And now these sights, voices, vagaries, as month after month passes in his new home, fade,--fade, yet somehow abide. The patter of a thousand feet are on the pavement around him. What wonder, if, in the surrounding din, the tranquillity of Ashfield, its scenes, its sounds, should seem a mere dream of the past? What wonder, if the solemn utterances from the old pulpit should be lost in the roar of the new voices? The few months he was to spend in their hearing run into a score, and again into another score. Two or three years hence we shall meet him again,--changed, certainly; but whether for better or for worse the sequel will show.
Well, well, we must not overleap the quiet current of our story. While the May violets are in bloom, let us enjoy them and be thankful; and when the autumn flowers are come to take their places, let us enjoy those, too, and thank God.
"Once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back, Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song; And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid's music."
Men have a commodious faith generally, and in the things of land and water; but they do not believe in the mermaid.
Once, a thousand years ago, a certain Arabian traveller described an Oriental fish that came up out of the sea to catch flies or to get a drink. It was no crabbed crustacean, no compromise of claws; but a fish with fins,--a perch: and, being a perch, it not only came up on dry land, but did, the traveller said, climb trees. There was a climax! No one characterized this story fitly, for all perceived that the Arabian must know its nature very well. And so the Arabian traveller died in good time, and the thousand years went on about their business, and in our days the fish story has been verified. Now it rests, partly, on the authority of "two Dutch naturalists residing at Tranquebar." Two Dutch naturalists are a good foundation for anything less than a pyramid. In this matter they are not alone, however; for the naturalist Daldorf, also, who was a lieutenant in the Danish East-India Company's service, communicated to Joseph Banks, who "did not believe in the mermaid," that "in the year 1791 he had taken this fish from a moist cavity in the stem of a Palmyra palm which grew near a lake." More than this, "he saw it when already five feet above the ground struggling to ascend still higher." And this was its process: "suspending itself by its gill-covers, and bending its tail to the left, it fixed its anal fin in the cavity of the bark, and sought by expanding its body to urge its way upward"; and its progress was arrested only by the hand with which the valiant Daldorf seized it. More in reference to the same fish may be found in Tennent's great book on Ceylon, in Hartwig, and later naturalists generally.