“Uncle George,” exclaimed the boy in surprise, “surely they don’t!”
“Oh, yes, they do,” the professor replied. “In the year 1903—that’s not so long ago—two girls who lived on the Island of Sark, one of the Channel Islands, off the north coast of France, came hurrying to the house of the village clergyman, telling him that they had found a baby with a fish’s tail on a beach, and that it was swimming in a pool of water. They were going to pick it up, they said, but when one of the girls put her hand down toward it, the supposed baby opened its mouth and showed a row of sharp teeth like a fish.”
“But they couldn’t have seen any such thing!” declared the boy. “I know enough for that.”
“Wait a bit,” came the warning answer; “you haven’t heard all the story yet. The minister or abbé, who seems to have been an inquisitive fellow, hurried to the place with the two girls. There, in a rock pool, as he described it in a communication to some local scientific society, he found a mermaid, a little creature not quite three feet long, but looking more like an old woman than a baby, as the girls had described it. He remarks, in his letter, in a certain naïve way, that the mermaid did not seem to understand either English or French. Thinking that she might be bewitched, he baptized her, then and there.”
“Baptized her!” said Perry, in surprise. “What for? Did he think she could go to church on a tail?”
“Perhaps he thought it best to be on the safe side,” was the reply. “Now here is a point that gives a curious twist of apparent truth to the story. The abbé added that the christening did not seem to make any difference. If he really wanted to color the tale, there was his chance to make a miracle out of it.
“In his half-scientific account of the occurrence, the abbé stated that the mermaid breathed like a woman, not a fish. Although warned by the girls, he tried to pick up the strange creature, but she fastened her teeth savagely in his arm, and when he tried to shake her off, she hung on, letting go her hold suddenly when free from the rock-bound pool in which she had been a prisoner. Falling on the flat ledges of the rocks, she shuffled rapidly to the sea, plunged in and was gone. The doctor who cauterized the abbé’s arm added a statement concerning the unusual character of the bite.”
“That’s a fishy tale!” exclaimed the boy derisively.
“It does sound a bit queer,” the professor admitted, “and yet, it’s not so long ago since Harvard University had in its museum a ‘specimen’ of a mermaid.”
“What was it?”