler to seaward fills, and heels over, and begins to tug and leap impatiently at the weight of her heavy trawl. Five minutes more, and the breeze will be down upon us. The young men whistle openly to woo it; the old father thinks such a superstition somewhat beneath both his years and his religion, but cannot help pursing up his lips into a sly ‘whe-eugh’ when he has got well forward out of sight. * * * * Five long minutes; there is a breath of air; a soft distant murmur; the white horses curve their necks, and dive and vanish; and rise again like snowy porpoises, nearer, and nearer, and nearer. Father and sons are struggling with that raving, riotous, drunken squaresail forward; while we haul away upon the main-sheet.