and when he insisted I told him that it was contrary to the customs of good society in our country for ladies to use tobacco in any form.  He laughed heartily, and said, “Did you suppose I would ask a lady to pollute her fragrant breath and dewy lips with so foul a thing as vile tobacco?  Taste and see.”  He brought his splendid hookah, which I found filled with the “fragrant spices of Araby” perfumed with attar of roses, while a long slender tube rested in a vessel of rose-water at my feet; and the fumes were certainly as agreeable as harmless.  But this, my first experiment in smoking, cost my Parsee friend three hundred dollars, the estimated value of his gold-mounted hookah, with its complicated array of tubes and vessels of the same precious metal, none of which he durst ever use again.

As we sat chatting together in the bright moonlight our ears were suddenly greeted by the sound of sweet music—­wild, unearthly melody that seemed to rise from the very depths of the ocean just below our feet.  At first it was only a soft trill or a subdued hum, as of a single voice:  then followed what seemed a full chorus of voices of enchanting sweetness.  Presently the melody died away in the distance, only, however, to burst forth anew after a brief interval.  All the time we were being regaled with the music we could see nothing to enlighten us as to its source, and were inclined to pronounce it a trick played by our fun-loving sailing-master.  He, however, denied all agency in the matter, but counseled us to “keep a close look-out on the lee bow” if we wanted to see a mermaid.  We had noticed a sort of thrilling motion on the lower deck, not unlike the sensation produced by the charge of an electro-galvanic battery; and this, the Parsee captain gravely assured us, was the mermaids’ dance, and their efforts to drag down our ship.  “But I’ll catch one of them yet—­see if I don’t,” he said energetically as he caught up something from the deck and ran forward, and was presently, with two of the Lascars, leaning over the bow.  Half an hour afterward he returned, and with a merry laugh laid in my lap two little brown fish, informing me that they were singing-fish, and that the music we had heard had been produced by shoals of these tiny vocalists then clinging to the bottom of our ship.  Our Parsee friend told me that the Arabs and Persians always speak of the singing-fish as “tiny women of the sea;” but he had never heard our version of their long hair, and their twining it about hapless sailors to drag them down to their coral caverns beneath the ocean’s wave.  He showed me how to preserve the fish by drying in the sun after repeated anointings with an aromatic oil, which he gave me for the purpose; and I have still in my cabinet these two specimens as a reminder of the incident.