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Updated: June 2, 2025
I am not a mermaid; and yet I have come from the sea ... like the Queen Zenobia." "Who was she?" asked Annet, speaking for the others. "She was a Queen in Carthage, more than two thousand years ago. She came to the Islands in a ship, to visit the tin-mines which used to lie between them and the mainland before the sea covered them, and from which she drew her great wealth.
But that is easy." The stranger reached out a white hand with a diamond upon it, and Annet yielded the book to her without resisting. "I come from here" and she tapped the pages mysteriously. "But how can that be?" demanded Linnet, who was always the matter-of-fact one. "Out of a book! Such things do not happen." Vashti laughed merrily.
"He lives in the north," she said, "in a city where the sea is sometimes frozen for weeks in the winter, and where night after night you may see the Northern Lights over the roofs. That is why he writes so much of snow and fir-trees and cold winters." Annet nodded. "I have seen the Northern Lights once from Saaron here," she announced proudly.
"My!" said Matthew Henry, gazing; and Annet turned on her sister and said, "There, now!" The words may seem inadequate, but Linnet understood them, and that they conveyed a question which she felt to be a poser. How could she doubt the existence of mermaids in such a spot as this?
She squeezed Miss Hackett's hand, and saw little more of the final catastrophe. Somehow the bride was stabbed, and fell screaming, while the fair Annet executed a war dance, but what became of her was uncertain. All Dolores knew was, that Ludmilla was there! She had recognized not only the eyes, but the air and figure.
Zenobia, it appeared, knew not only Merriman's Head, but every rock, down to the smallest and farthest in the Off Islands, where these creatures nested. She spoke to them of the island from which Annet took her name a low-lying ridge to the west of St. Ann's, curved like a snake, in nesting-time sheeted with pink thrift.
"And are you really Queen Zenobia?" "Come and see," said Vashti, rising. "The sands are bare between us and Brefar, and if Linnet is brave enough we will take a boat and she shall be shown the cave where Jan's father caught the mermaid." "But we must get back again," objected Annet. "I will see that you get back again." "The sands may not be safe."
He flung himself on the verge beside his gun and craned forward.... Yes, there was the rock; yes, and there on the rock sat a figure a woman and combed her long hair while she sang. Annet, Linnet, and Matthew Henry sat together in a niche of the cliff to the west of Piper's Hole, and panted after their climb.
So off the three children set for Piper's Hole; Annet and Linnet with long strides, Matthew Henry trotting to keep up with them. Arrived at the cliff's edge, they deployed with great caution that no noise might scare the mermaids from coming forth and searched for a nook where, themselves hidden, they could command a view of the cove at their feet.
Linnet stoutly maintained that this aunt of theirs, whom they had never set eyes on, must be a fairy herself neither more nor less; and Annet had her doubts on this point. Each child had a favourite story. Matthew Henry's was "The Tinder-Box," and he would wake in the night from dreams, deliciously terrible, of the three dogs "with eyes as big as coach wheels."
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