ScoTtTisH MERMAIDS. 151 
Sunday a terrible and mysterious explosion shattered the ancient 
Abbey of Fearn, bringing down the ponderous stone roof among 
the worshippers, and burying nearly half of them in the ruins. 
In all, thirty-six persons were killed on the spot, and many more 
were so frightfully injured that they never recovered. Among the 
victims were several relatives of the girl who had heard the 
uncanny knocking and witnessed the grim employment of the 
mermaid of Loch Slin. 
There is often a vindictiveness, too, about the mermaid’s 
nature, that leads her to wreak a terrible vengeance upon those 
who do her an injury or thwart her will or cross her path in any 
way. Close to the old house of Knockdalion, near the water of 
Eirvan, there used to be a block of stone on which a mermaid 
would sit at nightfall for hours at a time, singing her songs and 
combing her yellow hair. One day, however, the mistress of 
Knockdalion took it into her head that the singing was annoying 
her child and keeping him from sleeping, and she had the stone 
broken to pieces. Great was the mermaid’s grief and anger when 
she appeared that night and found her favourite seat was no 
longer there. And this was what she sang :— 
““Ye may think on your cradle—lI’]] think on my stane, 
And there’ll ne’er be an heir to Knockdalion again.’’ 
Soon after the cradle was found overturned, with the baby 
dead beneath it. And the mermaid’s prophecy proved only too 
true, for the family became extinct with that generation. 
One day some fishermen from Quarff, on the south-eastern 
coast of Shetland, caught a mermaid on one of their hooks. On 
seeing what was the nature of their prey, one of them drew his 
knife and stabbed the mermaid in the breast; whereupon the 
hook gave way, and she sank. Thenceforward the fisherman in 
question never prospered, and till the day of his death he was 
haunted by an evil spirit, in the form of an old man, who used to 
say to him—“Will ye still do such a thing, who killed a 
woman ?”’ 
Another Shetland story is of a somewhat similar character. 
A young fisherman one day caught a seal, which he skinned in 
the usual fashion, afterwards tossing the carcase into the sea. 
The animal, however, had only been stunned, and very soon 
revived. He naturally began to feel very cold in the absence of 
