BY L. FRANK BAUM

Author of the Emerald City of Oz, Dorothy and the
wizard in Oz, OZMA of Oz, the road to Oz,
the land of Oz, etc.

Illustrated by
John R. Neill

The oceans are big and broad.  I believe two-thirds of the earth’s surface is covered with water.  What people inhabit this water has always been a subject of curiosity to the inhabitants of the land.  Strange creatures come from the seas at times, and perhaps in the ocean depths are many, more strange than mortal eye has ever gazed upon.

This story is fanciful.  In it the sea people talk and act much as we do, and the mermaids especially are not unlike the fairies with whom we have learned to be familiar.  Yet they are real sea people, for all that, and with the exception of Zog the Magician they are all supposed to exist in the ocean’s depths.

I am told that some very learned people deny that mermaids or sea-serpents have ever inhabited the oceans, but it would be very difficult for them to prove such an assertion unless they had lived under the water as Trot and Cap’n Bill did in this story.

I hope my readers who have so long followed Dorothy’s adventures in the Land of Oz will be interested in Trot’s equally strange experiences.  The ocean has always appealed to me as a veritable wonderland, and this story has been suggested to me many times by my young correspondents in their letters.  Indeed, a good many childred have implored me to “write something about the mermaids,” and I have willingly granted the request.

Hollywood, 1911.

L. Frank Baum.

TROT AND CAP’N BILL

CHAPTER 1

“Nobody,” said Cap’n Bill solemnly, “ever sawr a mermaid an’ lived to tell the tale.”

“Why not?” asked Trot, looking earnestly up into the old sailor’s face.

They were seated on a bench built around a giant acacia tree that grew just at the edge of the bluff.  Below them rolled the blue waves of the great Pacific.  A little way behind them was the house, a neat frame cottage painted white and surrounded by huge eucalyptus and pepper trees.  Still farther behind that—­a quarter of a mile distant but built upon a bend of the coast—­was the village, overlooking a pretty bay.

Cap’n Bill and Trot came often to this tree to sit and watch the ocean below them.  The sailor man had one “meat leg” and one “hickory leg,” and he often said the wooden one was the best of the two.  Once Cap’n Bill had commanded and owned the “Anemone,” a trading schooner that plied along the coast; and in those days Charlie Griffiths, who was Trot’s father, had been the Captain’s mate.  But ever since Cap’n Bill’s accident, when he lost his leg, Charlie Griffiths had been the captain of the little schooner while his old master lived peacefully ashore with the Griffiths family.