Then the pirate, Sir Ralph the Rover, goes and cuts it off, just out of
spite, and sails away. Years afterwards his ship comes back to Scotland,
and there's a thick fog, and he's wrecked on the very Inchcape rock from
which he stole the warning bell.

'Sir Ralph the Rover tore his hair;
He cursed himself in his wild despair.
The waves poured in on every side,
And the vessel sank beneath the tide.'"

"Serve him right too! It was a sneaking rag to play!" commented Merle.

"The bell makes me think of an old hermitage," said Romola. "I expect to
see a monk walking along, telling his beads. Who was St. Morval? Didn't
he have a little chapel on the cliffs here?"

"Romola always thinks of the Middle Ages," laughed Beata. "That's because
she poses so much for Dad's pictures. It sounds like a church bell under
the sea to me. When we lived at Porthkeverne we were close to the lost
land of Lyonesse, and there was a lovely story about a mermaid. They said
she used to come and sit on a broad flat stone outside the church and
listen to the singing; and the priest heard of it, so one day he came out
and talked to her, and asked her if she wouldn't like to be baptized, and
she said she'd think about it. So she swam away; but she came back again
and again, and it was decided that she was to be baptized on Easter
Sunday. But on Good Friday there was a terrible storm, and the waves came
up and swallowed the whole of the village, so that when the poor mermaid
arrived she found the church sunk under the sea, and the priest and all
the people drowned. There was nobody to baptize her, and there never has