e 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