er features in the mirror.

_Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten
Dass ich so traurig bin----_

she sang happily, studying her gestures with care and cheerfully flopping
her tail.

She had a very lovely voice which had been expensively cultivated. One or
two small birds listened attentively for a while, then started in to help
her out.

On the veranda of his bungalow, not very far from Northport, stood a
young man of pleasing aspect, knickerbockers, and unusually symmetrical
legs. His hands reposed in his pockets, his eyes behind their eyeglasses
were fixed dreamily upon the skies. Somebody over beyond that screen of
woods was singing very beautifully, and he liked it--at first.

However, when the unseen singer had been singing the Lorelei for an hour,
steadily, without intermission, an expression of surprise gradually
developed into uneasy astonishment upon his clean-cut and unusually
attractive features.

"That girl, whoever she is, can sing, all right," he reflected, "but why
on earth does she dope out the same old thing?"

He looked at the strip of woods, but could see nothing of the singer. He
listened; she continued to sing the Lorelei.

"It can't be a phonograph," he reasoned. "No sane person could endure an
hour of that fool song. No sane person would sing it for an hour,
either."

Disturbed, he picked up the marine glasses, slung them over his shoulder,
walked up on the hill back of the bungalow, selected a promising tree,
and climbed it.

Astride a lofty limb the lord of Northport gazed earnestly across the
fringe of woods. Something sparkled out there, something moved,
glittering on a half-submerged rock. He adjusted the marine glasses and
squinted through them.

"Great James!" he faltered, dropping them; and almost followed the
glasses to destruction on the ground below.

How he managed to get safely to earth he never knew. "Either I'm crazy,"
he shouted aloud, "or there's a--a mermaid out there, and I'm going to
find out before they chase me to the funny house!"

There was a fat tub of a boat at his landing; he reached the shore in a
series of long, distracted leaps, sprang aboard, cast off, thrust both
oars deep into the water, and fairly hurled the boat forward, so that it
alternately skipped, wallowed, scuttered, and scrambled, like a hen
overboard.

"This is terrible," he groaned. "If I _didn't_ see what I think I saw,
I'll eat my hat; if I did see what I'm sure I saw, I'm madder