“Man, what with me?” she said, in a tone of voice which, though sweet as the song of a bird, had something so unnatural in it that it made his blood run cold. “Wishes three,” he replied, in the prescribed formula of the demonologist, and then proceeded to state them. His father, a sailor like himself, had been drowned many years before; and the first wish suggested to him by the circumstance was, that neither he himself nor any of his friends should perish by the sea. The second--for he feared lest Helen, so lady-looking a person, and an heiress to boot, might yet find herself the wife of a poor man--was, that he should be uninterruptedly fortunate in all his undertakings. The third wish he never communicated to any one except the mermaid, and yet no one ever failed to guess it. “Quit, and have,” replied the creature. Reid slackened his hold; and pressing her tail against the rock until it curled to her waist, and raising her hands, the palms pressed together, and the edge to her face, she sprang into the sea. The spray dashed to the sun; the white shoulders and silvery tail gleamed for a moment through the green depths of the water. A slight ripple splashed against the beach, and when it subsided, every trace of the mermaid had vanished. Reid wiped his brow, and ascending by one of the slopes of the hill towards the well-known resorts of his town’s-women--not the less inclined to hope from the result of his strange contest--he found Helen Stuart seated with one of her companions, a common acquaintance, on the grassy knoll over the Lover’s Leap. The charm, thought he, already begins to work.