Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/78

66 talking merman, the commentators on Abelinus' text hold it was not really a Triton, but a phantom.

Johnston records that in 1403 a mermaid was captured in a lake in Holland into which she had been cast by the sea. She consented to wear clothes, became accustomed to a diet of bread and milk, and learned to spin, but remained dumb.

Finally,—we have kept the best to the last, like the set-piece at a display of fire-works,—Dimas Bosque, physician to the Viceroy of the Island of Manara, records, in a letter quoted in Bartolo's History of Asia, that as he was wallving by the seashore in company with a Jesuit Father, a band of fishermen came running up breathlessly to invite the Priest to go aboard their vessel to see a strange ma-rvel. The Jesuit accepted their offer, and Dimas Bosque went with him.

In the ship were sixteen fishes with human faces, nine females and seven males, which the fishermen had just caught with one haul of the net. They were taken ashore and minutely examined. Their ears projected like ours, and were of cartilage covered with fine skin. Their eyes were like ours in colour, shape and position; they were enclosed in orbits deeply sunk under the forehead, were provided with eyelids, and had not, like fishes' eyes, different axes of vision. The nose only differed from the human nose in being somewhat flattened like a negro's, and slightly cloven like a bull-dog's. Mouth and lips exactly resembled our own. The teeth were square ahd set close together. Their bosom was broad and covered with the whitest of white skin, allowing the blood-vessels to show through.

The females had round, firm breasts, and some were evidently suckling young, for on pressure a very white and very pure milk was exuded. Their arms were two cubits long and thicker than ours; they were jointless, the hands being attached to the elbow. Lastly, the lower belly, beginning with the hips and thighs, divided into a double tail, like a fish's.

It will be readily understood what a a stir such a capture made. The Viceroy bought their catch from the fishermen, and partitioned this company of Tritons and Sirens among his friends and acquaintances as presents.

The Dutch Resident received for his share a Siren. This he forwarded to his Government at home, and the latter handed the curiosity over to the Museum at The Hague.

Obviously a veritable and authentic Siren, a Siren duly ticketed and exhibited in a Museum, a Siren declared by science to be none of the breed of Lazarillo de Tormes or Cadet- Roussel-Esturgeon, but really and truly a genuine 'descendant of the River Acheloiis and the Nymph Calliope, was an infinitely greater curiosity than a gallery of ravens, even though there might be ten thousand ravens therein. For after all we can see ravens any day and every day, whereas Sirens are getting rarer and rarer. Accordingly, not knowing if I should ever be at The Hague again, I was very unwilling to miss the opportunity of seeing a Siren.

Nevertheless, eager as I was to enjoy this pleasure, I was pulled up short on first entering the Museum. I knew it was in this same collection that the coat was shown which William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, by history surnamed The Silent, was wearing when he was assassinated at Delft by Balthazar Gerard on July 10th, 1584.

It was a historical memento whose attraction outweighed in my mind that of all the Sirens and Mermaids in the world. So I begged the cicerone to show me first of all the case containing these relics of the past, and afterwards the body of the famous mermaid.

The clothes worn by the founder of the Dutch Republic, the author of the Union of Utrecht, the husband of the widow of Teligny, are to be seen to the left hand on entering the first gallery; for more than three hundred years now they have been exposed to the veneration of the people for whom he breathed his last sigh.

"Lord! have pity on my soul and these poor people!" were William the Silent's words as he fell.

Doublet, vest and shirt, blood-stained all, are there, together with the bullet that pierced his breast and the pistol from which it was fired. It is a living, everlasting malediction against the assassin!

I know nothing which more rouses to thought, stirs reverie and promotes romantic dreams than the sight of material objects. How much is suggested by Ravaillac's knife, by Balthazar Gerard's pistol bullet! Who can say what three