"But," said Linnet, gravely, "we were reading about mermaids; and you
can't be one of _them_, because there aren't any."

Matthew Henry would by no means allow this. "But Jan's father caught
one," he objected, "in a pool just inside Piper's Hole, where she was
left by the tide. He has told us about her, dozens of times. And
besides," he added, getting in a home-thrust, "if there isn't any such
thing, why were you crying over the story, just now?"

"I wasn't," contended Linnet, very red in the face. But she shifted her
ground. "Why," pointing to Vashti's skirts--"her clothes aren't even
wet, to say nothing of a tail!"

Vashti laughed. "My dears, you are both right and both wrong. As for
the mermaids, Linnet, they were friends of mine before I reached your
age, and you must let me introduce you to one by-and-by, to cure you of
disbelieving. But you are right about me. 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. Her ship arrived in the middle of the
Great Storm; and before she came to land, here on Saaron, the waters
were rolling over the richest part of all her dependencies. Little she
cared; for in the first place she had never seen it, and could not
realise her loss, and moreover her ship had been tossing for three days
and nights, past all hope, so that she was glad enough to reach a
shore, however barren. She reached it, holding on to the shoulders of a
brown man, a Moor, who swam for land as the ship began to break up; and
the story goes that when his feet touched the sand he fell forward and
died, for the swimming had burst his heart. But have you never heard
the song about it?" Vashti sank her voice and began to chant, and low
though the strain was, and monotonous, the children had never heard
such wonderful singing--

It was the Queen Zenobia
With her gold crown,
That sailed away from Africa
With a down-derry-down!

--To westward and to northward
From Carthage town,
Beyond the strait of Cadiz
The sky began to frown.

"Well-a-mercy!" cried her ladies,
All of high renown;
"I think the sea is troublesome
And we s