The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

470 T he Highland Monthly.
it would not move, she went for her husband. When she
returned with her better-half, they both saw the animal
clambering amongst the rocks, about four feet of it being
above water. The woman, who had a splendid view of it,
describes it as ' a good-looking person,' while the man says
it was ' a woman covered over with brown hair.' At last
the couple tried to get hold of it, when it took a header into
the sea and disappeared. The man is confident he has seen
but people in the district are of
the fabled mermaid ;
opinion that the animal must belong to the seal tribe. An
animal of similar description was seen by several people at
Deerness two years ago."
When the seal visited land, he doffed a skin, or caul,,
worn by him as an inhabitant of the deep. When he
wished to return to his coral halls, he donned the caul.
Stories of such occurrences are related in Orkney and
Shetland—the seals in every case, after assuming the human
form, marrying daughters of the earth, and, like the fabled
ancestors of the Mac-Codrums, becoming the progenitors of
a numerous offspring.
While we occasionally hear of a male seal contracting
such an alliance, the stories of men capturing beautiful sea
maidens are more numerous. Hibbert gives one in his
" Shetland Islands," and the substance of it may here be
given as illustrative of the class. There we are told of an
Unstman, walking along the sandy margin of a voe, and
seeing a number of mer-men and mer-women dancing in
the moonlight, several seal skins being beside them on the-
ground. At his approach, they immediately secured their
garbs, and assuming the form of seals, or " Haaf-fish" (as
the Shetlanders call them), plunged into the waters of the
voe. One skin was left behind. The Shetlander seized it,
carried it away and concealed it. " On returning to the
shore," writes Hibbert, " he met the fairest damsel that
was ever gazed upon by mortal eyes, lamenting the robbery,
by which she should become an exile from her submarine
friends, and a tenant of the upper world. Vainly she
implored the restitution of her property ;
the
man had