The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

THE EQUINOX swindle, I suppose, a fake—and yet, after all, this Gingerbread showman in this Gingerbread City was not the first to work the merry cantrip. For wherever seals are common, be it in our own northern islands or in further foreign lands, there will these mermaid legends be wrought around them. Only in Orkney or the Hebrides they are most easily garnered, for the language is our own language. One of the most beautiful of them, when told in full, is the tale of the Mermaid Wife. On a moonlight night, as an Orkney fisherman strolled by the sea-shore, he saw, to his amazement, some _ beautiful maidens dancing a saraband on the smooth beach. In a heap by their side lay a bundle of skins, which, on his approach, the maidens seized and then plunged with them into the surf, where they took the form of seals. But the fisherman had managed to snatch up one skin, which lay apart from the rest, and so one maiden was left behind. Despite her entreaties and her tears, he kept the skin, and she was at last obliged to follow him to his hut. They married and had many children, who were like all other children, except for a thin web between their fingers, and for years husband and wife lived at peace. But every ninth night she would steal down to the beach and talk with one large seal in an unknown tongue, and then return with saddened countenance. And so the years passed, until one day, whilst playing in the barn, one of the children found an old dried skin. He took this to his mother gleefully, and she, snatching it from him, kissed him and his brothers and sisters, and then rushed down tothe sea. And the fisherman, when he returned home that evening, was just in time to see his wife take the form of a seal and dive into the water. He never saw her again, but sometimes she would call o’ nights, 338