No doubt of it: the sweet purple sorcery was stealing away all natural alertness. A certain Irish magic was filling the room and swelling, Reuben himself yielding to enjoyment of it, until it possessed not only the mournful mighty sound of a sea wind but all the driving power of a wind crossing the dark places, the lonely places, the foam-drenched wilderness. Daniel Shawn was explaining--had been for a long time, Reuben realized--that the tales of mermaids were mythical fancies; that certain profounder mysteries had nothing to do with such froth of dreams. Uncle John appeared unwilling to abandon the fishtail wenches, and countered with classical texts. Some of these, Reuben knew from a glint in Uncle John's eye and a squirming discomfort in Mr. Hibbs, had been invented on the spot for the occasion--John Kenny could be a rough man with a spontaneous Latin hexameter. But Shawn insisted, and was now launched on the story of a supposed mermaid seen by himself and another of his watch on a voyage among the hot somnolent West Indian isles. "Truly the crayter had the like of a woman's bubbies, and nursed a little one at them, and wasn't it meself was thinking I beheld the mermaid, for all she was that mortal ugly and her mouth ran up and down like a caterpillar's?" "Now," said Gideon Hibbs--"now, after all!" "I give you my word, sir, do I not?" Daniel Shawn's flare of wrath was swiftly veiled. "Will a man be inventing such a thing? Wasn't it meself that saw that mouth munching a huge great gob of sea grass, the kind that groweth in brackish waters, and saw the lips churning from side to side? That other man started for a harpoon. I stayed him. Ochone!--how could a man be looking on the ugly thing, the mother she was, and not have pity?" "Pity's a rare uneasy thing," said John Kenny.