Reid was too well acquainted with the beliefs of the age not to know that he looked upon the mermaid. And were he less a lover than he was, he would have done nothing more. But, aware of her strange power over the destinies of men, he only thought that now or never was his opportunity for gaining the hand of Helen. “Would that there were some of my lads here to see fair play!” he muttered, as, creeping amid the crags, and availing himself of every brake that afforded the slightest cover, he stole towards the shelf on which the creature was seated. She turned round in the moment he had gained it; the last note of her song lengthened into a shriek; and with an expression of mingled terror and surprise, which clouded a set of the loveliest features, she attempted to fling herself into the water; but in the moment of the attempt, the brawny arms of the shipmaster were locked round her waist. Her arms clasped his shoulders in turn, and with a strength scarcely inferior to that exerted by the snake of India when struggling with the tiger, she strove to drag him to the edge of the rock; but though his iron sinews quivered under her grasp like the beams of his vessel when straining beneath a press of canvas, he thought of Helen Stuart, and bore her down by main force in the opposite direction. A fainter and a still fainter struggle ensued, and she then lay passive against the cliff. Never had Reid seen aught so beautiful--and he was convinced of it, lover as he was--as the half-fish half-woman creature that now lay prostrate before him.