into the Seal; and in Shetland it is believed, that, while they are
distinct beings, they can only come to the surface of sea by entering
the skin of some animal capable of existing in the water. This also is
always the Seal. In this form they land on some rock and amuse
themselves as they will. But they must take care of these skins, for
without them they can never return.
One summer's eve, a Shetlander walked along the shore of a little inlet,
By the moonlight he saw, at some distance before him, a number of these
sea-people who had "left unsounded depths to dance on sands." Near them,
on the ground, he saw several seal-skins.
As he approached, the disturbed dancers precipitately made to their
garments, drew them on, and, in the form of seals, plunged into the sea.
When he came up, he saw one seal-skin still there; he snatched it up,
ran away, and secured it. He then returned. There he met upon the shore
the fairest maiden that eye ever gazed upon. She was lamenting piteously
the loss of her seal-skin robe, without which she could never rejoin her
friends or reach her watery home. He endeavored to console her. She
implored him to restore her dress; but her beauty had decided that. At
last, as he continued inexorable, she consented to become his wife. They
were married and had several children, who retained no mark of the
watery strain, save a thin web between their fingers and a peculiar bend
of the hand.
The Shetlander's love for his wife was unbounded, but she made a cold
return. Often she stole out alone and hastened to the sea-shore, and at
a given signal a seal of large size would appear, and they would hold
converse for hours in an unknown language, when she would return home
pensive and melancholy.
So years passed and her hopes vanished, when one day the children,
playing behind a stack of corn, found a seal-skin. Delighted, they ran
to show the prize to their mother. She was no less delighted, for she
saw in it the lost home and friends beneath the water. Yet she loved her
children. That proved but a slight pang, and with many embraces she fled
to the sea.
The husband came in almost immediately, and hearing what had happened
ran out only to see her plunge into the sea, where she was joined by the
seal. She looked back and saw his misery, "Farewell!" she said. "I loved
you well while I was with you, but I always loved my first husband
better."
"Near the coast," says Sir James Forbes, "we saw many sorts of fish, but
did not meet with many of the Mermaids so often mentioned in these seas
especially by Mr. Matcham, a gentleman of great respectability, and at
that time superintendent of the Company's Marine at Bombay. I have heard
him declare, that, when in command of a trading vessel at Mozambique,
Mombaz, and Melinda, three of the principal seaports on the east coast
of Africa, he frequently saw these extraordinary animals from six to
twelve feet long; the head resembling the human, except about the nose
and mouth, which were rather more like a hog's snout; the skin fair and
smooth; the head covered with dark, glossy hair of considerable length;
the neck, breasts, and body of the female as low as the hips, appeared
like a well-formed woman; from thence to the extremity of the tail they
were perfect fish. The shoulders and arms were in good proportion, but
from the elbow tapered to a fin, like the turtle or penguin."
The very curious reader should examine Cuvier's account of the Manatee,
or Manatus, (called from its hands,) and of the Halicore, or Dugong,
"from its mammae, called the Mermaid." Concerning this latter Hartwig has
the following sentence:--"When they raise themselves with the front part
of their body out of the water, a lively fancy might easily be led to
imagine that a human shape, though certainly none of the most beautiful,
was surging from the deep."
This is the testimony, and our deduction is short and simple.
We see, first, in the East, two hieroglyphs: one, the fishy man-monster,
expressive of a joint dominion over land and sea; the other, a woman and
fish conjoined, and expressive of relationship between the moon and the
sea; and thus _form_ of the Mermaid grew; and as that which had in its
mythology the latter of the figures was a maritime nation, the figure
was spread abroad and perpetuated. Next, in the North we see the
imagination that placed a colony of trolls under every hill, a tiny
creature under every "cowslip's bell," and a separate spirit in every
little stream, peopling also the outer ocean with its creatures; and
here the perfect _idea_ of the Mermaid, with its various beneficent or
mischievous qualities, appears.
Between these two put the sailor, always superstitious and of ready
credulity, and very often ignorant that the stories and the figure were
not the actual results of human experience, and, their reality assumed,
whatever strange thing he saw in his wanderings would be naturally
referred to them, whether it were an occasional Dugong, or only a seal
erected in the water at such a distance that the sunbeams on his shining
coat made it seem white.
And this is the natural history of the Mermaid.
Aside from this, if one were Quixotically inclined to assert the
Mermaid, he would find in all that has been said nothing of weight
against it; and after what has been proved to have existed, it is hard
to say what is impossible. The Ichthyophagi of Diodorus, while they
retained their human form, were more than half-fish, fishes in blood and
instinct very clearly. Tendencies exaggerate themselves very strangely
in a few centuries. A negro's under-lip has been so big as to hang down
before him like an apron. Cuvier declares that we "may trace the
gradations of one and the same plan, from man to the last of the
fishes"; and Mr. Darwin's theory appears to involve something like
Mermaids as inevitable links, existing or extinct, in the chain of
universal life.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] See _Memoirs of an Oriental Residence_.--Sir James Forbes.
SKIPPER BEN.
Sailing away!
Losing the breath of the shores in May,--
Dropping down from the beautiful bay,
Over the sea-slope vast and gray!
And the Skipper's eyes with a mist are blind;
For thoughts rush up on the rising wind
Of a gentle face that he leaves behind,
And a heart that throbs through the fog-bank dim,
Thinking of him.
Far into night
He watches the gleam of the lessening light
Fixed on the dangerous island-height
That bars the harbor he loves from sight;
And he wishes at dawn he could tell the tale
Of how they had weathered the southwest gale,
To brighten the cheek that had grown so pale
With a sleepless night among spectres grim,--
Terrors for him.
Yo-heave-yo!
Here's the Bank where the fishermen go!
Over the schooner's sides they throw
Tackle and bait to the deeps below.
And Skipper Ben in the water sees,
When its ripples curl to the light land-breeze,
Something that stirs like his apple-trees,
And two soft eyes that beneath them swim,
Lifted to him.
Hear the wind roar,
And the rain through the slit sails tear and pour!
"Steady! we'll scud by the Cape Ann shore,--
Then hark to the Beverly bells once more!"
And each man worked with the will of ten;
While up in the rigging, now and then,
The lightning glared in the face of Ben,
Turned to the black horizon's rim,
Scowling on him.
Into his brain
Burned with the iron of hopeless pain,
Into thoughts that grapple and eyes that strain,
Pierces the memory, cruel and vain!
Never again shall he walk at ease
Under his blossoming apple-trees
That whisper and sway in the sunset-breeze,
While the soft eyes float where the sea-gulls skim,
Gazing with him.
How they went down
Never was known in the still old town:
Nobody guessed how the fisherman brown,
With the look of despair that was half a frown,
Faced his fate in the furious night,
Faced the mad billows with hunger white,
Just within hail of the beacon-light,
That shone on a woman sweet and trim,
Waiting for him.
Beverly bells,
Ring to the tide as it ebbs and swells!
His was the anguish a moment tells,--
The passionate sorrow Death quickly knells;
But the wearing wash of a lifelong woe
Is left for the desolate heart to know,
Whose tides with the dull years come and go,
Till hope drifts dead to its stagnant brim,
Thinking of him.
ASSASSINATION.
The assassination of President Lincoln threw a whole nation into
mourning,--the few exceptions to those who deplored the President's
violent and untimely end only serving to make the general regret the
more manifest. Of all our Presidents since Washington, Mr. Lincoln had
excited the smallest amount of that feeling which places its object in
personal danger. He was a man who made a singularly favorable impression
on those who approached him, resembling in that respect President
Jackson, who often made warm friends of bitter foes, when circumstances
had forced them to seek his presence; and it is probable, that, if he
and the honest chiefs of the Rebels could have been brought face to
face, there never would have been civil war,--at least, any contest of
grand proportions; for he would not have failed to convince them that
all that they had any right to claim, and therefore all that they could
expect their fellow-citizens to fight for would be more secure under his
government than it had been under the governments of such men as Pierce
and Buchanan, who made use of sectionalism and slavery to promote the
selfish interests of themselves and their party. The estimation in which
he was latterly held by the most intelligent of the Secessionists
indicates, that, had they been acquainted with him, their Secessionism
never would have got beyond the nullification of the Palmetto
Nullifiers; and that was all fury and fuss, without any fighting in it.
Ignorance was the parent of the civil war, as it has been the parent of
many other evils,--ignorance of the character and purpose of the man who
was chosen President in 1860-61, and who entered upon official life with
less animosity toward his opponents than ever before or since had been
felt by a man elected to a great place after a bitter and exciting
contest. There is not the slightest reason for doubting the sincerity of
Mr. Lincoln's declaration, that his administration should be
Constitutional in its character; nor can it be said that the earlier
Rebels ever supposed that he would invade their Constitutional rights.
They rebelled because circumstances enabled them to attempt the
realization of their long-cherished dream of a slave-holding
Confederacy, and because they saw that never again, in their time, would
another such opportunity be offered to effect a traitorous purpose. It
was clear to every mind that a year of quiet under the new
administration would dispel the delusion that the North was about to
overthrow the old polity; and therefore the violent men of the South
were determined that that administration never should have a fair trial.
Their action at Charleston, in 1860, by rendering the election of the
Republican candidate certain, shows that they wished an occasion for
revolt; and the course of President Buchanan, who refused to take the
commonest precautions for the public safety, gave them a vantage-ground
which they speedily occupied, and so made war inevitable.
That one of the most insignificant of their number should have murdered
the man whose election they declared to be cause for war is nothing
strange, being in perfect keeping with their whole course. The wretch
who shot the chief magistrate of the Republic is of hardly more account
than was the weapon which he used. The real murderers of Mr. Lincoln are
the men whose action brought about the civil war. Booth's deed was a
logical proceeding, following strictly from the principles avowed by the
Rebels, and in harmony with their course during the last five years. The
fall of a public man by the hand of an assassin always affects the mind
more strongly than it is affected by the fall of thousands of men in
battle; but in strictness, Booth, vile as his deed was, can be held to
have been no worse, morally, than was that old gentleman who insisted
upon being allowed the privilege of firing the first shot at Fort
Sumter. Ruffin's act is not so disgusting as Booth's; but of the two
men, Booth exhibited the greater courage,--courage of the basest kind,
indeed, but sure to be attended with the heaviest risks, as the hand of
every man would be directed against its exhibitor. Had the Rebels
succeeded, Ruffin would have been honored by his fellows; but even a
successful Southern Confederacy would have been too hot a country for
the abode of a wilful murderer. Such a man would have been no more
pleasantly situated even in South Carolina than was Benedict Arnold in
England. And as he chose to become an assassin after the event of the
war had been decided, and when his victim was bent upon sparing Southern
feeling so far as it could be spared without injustice being done to the
country, Booth must have expected to find his act condemned by every
rational Southern man as a worse than useless crime, as a blunder of the
very first magnitude. Had he succeeded in getting abroad, Secession
exiles would have shunned him, and have treated him as one who had
brought an ineffaceable stain on their cause, and also had rendered
their restoration to their homes impossible. The pistol-shot of Sergeant
Corbett saved him from the gallows, and it saved him also from the
denunciations of the men whom he thought to serve. He exhibited,
therefore, a species of courage that is by no means common; for he not
only risked his life, and rendered it impossible for honorable men to
sympathize with him, but he ran the hazard of being denounced and cast
off by his own party. This places him above those who would have
assassinated their country, but who took care to keep themselves within
the rules of honorable action, as the world counts honor. He perilled
everything, while they staked only their lives and their property. Their
success would have justified them in general estimation, but his success
would have been his ruin. He was fortunate in meeting death so soon, and
not less so in the mode of his exit from the stage of life. All
Secessionists who retain any self-respect must rejoice that one whose
doings brought additional ignominy on a cause that could not well bear
it has passed away and gone to his account. It would have been more
satisfactory to loyal men, if he had been reserved for the gallows; but
even they must admit that it is a terrible trial to any people who get
possession of an odious criminal, because they may be led so to act as
to disgrace themselves, and to turn sympathy in the direction of the
evil-doer. No fouler murder ever was perpetrated than that of which
Booth was guilty; and had he been taken alive and sound, it is possible
that our conduct would not have been of such a character as it would
have been pleasing to think of after our just passion should have
cooled. We should recollect, that, a hundred and sixty years after its
occurrence, the shouting of Englishmen over the verdict of _Guilty_
rendered against Charnock and his associates, because of their part in
the Assassination Plot, is condemned by the greatest of English
historians, who was the last man to be suspected of sympathizing with
men who sought to murder William III. A disposition to insult the
fallen, no matter how vile may be their offences or how just their fall,
is not an American characteristic; but so wide-spread and well-founded
was the indignation caused by the basest murder of modern times, that we
might have been unjust to ourselves, if the murderer had come whole into
our hands. Therefore the shot of Sergeant Corbett is not to be
regretted, save that it gave too honorable a form of death to one who
had earned all that there is of disgraceful in that mode of dying to
which a peculiar stigma is attached by the common consent of mankind.
Whether Booth was the agent of a band of conspirators, or was one of a
few vile men who sought an odious immortality, it is impossible to say.
We have the authority of a high Government official for the statement
that "the President's murder was organized in Canada and approved at
Richmond"; but the evidence in support of this extraordinary
announcement is, doubtless for the best of reasons, withheld at the time
we write. There is nothing improbable in the supposition that the
assassination plot was formed in Canada, as some of the vilest
miscreants of the Secession side have been allowed to live in that
country. We know that there were other plots formed in that country
against us,--plots that were to a certain extent carried into execution,
and which led to loss of life. The ruffians who were engaged in the St.
Albans raid--which was as much an insult to England as it was a wrong to
us--were exactly the sort of men to engage in a conspiracy to murder
Federal magistrates; but it is not probable that British subjects had
anything to do with any conspiracy of this kind. The Canadian error was
in allowing the scum of Secession to abuse the "right of hospitality"
through the pursuit of hostile action against us from the territory of a
neutral. If injustice is done their country in this instance, Canadians
should recollect that what is known to have been done there for our
injury is quite sufficient to warrant the suspicion that more was there
done to increase the difficulties of our situation than now distinctly
appears. The country that contains such justices as Coursol and Smith
cannot complain, if its sense of fairness is not rated very high by its
neighbors,--neighbors who have suffered from Secessionists being allowed
to make Canada a basis of operations against the United States, though
the United States and Great Britain are at peace.
That a plan to murder President Lincoln should have been approved at
Richmond is nothing strange; and though such approval would have been
supremely foolish, what but supreme folly is the chief characteristic of
the whole Southern movement? If the seal of Richmond's approval was
placed on a plan formed in Canada, something more than the murder of Mr.
Lincoln was intended. It must have been meant to kill every man who
could legally take his place, either as President or as President _pro
tempore_. The only persons who had any title to step into the Presidency
on Mr. Lincoln's death were Mr. Johnson, who became President on the
15th of April, and Mr. Foster, one of the Connecticut Senators, who is
President of the Senate. There was no Speaker of the House of
Representatives; so that one of the officers designated temporarily to
act as President, on the occurrence of a vacancy, had no existence at
the time of Mr. Lincoln's death, has none at this time, and can have
none until Congress shall have met, and the House of Representatives
have chosen its presiding officer. It does not appear that any attempt
was made on the life of Mr. Foster, though Mr. Johnson was on the list
of those doomed by the assassins; and the savage attack made on Mr.
Seward shows what those assassins were capable of. But had all the
members of the Administration been struck down at the same time, it is
not at all probable that "anarchy" would have been the effect, though to
produce that must have been the object aimed at by the conspirators.
Anarchy is not so easily brought about as persons of an anarchical turn
of mind suppose. The training we have gone through since the close of
1860 has fitted us to bear many rude assaults on order without our
becoming disorderly. Our conviction is, that, if every man who held high
office at Washington had been killed on the 14th of April, things would
have gone pretty much as we have seen them go, and that thus the
American people would have vindicated their right to be considered a
self-governing race. It would not be a very flattering thought, that the
peace of the country is at the command of any dozen of hardened ruffians
who should have the capacity to form an assassination plot, the
discretion to keep silent respecting their purpose, and the boldness and
the skill requisite to carry it out to its most minute details: for the
neglect of one of those details might be fatal to the whole project.
Society does not exist in such peril as that. Does any one suppose,
that, if the Gunpowder Plot had been a success,--that, if King, Lords,
and Commons had all been hoisted by Mr. Fawkes, the English nation would
have gone to wreck, that it could not have survived the loss of most of
the royal family, the greater part of the peerage, and most of the
gentlemen who had been chosen to serve in the House of Commons? England
would have survived such a blow as that blowing-up would have inflicted
on her, though for the time she might have been in a very confused
condition; and so we should have survived--and we believe without
exhibiting much confusion--all the efforts of assassins to murder our
leading men, had those efforts been entirely successful.