"Well, the Northern Lights were shining in the streets on the night when I met him. I drove to his house in a sleigh from the theatre—if you know what a theatre is?" Vashti paused dubiously; but Annet nodded and assured her—
"That's all right. We don't know about these things, but they are all in the book."
"And so," said Vashti, "is the man himself, or most of him. He was a queer, shy old man, with oddly-shaped hands and feet, but oh, such timid eyes! And he lived in a fine house all by himself, for he had no wife. In the days when he wanted a wife he had been an Ugly Duckling, and now, when he had turned into a swan, it was too late to marry. He was very old indeed; but this was his birthday, and he had lit up all his rooms for us and made a great feast, and at the feast he made me sit on his right hand.... There were princesses to do him honour, but he chose me out because I had sung to him; and the princesses were not angry because he was an old man. Out in the streets the people were letting off fireworks, and while he talked to me I could hear the whole sky banging with rockets and crackers. It put me in mind of his story of 'The Flying Trunk.' But he talked of Italy and the South, because I had come from there; and of the Mediterranean and of beautiful inland lakes which he had known, but would never see again; for he was over seventy. And he told me that, in spite of the snow and frost outside, he could feel the spring coming northward again with the storks. It was the last time (he said) that he should ever see it, but he filled his glass and drank to me because, as he put it, I had sung the South back to him for this last time. So now you know why I was proud to come to you out of his book."
"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