lves.

It is said that 'in Bohemia' fishermen have been known to refuse aid to
drowning persons lest 'Vodyany' would be offended and prevent the fish
from entering the nets.

This 'Vodyany,' however, seems rather a variant of the old Hydra, who
reappears in the diabolical names so frequently given to boiling springs
and dangerous torrents. The 'Devil's Tea-kettles' and 'Devil's
Punch-bowls' of England and America have the same association as the
weird legends connected with the Strudel and Wirbel whirlpools of the
Danube, and with the rapids of the Rhine, and other rivers. Curiously
enough, we find the same idea in The Arabian Nights, when 'The sea
became troubled before them, and there arose from it a black pillar
ascending towards the sky, and approaching the meadow, and behold it was
a Jinn of gigantic stature.'

This demon was a waterspout, and waterspouts in China are attributed to
the battles of dragons. 'The Chinese,' says Mr. Moncure Conway, 'have
canonised of recent times a special protectress against the storm-demons
of the coast, in obedience to the wishes of the sailors.'

The swan-maidens, who figure in so many legends, are mere varieties of
the mer-maiden, and, according to the Icelandic superstition, they and
all fairies were children of Eve, whom she hid away on one occasion when
the Lord came to visit her, because they were not washed and
presentable! They were, therefore, condemned to be invisible for ever.

A Scotch story, quoted by Mr. Moncure Conway, rather bears against this
theory. One day, it seems, as a fisherman sat reading his Bible, a
beautiful nymph, lightly clad in green, came to him out of the sea, and
asked if the book contained any promise of mercy for her. He replied
that it contained an offer of salvation to 'all the children of Adam,'
whereupon she fled away with a loud shriek, and disappeared in the sea.
But the beautiful stories of water-nymphs, of Undines and Loreleis, and
mer-women, are too numerous to be even mentioned, and too beautiful, in
many cases, to make one care to analyze.

There is a tradition in Holland that when, in 1440, the dikes were
broken down by a violent tempest, the sea overflowed the meadows. Some
women of the town of Edam, going one day in a boat to milk their cows,
discovered a mermaid in shallow water floundering about with her tail in
the mud. They took her into the boat, brought her to Edam, dressed her
in women's clothes, and taught her to spin, a