Once we
_began_ to eat a limpet!--Beyond that point my memory is dumb.
I wonder how we should have felt if Shriny had really appeared to us, as
Coomara appeared to Jack Dogherty, and taken us down below the waves, or
kept us among the stakes of her palace till the tide flooded them, and
perhaps filled it with wonderful creatures and beautiful things, and
floated out the dank, dripping fucus into a veil of lace above our
heads; as our mother used to float out little dirty lumps of seaweed
into beautiful web-like pictures when she was preserving them for her
collection.
Shriny never did come, though Mr. Croker says Coomara came to Jack.
Perhaps, young readers, some of you have never read the story of the
Soul Cages. It is a long one, and I am not going to repeat it here,
only to say a word or two about it, for which I have a reason.
Jack Dogherty--so the story goes--had always longed to see a Merrow.
Merrow is the Irish name for seafolk; indeed, it properly means a
mermaid. And Jack, you know, lived in a fairy tale, and not in lodgings
at a watering-place on the south coast; so he saw his Merrow, though we
never saw Shriny.
I do not think any of the after-history of the Merrow is equal to Mr.
Pages:
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174