Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
I know that you go into the world and meet the handsomest and the wittiest women in Paris. May I not suppose that some one of those mermaids has deigned to clasp you in her cold and scaly arms, and that she has inspired the answer whose prosaic opinions sadden me?
of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez; of pearls, and shells; of coral beds, and of enchanted isles; of mermaids' grots
There was also the pool into which poor Selkirk had tumbled with the vegetables on the day of the first dinner on the rock, and that other pool into which Forsyth had plunged after the mermaids; and, not least interesting among the spots of note, there was the ledge, now named the "Last Hope", on which Mr Stevenson and his men had stood on the day when the boat had been carried away, and they had expected, but were mercifully preserved from, a terrible tragedy.
Then he began telling me stories of mermaids a common subject in this neighbourhood. 'There was one time a man beyond of the name of Shee, he said, 'and his master seen a mermaid on the sand beyond combing her hair, and he told Shee to get her. "I will," said Shee, "if you'll give me the best horse you have in your stable." "I'll do that," said the master.
The thought was quickening to the fancy; nor could I help dreaming of the endless grottoes and galleries, far below the reach of the mariner's lead. And what strange shapes were lurking there! Think of those arch creatures, the mermaids, chasing each other in and out of the coral cells, and catching their long hair in the coral twigs!
At the head of the cove stood a fishing hamlet, containing some twenty huts. In these huts lived the fisher-folk, ruled by one man the chief who was the father of two beautiful daughters. Now these fishermen for some years had been very lucky, for a fairy queen and her fairies had settled there, and she had given her power over to a merman, who was the chief of a large family of mermaids.
The whole house was constantly in a state of inundation, under the discipline of mops and brooms and scrubbing brushes; and the good housewives of those days were a kind of amphibious animal, delighting exceedingly to be dabbling in water insomuch that an historian of the day gravely tells us, that many of his townswomen grew to have webbed fingers like unto a duck; and some of them, he had little doubt, could the matter be examined into, would be found to have the tails of mermaids; but this I look upon to be a mere sport of fancy, or, what is worse, a wilful misrepresentation.
"Come along, Em," said Dick, piling the broken wood on top of some rotten hibiscus sticks; "give me the tinder box." He got a spark on to a bit of punk, and then he blew at it, looking not unlike Aeolus as represented on those old Dutch charts that smell of schiedam and snuff, and give one mermaids and angels instead of soundings.
Oft would they return to their sweethearts, sporting musky girdles of sea-kelp, tasseled with green little pouches of grass, brimful of seed-pearls; and jingling their coin in the ears of the damsels, throw out inuendoes about the beautiful and bountiful mermaids: how wealthy and amorous they were, and how they delighted in the company of the brave gallants of Tupia.
"You be safe enough here to-night, miss. My old man is snoring sound abed, and there's no other soul ever sets foot here o' nights, except it be the mermaids now and then. Goodness, Father, where's our boat? It ought to be up here on the pebbles." Rose pointed to a strip of sand some forty yards nearer the sea, where the boat lay.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking