Never, said the miller. Well, to go on: Sometimes she would get through the causeway and go and lie in the pool over yonder near your cottage, floating and sending the ripples widening in great circles round her. Now, it happened one day that the Nix was in her place, hidden behind the door near the wheel, when a pedlar passed by on the road. He had a pack on his back, gold rings in his ears and a staff in his hand; for he was a lusty fellow, landed off a ship that had come in from the Baltic, and was travelling inland to sell what wares he could carry. He was singing as he went, and the Nix came out and swam close under the walls to hear him. He sang of the sea, and there was something in his voice that reminded you of the wind droning in the rigging. (How grandmother knew that I don’t know, for she wasn’t there to hear him; but she had once been in a ship off the coast of Jutland, so I suppose she guessed it.) “Out and home and out again, As the tide rolls heavily, With the ship to steer and the fog to fear, By the grey banks near the sea. “Hand to the helm and heart to the blast, And face to the driving rain, And the sea runs high to the glowering sky As we sail for the North again. “Hark to the mermaids off the shore, As they sing so bonnilie Through the rocks and caves to the sounding waves In the grey lands out at sea, In the caves across the sea.” She had never heard such words or such a tune in her life, and she rose, head and shoulders, out of the water, crying to the pedlar to sing it again. But when he saw the yellow hearts of the water-lilies round her head, he took them for gold, and he leaned over the little wall and made a snatch at them. The Nix dived under again and went back like a flash to the darkness by the wheel. But all day long she sat there, singing to herself all she could remember of the song of the pedlar; she was like one possessed: “By the grey banks near the sea,” she sang, rocking herself about, “In the caves across the sea.” Now, as time went on her longing grew stronger and stronger: all the day she thought of the sea and the grey caves of the coast, and all night she sat on the wall, looking out eastwards and listening for any sound of water that might come inland. (It was at this time that the miller’s man saw her.) Why this happened to her I can’t tell, for I don’t know. Perhaps her relations were those sea-kelpies that haunt the Baltic.