"It can't be a phonograph," he reasoned. "No sane person could endure an hour of that fool song. No sane person would sing it for an hour, either."
Disturbed, he picked up the marine glasses, slung them over his shoulder, walked up on the hill back of the bungalow, selected a promising tree, and climbed it.
Astride a lofty limb the lord of Northport gazed earnestly across the fringe of woods. Something sparkled out there, something moved, glittering on a half-submerged rock. He adjusted the marine glasses and squinted through them.
"Great James!" he faltered, dropping them; and almost followed the glasses to destruction on the ground below.
How he managed to get safely to earth he never knew. "Either I'm crazy," he shouted aloud, "or there's a--a mermaid out there, and I'm going to find out before they chase me to the funny house!"
There was a fat tub of a boat at his landing; he reached the shore in a series of long, distracted leaps, sprang aboard, cast off, thrust both oars deep into the water, and fairly hurled the boat forward, so that it alternately skipped, wallowed, scuttered, and scrambled, like a hen overboard.
"This is terrible," he groaned. "If I didn't see what I think I saw, I'll eat my hat; if I did see what I'm sure I saw, I'm madder than the hatter who made it!"
Nearer and nearer, heard by him distinctly above the frantic splashing of his oars, her Lorelei song sounded perilously sweet and clear.
"Oh, bunch!" he moaned; "it's horribly like the real thing; and here I come headlong, as they do in the story books----"
He caught a crab that landed him in a graceful parabola in the bow, where he lay biting at the air to recover his breath. Then his boat's nose plowed into the sandy neck of land; he clambered to his feet, jumped out, and ran headlong into the belt of trees which screened the singer. Speed and gait recalled the effortless grace of the kangaroo; when he encountered logs and gullies he rose grandly, sailing into space, landing with a series of soft bounces, which presently brought him to the other side of the woods.