A Little Gipsy Lass by Gordon Stables

It is around the unknown and the unknowable in this world that terror and superstition mostly cling. Had any one invented the telegraph, the telephone, or any other of the wonders developed by a proper knowledge of the powers of electricity, three hundred years ago, ten to one that individual would have been condemned to the stake as being in league with the Evil One.

We have all of us heard tell of or read about mermaids and mermen, but few perhaps of the cultivated believe in such beings nowadays. People in the far north of Scotland, especially those born and bred among the wild, weird mountains and glens, and the misty and awful gloom that often settles over these for days, are different. No wonder that in such localities ghosts are often said to be seen, and mournful cries are heard by night or while storms of wind and rain are raging. But it was more among the lone Hebrides that mermaids were believed in, and it is not so very long ago that an old laird lived who credited the notion that these semi-fairies had really been seen and heard.