Certainly nobody could see her here.  Nobody would interrupt her either, because the route of navigation lay far outside, to the north.  All around were woods; the place was almost landlocked, save where, far away through the estuary, a blue and hazy horizon glimmered in the general direction of New England.

So, when she had recovered sufficient breath she let down the flashing, golden-brown hair, sat up on the rock, lifted her pretty nose skyward, and poured forth melody.

As she sang the tiresome old Teutonic ballad she combed away vigorously, and every now and then surveyed her features in the mirror.

  Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten
  Dass ich so traurig bin——­

she sang happily, studying her gestures with care and cheerfully flopping her tail.

She had a very lovely voice which had been expensively cultivated.  One or two small birds listened attentively for a while, then started in to help her out.

On the veranda of his bungalow, not very far from Northport, stood a young man of pleasing aspect, knickerbockers, and unusually symmetrical legs.  His hands reposed in his pockets, his eyes behind their eyeglasses were fixed dreamily upon the skies.  Somebody over beyond that screen of woods was singing very beautifully, and he liked it—­at first.

However, when the unseen singer had been singing the Lorelei for an hour, steadily, without intermission, an expression of surprise gradually developed into uneasy astonishment upon his clean-cut and unusually attractive features.

“That girl, whoever she is, can sing, all right,” he reflected, “but why on earth does she dope out the same old thing?”

He looked at the strip of woods, but could see nothing of the singer.  He listened; she continued to sing the Lorelei.

“It can’t be a phonograph,” he reasoned.  “No sane person could endure an hour of that fool song.  No sane person would sing it for an hour, either.”

Disturbed, he picked up the marine glasses, slung them over his shoulder, walked up on the hill back of the bungalow, selected a promising tree, and climbed it.

Astride a lofty limb the lord of Northport gazed earnestly across the fringe of woods.  Something sparkled out there, something moved, glittering on a half-submerged rock.  He adjusted the marine glasses and squinted through them.

“Great James!” he faltered, dropping them; and almost followed the glasses to destruction on the ground below.

How he managed to get safely to earth he never knew.  “Either I’m crazy,” he shouted aloud, “or there’s a—­a mermaid out there, and I’m going to find out before they chase me to the funny house!”

There was a fat tub of a boat at his landing; he reached the shore in a series of long, distracted leaps, sprang aboard, cast off, thrust both oars deep into the water, and fairly hurled the boat forward, so that it alternately skipped, wallowed, scuttered, and scrambled, like a hen overboard.