Answer me not so haughtily;
For if thou wilt not plight thee to me,
Thou shalt ever crazy be.
Duke Magnus! Duke Magnus! plight thee to me,
I pray you still so freely,—
Say me not nay, but yes, yes!”
“There is no harm in these mermaids,” said Tom, “for they are as good and hard-working a set of girls as any in Christiansand, but I trust we shall never meet with the real ones; at least, not just before a voyage.”
“Why not,” said the Captain, “my principal reason for coming here was the chance of seeing a mermaid in the only country in which they are still to be met with. Have you never seen one yourself, Tom?”
“No, and God grant I never may; they are not seen so often now-a-days as they used to be, that is truth. If they are to be seen at all,” he said, after a pause, “I must say this is just the time and the weather for them; a calm, still, sunny day, with a mist on the water; through this they used often and often to be seen in old times, combing their hair, or driving their milk-white cattle to feed on the rock weed; sometimes, though not so often, they are seen at night, coming and shivering round the fishermen’s fires, and trying to entice away the young men and to get them to go with them to their deep sea-caves; and those that they carry off are never seen again in the upper world.[35] But mermaids are never seen except in a still that comes before a storm, and no one ever catches a fish for the first voyage after they have seen them.”
“It is just the same with the Skogsfrue,” (the Lady of the Forest,) said Torkel; “she is just as unlucky for us hunters, and when she can get any young men to go with her, she never lets them come back again. I have fancied more than once that I have seen her through the smoke of my fire in the wild fjeld, but she was not likely to catch me.”[36]