“Oh, because it’s the natur’ of all the things in the sea. It must have been but a damp, uncomfortable way to live for warm-blooded folks; but tell me what they were like, or do you happen to have a picture of one?”
“I’m sorry to say I have not.”
“Did they think they was like folks, or did they live for ever?”
“Some said they were immortal, others that they were only very long-lived. Plutarch says they lived more than nine thousand years.”
“Creation! What awful old maids they must have been! That’s more than old Mrs. Skinner, who was eighty-six when she married John Dickenson, ’cause she said she wasn’t going to have ‘Miss’ on her tombstone if she could help it.”
“But then they always remained young and lovely, never grew old or changed. They used to say that whoever looked on an unveiled nymph went mad.”
“Waal, I’d risk that if I could see one. But they was kind of onlucky sort of critters, then, after all?” asked Job, who seemed to be inwardly dwelling on some thought which he was keeping out of the talk.
“Yes, to those who approached them rashly, but they were kind to those who worshiped them with reverence and offered them the gifts they loved.”
“Waal, they wa’n’t very peculiar in that. The most of women is capable of being coaxed if you only go to work the right way. I don’t know how it might have been with gals in the sea, but it ain’t best to be too dreadful diffident with the land kind always,” returned Job, with a sly smile. “But about this figure of ourn. I suppose it ought to have some kind of a light gown on, and hadn’t they—them nimps?—got no emblem, nor nothing of that sort, like Neptune’s trident? I’m going to make a Neptune for a ship Peleg Brag’s got. Her name was The Ann Eliza. But the young woman she was named for, she up and married Jonathan Whitbeck, so Peleg, he’s gont to call his ship The Neptune now. It’s the only way he can think of to take it out on Ann Eliza, and I don’t expect that’ll kill her; but didn’t these nimps have nothing about them to show what they were?”
“Sometimes seaweeds, or coral and shells. Sometimes they held a silver vase.”