were off in the sky like a puff of smoke, and the crowd
left miles below. The next thing he knew he was sittin' on a rock, over
yonder in Inniscaw, by the mouth of Piper's Hole, and starin' at the
sea. So he picks himself together and walks up to North Inniscaw Farm
(as 'twas called in those days), and there he took service and married
and lived steady ever after. Leastways----"

"Leastways," said a voice at the gate, "he gave over drinking except
when his master ran a cargo of brandy, and he never gave his wife
trouble but once, when he took home a mermaid and made the good soul
jealous."

"Aunt Vazzy!" cried the children. "Why, how long have you been standin'
there?"

"Long enough to hear the end of the story, and how Jan's father came to
the Islands through Piper's Hole."

"But," Linnet objected, "Jan didn't say that his father came through
Piper's Hole; only that he found himself on the rocks in front of it.
They came through the air, he and the little lady, didn't they, Jan?"

Jan shook his head. "They started to come through the air," he answered
cautiously.

"Everybody knows that the fairies always pass to and fro through
Piper's Hole," said Annet, in a positive voice. "The mermaids, too. The
cave there goes right through Inniscaw and under the sea, and comes up
again in the mainland. Nobody living has ever gone that way; but Farmer
Santo had an uncle once that owned a sheep-dog that wandered into
Piper's Hole and was lost, and a month later it turned up on the
mainland with all its hair off."

"It do go in a terrible long way, to be sure," Jan admitted; "for I
made a trial of it myself, one time, at low water. First of all you
come to a pool, and, then, about fifty yards further, to another pool,
and into that I went plump, coming upon it sudden, in the darkness. I
swallowed a bellyful of it, too, and the water--if you'll believe
me--was quite fresh. I didn't try no further, because, in the first
place, the tide was rising, and because, when I pulled myself out, I
heard a sound on t'other side of the pool like as if some creature was
breathin' hard there in the darkness. It properly raised my hair, and I
turned tail."

"Fie, Jan! Ran away from a mermaid!" said Vashti, laughing. "You should
have brought her home and married her."

"I don't want to marry no woman with a tail like a fish, nor no woman
that makes thikky noise with her breathin'," maintained Jan. "That's to
say, if merrymaid it were, whic