love with the mermaid."

"He had no business to steal her comb, and then run away with
herself," said Turkey.

"She was none the worse for it," said I.

"Who told you that?" he retorted. "I don't think the girl herself
would have said so. It's not every girl that would care to marry a
king's son. She might have had a lover of her own down in the sea. At
all events the prince was none the better for it."

"But the song says she made a tender wife," I objected.

"She couldn't help herself. She made the best of it. I dare say he
wasn't a bad sort of a fellow, but he was no gentleman."

"Turkey!" I exclaimed. "He was a prince!"

"I know that."

"Then he must have been a gentleman."

"I don't know that. I've read of a good many princes who did things I
should be ashamed to do."

"But you're not a prince, Turkey," I returned, in the low endeavour to
bolster up the wrong with my silly logic.

"No. Therefore if I were to do what was rude and dishonest, people
would say: 'What could you expect of a ploughboy?' A prince ought to
be just so much better bred than a ploughboy. I would scorn to do what
that prince did. What's wrong in a ploughboy can't be right in a
prince, Ranald. Or else right is only right sometimes; so that right
may be wrong and wrong may be right, which is as much as to say there
is no right and wrong; and if there's no right and wrong, the world's
an awful mess, and there can't be any God, for a God would never have
made it like that."

"Well, Turkey, you know best. I can't help thinking the prince was not
so much to blame, though."

"You see what came of it--misery."

"Perhaps he would rather have had the misery and all together than
none of it."

"That's for him to settle. But he must have seen he was wrong, before
he had done wandering by the sea like that."

"Well now, Turkey, what would you have done yourself, suppose the
beautifulest of them all had laid her comb down within an inch of
where you were standing--and never saw you, you know?"

Turkey thought for a moment before answering.

"I'm supposing you fell in love with her at first sight, you know," I
added.

"Well, I'm sure I should not have kept the comb, even if I had taken
it just to get a chance of speaking to her. And I can't help fancying
if he had behaved like a gentleman, and let her go without touching
her the first time, she might have come again; and if he had married
her at last of her own free will, she would n