she was of having no one to protect her, had made her friends; and now that harvest was over, she was returning home, proud of her slender earnings, and full of hope and happiness. It was early on a Sabbath morning, and her path winded along the southern bank of Loch-Slin, where the parish of Tarbat borders on that of Fearn. [Sidenote: THE WASHING OF THE MERMAID.] Loch-Slin is a dark sluggish sheet of water, bordered on every side by thick tangled hedges of reeds and rushes; nor has the surrounding scenery much to recommend it. It is comparatively tame--tamer perhaps for the last thirty years than at any former period; for the plough has been busy among its green undulating slopes, and many of its more picturesque thickets of alders and willows have disappeared. It possesses, however, its few points of interest; and its appearance at this time in the quiet of the Sabbath morning, was one of extreme seclusion. The tall old castle of Loch-Slin, broken and weather-worn, and pregnant with associations of the remote past, stood up over it like some necromancer beside his mirror; and the maiden, as she tripped homewards along the little blind pathway that went winding along the quiet shore--now in a hollow, anon on a height--could see the red image of the ruins heightened by the flush of the newly-risen sun, reflected on the calm surface that still lay dark and grey under the shadow of the eastern bank. All was still as death, when her ear suddenly caught a low indistinct sound as of a continuous knocking, which heightened as she went, until it was at length echoed back from the old walls; and which, had she heard it on a week morning, she would have at once set down as that of the knocking of clothes at a washing. But who, she thought, can be “knocking claes” on the Sabbath? She turned a projecting angle of the bank, and saw, not ten yards away, what seemed to be a tall female standing in the water immediately beyond the line of flags and rushes which fringed the shore, and engaged apparently in knocking clothes on a stone, with the sort of bludgeon still used in the north country for the purpose. The maiden hurried past, convinced that the creature before her could be none other than the mermaid of Loch-Slin; but in the midst of her terror she was possessed enough to remark that the beautiful goblin seemed to ply its work with a malignant pleasure, and that on a grass plot directly opposite where it stood, there were spread out as if to dry, more than thirty smocks and shirts, all horribly dabbled with blood. As the poor girl entered her mother’s cottage, the excitement that had borne her up in her flight suddenly failed, and she sunk insensible upon the floor. For a moment the mother seemed roused by the circumstance, but as her daughter recovered, she again relapsed into her accustomed apathy.