impossible to say. If they did not influence directly, they were
certainly suggestive of considerations which did have their weight. The
result was, that permission was given for the stay of Reuben, on
condition that Mr. Brindlock could give him constant occupation, and
that he should be regular in his attendance on the Sabbath at the
Fulton-Street Church. Shortly after, the Doctor goes to the city,
provided, by the watchful care of Miss Eliza, with a complete wardrobe
for the truant boy, and bearing kind messages from the household. But
chiefly it is the Doctor's object to give his poor boy due admonition
for his great breach of duty, and to insist upon his writing to the
worthy Mr. Brummem a full apology for his conduct. He also engages his
friend of the Fulton-Street parish to have an eye upon his son, and to
report to him at once any wide departure from the good conduct he
promises.
Reuben writes the apology insisted upon to Mr. Brummem in this style:--
"MY DEAR SIR,--I am sorry that I threw 'Daboll' in your face
as I did, and hope you will forgive the same.
"Yours respectfully."
But after the Doctor's approval of this, the lad cannot help adding a
postscript of his own to this effect:--
"P.S. I hope old Whiteface didn't lose a shoe when you drove
out on the river road? I saw you; for I was sitting in the
edge of the woods, eating Keziah's gingerbread. Please thank
her, and give my respects to all the fellows."
Miss Johns considers it her duty to write a line of expostulation to her
nephew, which she does, with faultless penmanship, in this strain:--
"We were shocked to hear of your misconduct toward the
worthy Mr. Brummem. I could hardly believe it possible that
Master Reuben Johns had been guilty of such an indiscretion.
Your running away was, I think, uncalled for, and the
embarkment upon the sloop, under the circumstances, was
certainly very reprehensible. I trust that we shall hear
only good accounts of you from this period forth, and that
you will be duly grateful for your father's distinguished
kindness in allowing you to stay in New York. I shall be
happy to have you write to me an occasional epistle, and
hope to see manifest a considerable improvement in your
handwriting. Does Sister Mabel wear her ermine cape this
winter? I trust we shall hear of your constant attendance at
the Fulton-Street Church, and hear only commendation of you
in whatever, duties you may be called to engage. Adele
speaks of you often, and I think misses you very much
indeed."
Yet the spinster aunt was not used to flatter Reuben with any such
mention as this. "What can she mean," said he, musingly, "by talking
such stuff to me?"
Phil Elderkin, too, after a little, writes long letters that are full of
the daily boy-life at Ashfield:--how "the chestnutting has been
first-rate this year," and he has a bushel of prime ones seasoning in
the garret;--how Sam Throop, the stout son of the old postmaster, has
had a regular tussle with the master in school, "hot and heavy, over the
benches, and all about, and Sam was expelled, and old Crocker got a
black eye, and, darn him, he's got it yet";--and how "_somebody_ (name
unknown) tied a smallish tin kettle to old Hobson's sorrel mare's tail
last Saturday night, and the way she went down the street was a
caution!"--and how Nat Boody has got a new fighting-dog, and _such_ a
ratter!--and how Suke, "the divine Suke, is, they say, going to marry
the stage-driver. _Sic transit gloria mulie_--something,--for I'll be
hanged, if I know the proper case."
And there are some things this boisterous Phil writes in tenderer
mood:--how "Rose and Adele are as thick as ever, and Adele comes up
pretty often to pass an evening,--glad enough, I guess, to get away from
Aunt Eliza,--and I see her home, of course. She plays a stiff game of
backgammon; she never throws but she makes a point; she beats me."
And from such letters the joyous shouts and merry halloos of the
Ashfield boys come back to him again; he hears the rustling of the
brook, the rumbling of the mill; he sees the wood standing on the hills,
and the girls at the door-yard gates; the hum of voices in the old
academy catches his ear, and the drowsy song of the locusts coming in at
the open windows all the long afternoons of August; and he watches again
the glancing feet of Rose--who was once Amanda--tripping away under the
sycamores; and the city Mortimer bethinks him of another Amanda, of
browner hue and in coquettish straw, idling along the same street, with
reticule lightly swung upon her finger; and the boy bethinks him of
tender things he might have said in the character of Mortimer, but never
did say, and of kisses he might have stolen, (in the character of
Mortimer,) but never did steal.
And now these sights, voices, vagaries, as month after month passes in
his new home, fade,--fade, yet somehow abide. The patter of a thousand
feet are on the pavement around him. What wonder, if, in the surrounding
din, the tranquillity of Ashfield, its scenes, its sounds, should seem a
mere dream of the past? What wonder, if the solemn utterances from the
old pulpit should be lost in the roar of the new voices? The few months
he was to spend in their hearing run into a score, and again into
another score. Two or three years hence we shall meet him
again,--changed, certainly; but whether for better or for worse the
sequel will show.
And Rose?--and Adele?
Well, well, we must not overleap the quiet current of our story. While
the May violets are in bloom, let us enjoy them and be thankful; and
when the autumn flowers are come to take their places, let us enjoy
those, too, and thank God.
DEEP-SEA DAMSELS.
"Once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song;
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid's music."
_A Midsummer Night's Dream._
Men have a commodious faith generally, and in the things of land and
water; but they do not believe in the mermaid.
Once, a thousand years ago, a certain Arabian traveller described an
Oriental fish that came up out of the sea to catch flies or to get a
drink. It was no crabbed crustacean, no compromise of claws; but a fish
with fins,--a perch: and, being a perch, it not only came up on dry
land, but did, the traveller said, climb trees. There was a climax! No
one characterized this story fitly, for all perceived that the Arabian
must know its nature very well. And so the Arabian traveller died in
good time, and the thousand years went on about their business, and in
our days the fish story has been verified. Now it rests, partly, on the
authority of "two Dutch naturalists residing at Tranquebar." Two Dutch
naturalists are a good foundation for anything less than a pyramid. In
this matter they are not alone, however; for the naturalist Daldorf,
also, who was a lieutenant in the Danish East-India Company's service,
communicated to Joseph Banks, who "did not believe in the mermaid," that
"in the year 1791 he had taken this fish from a moist cavity in the stem
of a Palmyra palm which grew near a lake." More than this, "he saw it
when already five feet above the ground struggling to ascend still
higher." And this was its process: "suspending itself by its
gill-covers, and bending its tail to the left, it fixed its anal fin in
the cavity of the bark, and sought by expanding its body to urge its way
upward"; and its progress was arrested only by the hand with which the
valiant Daldorf seized it. More in reference to the same fish may be
found in Tennent's great book on Ceylon, in Hartwig, and later
naturalists generally.
Men would naturally doubt of fish in trees. Even the Chinese would. "To
climb a tree in pursuit of fish," is a phrase actually used as an
hyperbole of nonsense by many Tsze, in the book called "Shang Mung." And
the above is therefore a fair instance of the progress of human
intelligence,--of a thousand years of incredulity, and final scientific
admission. Let it be taken here as absinthe, appetizingly.
The ancients believed, among other things, that man had, to say the
least, relations in the various departments of Nature and in the various
divisions of animal life; that there were wild men who lived in the
forests, and differed from man proper principally in other than
physical respects; and that there were wild men who lived in the sea:
also that there were beings half-man and half-horse; others half-man and
half-bird; and others, again, half-man and half-fish. In respect to the
wild man of the woods, it may be said that those words are the literal
signification of the Malayan words _orang outang_; and that animal's
appearance seems to determine that the Satyr and kindred creatures were
not entirely imaginations. For the half-man and half-horse we have
abundant explanation in the various wild riding tribes of men,
especially the Tartars. The half-bird appears to have been distinguished
for only a singing reason, and is therefore, as it were, a piece of
heraldry. For the wild man of the sea, and the half-man and half-fish,
what have we?
Let us see.
Apparently the earliest presentation to men's eyes of that form under
which the mermaid is still figured was the image, in very ancient days,
of Derceto, goddess of the Philistines of Ascalon, in a temple of that
city. She was woman above and fish below. She had been a beautiful
virgin, but had excited that all-prevalent passion since irregulated by
Aphrodite. It proved her ruin, she cast herself into the sea, and
suffered the partial metamorphosis. So was it fabled in that land: but
it is much more plausibly thought that the combination of woman and fish
declared, hieroglyphically, some dim knowledge that those ancients had
of certain relations between the moon and the sea, of which things the
respective parts were typical.
Half-fishy also was the form of that Dagon which in Ashdod, or Azotus,
another city of the Philistines, fell down upon his face before the ark
of the Lord. This Dagon was the god, apparently, in whose honor the
Philistines were gathered together on that day when blind Samson "took
hold of the two middle pillars," and let down the roof, and caught so
many swallows.
According to an ancient fable, preserved by Berosus, this is what was
known of Dagon. In the first year, there appeared, coming out of that
part of the Erythraean Sea which borders upon Babylonia, an animal whose
whole body was that of a fish; but under the fish's head he had another
head, with feet below similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish's
tail. His voice was articulate and human, and he taught men to construct
cities, to found temples, compile laws,--indeed, taught them everything
that could tend to soften them from a state of natural barbarism; and
hence he was called Oannes, a name that signified "the Enlightener"; and
this name journeying westward became contracted into _On_, and had
prefixed to it the _Dag_, signifying _a fish_, and so became Dagon.
An image of Oannes is mentioned by Berosus as preserved in his time, and
one has been found on the walls of Nimroud. In the ruins near Khorsabad
was found another of Dagon in his final Phoenician form. Engravings of
both these may be seen in "Nineveh and its Palaces."
In the story of Oannes we have probably the account preserved by a rude
people of the advent among them at a very early period of one more
enlightened than themselves; just as the Peruvians accounted in their
peculiar way for the coming of Manco Capac. He comes also from a land
farther east, by the Persian Gulf. These people were at the time very
likely ignorant of even the most rudimentary navigation, and hence
coming by water he was to them a fish indeed.
The incarnation of Brahma as a fish--the Matsya Avatar--is recounted in
much Sanscrit; but it appears to be only a symbolical reference to a
great division of Nature,--a heathen assertion of God in the sea, as
well as elsewhere. The same is true of the marine deities of Greece and
Rome, which were not fishy, though the words Triton and Nereid have led
to misconception, as in relation to those words it is necessary to
understand a distinction that has not always been made. The mythological
Triton was one,--a sea-god subordinate to Poseidon, and played a
conspicuous part in Deucalion's flood. He is pictured by Ovid as
carrying a horn, and wearing a Tynan robe, that may be construed into a
blue jacket,--which would make him the original sailor. The Nereids were
fifty. They were the daughters of Nereus, and, pursued by the fifty sons
of AEgyptus, could find rest in no land, and became wanderers upon the
sea, and at length sea-nymphs. Each had a special, besides the general
name.
There does, however, appear to have been a "fishy composure" held sacred
by the Greeks: this was the _Pompilus_, "Pompilus," says Apollonius
Rhodius, "was originally a man, and he was changed into a fish on
account of a love-affair of Apollo's. They say that Apollo fell in love
with a beauty named Ocyrhoe, and that, when she had crossed over to
Miletus, at the time of a festival, and was afraid to return lest the
god should attack her, she induced Pompilus, a sailor, and friend to her
father, to see her safely home; and that he led her down to the shore
and embarked, when Apollo appeared, took the maiden, sunk the ship, and
metamorphosed Pompilus into a fish." Others assert this fish to have
sprung at the same time with Aphrodite, and from the same heavenly
blood. What fish it was it is scarcely possible to say; but that there
was a fish bearing this name held sacred by the Greeks is certain.
The Triton, in which the ancients believed as part of the physical
world, was a different being from the deity. He was the classical
Merman. The term _Nereid_ was used confusedly to express the female of
the Triton, or the Mermaid.
The passage, in his "Natural History," where Pliny speaks of the Triton,
indicates that the existence of such an animal was not universally
admitted. It is prefaced thus:--"The vulgar notion may very possibly be
true, that whatever is produced in any other department of Nature may be
found in the sea as well." We are then told that a deputation of persons
from Olisipo, (the present Lisbon,) that had been sent for the purpose,
brought word to the Emperor Tiberius that a Triton had been both seen
and heard in a certain cavern, blowing a conch-shell, and that he was of
the form in which Tritons are usually represented.
This is so simple and meagre as to read like an extract from some diary
or annals; and the mere existence of such a passage seems to be good
evidence that something, at the least, like a Triton, was certainly
seen. For Pliny was sufficiently near to this time to know whether such
a deputation had come to Rome, and would scarcely have volunteered a
falsehood; so that the deputation may reasonably be granted. Then the
distance from Lisbon to Rome was so great, particularly in that
ante-railroad time, and the general interest in the Merman so little,
that it does not seem possible a deputation should be sent that distance
"for the purpose" only of presenting this information, unless the proof
of the object seen was of the most convincing character to those by whom
the deputation was sent.
It is to be regretted that Pliny did not give at more length the
statement of this early scientific commission. He does not leave the
subject immediately, however, but says,--
"I have some distinguished informants of equestrian rank, who state that
they themselves once saw in the Ocean of Gades a sea-man which bore in
every part of his body a perfect resemblance to a human being; and that
during the night he would climb up into ships, upon which the side of
the vessel where he seated himself would instantly sink downward, and,
if he remained there any considerable time, even go under water."
Gades was Cadiz, and the Ocean of Gades was that part of the Atlantic
lying south and west of Spain and west of Africa. The statement of the
Merman's boarding a ship is, a little singularly, to be found as well in
the ballad of the "Merman Rosmer," which comes into English from a
Scandinavian source. The effect of his boarding a ship is identical
also. He would seem to have been a heavy fellow, North and South.
"Nor yet," says Pliny, still on the same subject, "is the figure
generally attributed to the Nereids [Mermaids] at all a fiction; only in
them the portion of the body that resembles the human figure is still
rough all over with scales. For one of these creatures was seen upon the
same shores, [Ocean of Gades,] and as it died its plaintive murmurs were
heard, even by the inhabitants at a distance. The legates of Gaul, too,
wrote word to the late Emperor Augustus, that a considerable number of
Nereids had been found dead upon the sea-shore."
Entire faith in the scales is not exacted of the reader, and the weight
of authority, especially scientific, is against them. No marine mammals
have scales. There is, of course, no knowing what they may have had. The
statement of what the legates of Gaul wrote to the Emperor is of most
consequence in this extract, and it is perhaps out of a natural respect
for authority that we are inclined to give most weight to these official
communications. Officials, it is true, have sometimes erred; but these
officials agree with others, and to be stranded has been a common
misfortune of mermen and maids.
Alexander of Alexandria, the good Bishop who had so healthy an
abhorrence of Arianism, _saw_ (upon his own authority) a Nereid
(Mermaid) that had been thrown ashore on the coast of the Peloponnesus.
Seeing was believing; and if the Bishop was right in so many things, all
the way up to Divinity, is it possible that he could be wrong in the
mere fact of a dead animal? Or if he was wrong in this particular, is
not the whole question as to the right or wrong of Arianism opened
again?
A mermaid was stranded in 1403 near Haerlem,--driven ashore by a
tempest, said one Meyer, a Dutchman. It was brought to feed upon bread
and milk, taught to spin, and lived for many years. John Gerard of
Leyden adds, that she would frequently pull off her clothes and run
toward the water, and that her speech was so confused a noise as not to
be understood by anybody. She was buried in the churchyard, because she
had learned to make the sign of the cross. They had much consideration
for a possible soul in those days.
Gerard spoke this upon the credit of several persons who had seen her.
We find noted by another author, that, "in the fifteenth century, after
a dreadful tempest on the coast of Holland, a mermaid was found
struggling in the mud, near Edam, in West Friesland; whence it was
carried to Haerlem, where it lived some years, was clothed in female
apparel, and, it is said, was taught to spin." This was apparently the
same.
This creature is said to have run,--a thing somewhat inconsistent with a
caudal termination,--and she must be supposed, therefore, to be of the
Wild-Man-of-the-Sea family rather than of the half-man, half-fish. She
was, perhaps, a relative of this next, recorded in an ancient English
chronicle:--
"In the time of King Henry I., when Bartholomew de Glanville was warden
of Oxford Castle, the fishermen took in their nets a wild man, having
the human shape complete, with horns on his head, and long and pick
beard, and a great deal of shaggy hair on his breast; but he stole away
to sea privately, and was never seen afterwards."
He wished, evidently, to avoid the embarrassment of the farewell.
Another of these footed sea-men makes his appearance in the book of
Gellius on Animals. Therein is recounted the history, as far as landsmen
knew it, of a Triton that used to come ashore on the coast of Epirus,
and lie in wait by a well but a short distance from the sea, and who,
when the country girls came to the well for water, would leap out and
seize them, and bear them away beneath the waves; and not able to
conceive the peculiarity of the human lungs that lurked beneath their
beautiful bosoms, many a one the wretch thus drowned in his passionate
admiration. Beautiful Greek girls! with such limbs as have come down in
marble! Life under the sea seems favorable to the perfection of a
correct taste.
_Mem._--The reader is not at liberty to doubt this Triton. Draconetus
Bonifacius, a Neapolitan, subsequently saw him preserved in honey.
In 1560 the fishermen of Ceylon caught seven of these sea-people of both
sexes. They were seen by many Portuguese gentlemen then at Menar, and,
among the rest, by Dimaz Bosquez, physician to the Viceroy of Goa, who
minutely examined them, made dissections, and asserted that the
principal parts, internal and external, were conformable to those of the
human species.[A]
In the reign of Roger, King of Sicily, a young man swimming in the sea,
one night, perceived that something followed him. He thought it one of
his companions, but caught it by the hair, and dragged it on shore. It
was a maiden of great beauty! He threw his cloak about her, and took her
to his home. There she lived with him and bore a son. But he was
continually troubled that one so beautiful should be dumb; for she had
never spoken. One day a companion jeered at the spectre that he had at
home, and, angry and terrified, he urged her to tell him who or what she
was, and threatened with his sword to kill the child before her, if she
did not. Then she said that he had lost a good wife by forcing her to
speak; and she vanished. A few years after, when the son was playing on
the shore, his mother dragged him into the sea, and he was drowned.
In the South of France a belief prevails in beings called Dracs, who
have apparently a complete human form, and who inhabit indifferently the
rivers or the sea. Gervase of Tilbury has recorded several instances of
their appearance, of which the following is one:--
"There is on the banks of the Rhone, under a guard-house at the north
gate of the city of Arles, a great pool of the river. In these deep
places they say that the Dracs are often seen of bright nights. A few
years ago, there was, for three successive days, openly heard the
following words in the place outside the gate of the city which I have
mentioned, while the figure, as it were, of a man ran along the
bank,--'The hour is past, and the man does not come!' On the third day,
about the ninth hour, while the figure of a man raised his voice higher
than usual, a young man ran swiftly to the bank, plunged in, and was
swallowed up, and the voice was heard no more."
The depths of the sea appear to be the Fairy Land of France, and the
French Mermaids merely fairies. Such is their character in popular
ballads of Provence. Among popular legends of Brittany, "The Groac'h of
the Isle of Lok" is peculiarly striking, but withal merely a fairy
story,--the Groac'h being a first cousin at least of Undine and the
Lorelei. Yet in Brittany another Mermaid--Morgan, or Morverc'h,
sea-woman, or sea-daughter--sings and combs its golden hair by the
noontide sun at the edge of the ocean.
The Irish Moruach, or Merrow, seamaid, is the _bona fide_ Mermaid, and
some families in the South of Ireland are said to claim descent from
them. There are numerous legends.
Mermaids are plentiful in all accounts of Norway; and Aldrovandus gives
the portrait of one that was captured in the Baltic, and presented to
Sigismund, King of Poland. It lived several days, and was seen by all
his court. Aldrovandus gives also the picture of a Merman who, in his
natural condition, had the appearance of being clothed in a bishop's
frock, and of another with horns, which was a peculiarity of the one
taken in England somewhat earlier.
In Scandinavian mythology every division of Nature is peopled with its
peculiar spirits, and all have a longing, mournful desire for salvation.
A river-spirit, or Nek, once asked a priest if he would likely be saved.
"Sooner," answered the priest, "will this cane which I hold in my hand
grow green flowers than thou attain salvation."
The spirit wept mournfully, and the priest passed on. But in a little
while his cane actually bloomed, and put forth leaves and blossoms, and
he went back and told the spirit, who then sang and rejoiced all night.
The Havmand is the Merman; the Havfrue, the Mermaid. They are handsome,
rather beneficent than evil, though occasionally both are treacherous.
"Fishermen sometimes see the Mermaid in the bright summer sun, when a
thin mist hangs over the sea, sitting on the surface of the water, and
combing her long, golden hair with a golden comb, or driving up her
snow-white cattle to feed on the islands. At other times she comes as a
beautiful maiden, chilled and shivering with the cold of night, to the
fires the fishers have, hoping by this means to entice them to her
love."