will under the skin of his tiny foot, by some cunning machinery of
valves--small creatures truly, but very wonderful to men who have
learned to reverence not merely the size of things, but the wisdom of
their idea, and raising strange longings and dreams about that
submarine ocean-world which stretches, teeming with richer life than
this terrestrial one, away, away there westward, down the path of the
sun, toward the future centre of the world's destiny.

Wonderful ocean-world! three-fifths of our planet! Can it be true
that no rational beings are denizens there? Science is severely
silent--having as yet seen no mermaids: our captain there forward is
not silent--if he has not seen them, plenty of his friends have. The
young man here has been just telling me that it was only last month
one followed a West Indiaman right across the Atlantic. "For," says
he, "there must be mermaids, and such like. Do you think Heaven
would have made all that water there only for the herrings and
mackerel?"

I do not know, Tom: but I, too, suspect not; and I do know that
honest men's guesses are sometimes found by science to have been
prophecies, and that there is no smoke without fire, and few
universal legends without their nucleus of fact. After all, those
sea-ladies are too lovely a dream to part with in a hurry, at the
mere despotic fiat of stern old Dame Analysis, divine and reverend as
she is. Why, like Keats's Lamia,


'Must all charms flee,
At the mere touch of cold Philosophy,'