Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/77

Rh them to the inspection of a Parisian man of science who has never seen any other but a French bed, and you will have a whole volume of conjectures, each more extravagant than the other, as to the different uses for which these different articles of furniture are presumably employed. He will assign a hundred different purposes before he guesses they are one and all intended for sleeping in.

Luckily I have long been familiar with the most out-of-the-way descriptions of beds, and I had slept quite soundly on my Dutch couch. Alas! Alexandre and Biard had not fared equally well. Since seven in the morning they had been out and about in search of a bath. They hoped water would wash away the feathers, and the bath remove the effect of the bed. At half-past nine they returned, having traversed the whole town three times over and visited every museum and bric-a-brac shop therein, but without discovering anything in the shape of a public bath. It is only fair to remark that the sea is only a league from The Hague.

I had just, and only just, the time left to visit the museum myself. There was one thing I wanted to see, apart from the Rembrandts, Van Dycks, Hobbemas, Paul Potters and all the other masterpieces of Dutch art, and that was, in the ground floor rooms in the middle of this most interesting collection, a glass-case in which are preserved several specimens of mermaids.

The mermaid is a product peculiar to Holland and her Colonies. As you may, or may not, know, there are two distinct classes of mermaid,—the Siren and the Nereïd.

The Siren is the good old antique monster, with a woman's head and a fish's tail. They are the daughters of Parthenopé, Ligeia and Leucosia. If we are to believe the authors of the XVIth, XVIIth and even XVIIIth Centuries, Sirens are not at all uncommon. The English ship's-captain John Smith saw in 1614, in the English Islands of the West Indies, a Siren having the upper part of her body exactly like a woman. She was swimming along with all imaginable grace, when he first saw her in the depths of the sea. Her great eyes, albeit a trifle round, her well shaped nose, albeit just a little flat, her pretty ears, albeit a bit longish, made up a very agreeable personality, to which long green locks gave a certain strangeness that was not without charm. As ill luck would have it, the fair water-witch suddenly turned head over heels, and Captain John Smith, who was by way of falling in love with her, noticed that from the navel downwards the woman was nothing more nor less than a fish. True the fish had a double tail, but a double tail is a poor substitute after all for a pair of legs.

Doctor Kircher informs us, in a scientific report, that a Siren was caught in the Zuider Zee and dissected at Leyden by the learned Professor Pieter Paw. In the same paper he speaks of a Siren that was found in Denmark, and that learned to spin and foretell the future. This Siren had long locks, not of hair however but a network of fleshy fibres. She had a pleasing face, arms longer than a man's, her fingers joined together with a web of cartilage like a goose's foot, the breasts round and firm, the skin covered with scales so white and fine that from a distance she had all the appearance of possessing a smooth, ivory complexion. She told how Tritons and Sirens form a submarine population, which sharing the cunning and instinct of monkey and beaver, build themselves, in spots inaccessible to divers, rockwork grottoes strewn with beds of sand, wherein they rest and sleep and live.

Johann Philip Abelinus relates, in the first volume of his Theatrum Europæum, how in the year 1619 certain Councillors of the King of Denmark, sailing from Norway to Copenhagen, saw a merman walking in the sea and carrying a bunch of herbs upon his head. A bait was thrown concealing a hook. The merman, it would seem, was just as greedy as any ordinary human being, for he was quickly attracted by the tempting bit of bacon, took it in his mouth and was hauled on board the ship. But no sooner was he landed on the deck than he began to speak the purest Danish and threaten the vessel with shipwTeck. At the first words he uttered, the sailors as may well be supposed were intensely astonished, and when presently he proceeded to threats, their surprise changed into terror. They made all haste to pitch the man of the sea back into his native element with a thousand excuses for having incommoded him. It should be added in fairness that, as this is the only known instance of a