continued he, turning to the minister, with great anxiety, "the object of
my present intrusion on you is to learn your opinion, as an eminent
divine, as to our final condition on that dreadful day." Here the
venerable pastor entered upon a long conversation with the fairy,
touching the principles of faith and repentance. Receiving rather
unsatisfactory answers to his questions, the minister desired the
"sheech" to repeat after him the Paternoster, in attempting to do which,
it was not a little remarkable that he could not repeat the word "art,"
but said "_wert_," in heaven. Inferring from every circumstance that
their fate was extremely precarious, the minister resolved not to puff
the fairies up with presumptuous, and, perhaps, groundless expectations.
Accordingly, addressing himself to the unhappy fairy, who was all anxiety
to know the nature of his sentiments, the reverend gentleman told him
that he could not take it upon him to give them any hopes of pardon, as
their crime was of so deep a hue as scarcely to admit of it. On this the
unhappy fairy uttered a shriek of despair, plunged headlong into the
loch, and the minister resumed his course to his home.




THE FISHERMAN AND THE MERMAN.


Of mermen and merwomen many strange stories are told in the Shetland
Isles. Beneath the depths of the ocean, according to these stories, an
atmosphere exists adapted to the respiratory organs of certain beings,
resembling, in form, the human race, possessed of surpassing beauty, of
limited supernatural powers, and liable to the incident of death. They
dwell in a wide territory of the globe, far below the region of fishes,