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[Illustration: “He gazed at the wooden creature with all his heart in
his eyes.” Page 62.]




                               ADVENTURES
                                   IN
                              Shadow-Land.


                               CONTAINING

                    Eva’s Adventures in Shadow-Land.
                           By MARY D. NAUMAN.

                                  AND

                    The Merman and The Figure-Head.
                         By CLARA F. GUERNSEY.


                          TWO VOLUMES IN ONE.

                         _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS._


                              PHILADELPHIA
                         J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
                                 1874.


       Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by
                        J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.,
       In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

                          Lippincott’s Press,
                             Philadelphia.




                               THE MERMAN
                                  AND
                            THE FIGURE-HEAD.




                               CONTENTS.


                               CHAPTER I.
                                                                    PAGE
  The Sea-Nymph                                                        7

                               CHAPTER II.
  The Sea Kingdom                                                     28

                               CHAPTER III.
  The Figure-head                                                     52

                               CHAPTER IV.
  The Bewitched Lover                                                 74

                                CHAPTER V.
  The Sea-Nymphs                                                      90

                               CHAPTER VI.
  Lucy Peabody’s Dream                                               103




                               THE MERMAN
                                  AND
                            THE FIGURE-HEAD.




                               CHAPTER I.
                            _THE SEA-NYMPH._


  “I may be wrong, but I think it a pity
  For a movable doll to be made so pretty.”
                                                      _Doll Poems._

“I shall call her the Sea-nymph,” said Master Isaac Torrey.

“Umph!” said his clerk, Ichabod Sterns, looking over his spectacles at
his master.

“And why not The Sea-nymph, pray?” demanded Master Torrey. “Why, I say,
should I not call my fine new brig The Sea-nymph if it pleases my
fancy?”

“Fancy!” said Ichabod Sterns, putting his head on one side. “Fancy!
Umph!”

Now this was most exasperating conduct on Ichabod’s part, and as such
Master Torrey felt it.

“Yes, if it pleases my fancy,” he repeated, defiantly. “What right have
you, Ichabod Sterns, to object to that, I should like to know? If I
chose to name her after the whole choir of all the nymphs that ever swam
in the sea—Panope and Melite, Arethusa, Leucothea, Thetis, Cymodoce—what
have you to say against it? Isn’t she to swim the seas and make her
living out of the winds and waves? And what can you object to ‘The
Sea-nymph?’ I’d like to hear. But it’s your nature to object, Ichabod
Sterns. I’ve no doubt that you came objecting into the world, and I’ve
no doubt that when your time comes you’ll object to dying. It would be
just like you.”

“And death will mind my objections no more than you, Master Torrey,”
said the old clerk, smiling rather grimly as Master Torrey ceased his
pacing up and down the room and flung himself into a chair.

“But what _is_ your objection to the name?” asked the merchant, calming
down a little.

“Did I object?” said Ichabod Sterns.

“Didn’t you? You were bristling all over with objections from the toe of
your shoe to the top of your wig.” Ichabod involuntarily put up his hand
to his wig. “Why isn’t it a good name for a ship?”

“Nay, I know naught against it, Master Torrey, only it is a heathenish
kind of name for a ship that is to sail out of our decent Christian town
of Salem.”

“Heathenish! Let me tell you, Master Ichabod, that this world owes a
vast deal to the heathen—more than she does to some Christians I could
name.”

Now this awful speech was enough to make the very pig tails of many of
Master Torrey’s acquaintance stand on end with horror and surprise. But
Ichabod was used to his master’s ways, so he did not jump out of his
chair, but only looked to the door to be sure that no one had overheard
the terrible statement, for had such been the case there is no telling
what might have come to pass.

“How do you make that out, Master Torrey?” he said, composedly.

“Did you ever happen to hear of Socrates or Cicero?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of ’em,” said Ichabod.

“And did you ever hear of the Duke of Alva, or Cardinal Pole, or Bloody
Queen Mary, or Catenat?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of ’em,” returned Ichabod again, a little fiercely.

“And which was the better man, the Athenian or the Christians who burnt
their fellows at the stake?” said Master Torrey, triumphantly, as one
who had made a point.

“Umph!” said Ichabod; “I’m not a scholar like you, Master Torrey, but
I’d like you to tell me whether they were Christians by name that
poisoned Socrates and murdered Cicero?”

“Well, no,” said the merchant.

“Umph!” said Ichabod Sterns again, leaning back on his chair and rubbing
his hands slowly one over the other.

“Well, what of that?” said Master Torrey, a little taken aback.

“Oh, nothing, sir,” said Ichabod; “we have wandered a long way from the
name of the new brig.”

“She shall be The Sea-nymph,” said Master Torrey with decision. “What
could be better?”

“I thought, Master Torrey, you might have liked to call her the Anna
Jane,” said Ichabod, with a little cracked laugh like an amused crow.

Master Torrey  high, but not with displeasure.

“I wouldn’t venture, Ichabod, I wouldn’t dare. She’s too shy, too
modest, to be pleased with such an open compliment.”

“Umph!” said the clerk again. It seemed to be a way he had. “But you are
determined to call her The Sea-nymph, Master Torrey?”

“Ah, am I!” replied Torrey, who seemed by no means disposed to pursue
the subject of the “inexpressive she,” whoever it might be. “And she
shall have the handsomest figure-head that Job Chippit can carve; and it
sha’n’t be a mere head and shoulders either, it shall be a full-length
figure.”

“It will cost a good penny, master. Job’s prices are high.”

“There’s another objection! Who cares what it costs? Am I a destitute
person? Am I an absolute pauper? Am I like to apply to the selectmen to
be supported by the town?”

“Not yet, master,” said Ichabod, gathering his papers together. “But if
we go to following our _fancies_”—scornful emphasis—“there is no telling
where we may end;” and without giving his master time to reply, Ichabod
sped out of the counting-room.

Now I am not going to tell you a long story about Master Torrey, though
I might do so if I had not a tale to tell you about something
else—namely, this sea-nymph and the merman who figure at the head of
this story. I was once told by a schoolmaster that in writing there was
“nothing so important as a strict adherence to facts;” “fax” he called
them. I treasured up this valuable precept in the inmost recesses of my
mind, and I mean to adhere to facts if I possibly can. But I can’t
adhere to facts till I get them, and to do that I don’t see but I shall
have to tell you a little about Master Isaac Torrey, merchant of Salem,
who was the means of putting this wonderful figure-head in the merman’s
way. He was a merchant of Salem when Salem was a centre of trade, and
sent many a brave ship to the Indies and the Mediterranean. He was
thirty-four years old, and looked ten years younger. He was a man
inclined to extravagance and luxury. He wore the handsomest waistcoats
and the finest lace of any one in town. He had been educated in the
gravest, strictest fashion of those grave days. His parents would have
been horrified if they had found him reading a novel or a play, but they
urged him on to study Virgil and Homer.

Now if you will promise, my young readers, never to tell your respected
instructors, I will let you into a secret. The truth is that the poems
of Virgil and Homer are all full of stories as interesting and charming
as any boy or girl could desire. But this is a circumstance which most
school-teachers make it their first object in life to conceal, and they
generally succeed so well that their pupils for the most part go through
their whole course of education and never discover that their Virgils
and Homers are anything but stupid school-books—a sort of intellectual
catacombs enshrining the dryest bones of grammar and parsing.

Now and then, however, a boy or girl finds out that there is food for
the imagination in classic poetry. Such had been the case with Isaac
Torrey, and the verses that he read with his tutor took such a hold upon
him that he became what some of his friends called “half a heathen.” Not
but that an acquaintance with the classics was thought becoming, nay,
essential, to the character of a gentleman. In the speeches and writings
of those days a due seasoning of allusions to the old gods and a
sprinkling of Latin quotations was considered the proper thing. But this
learning was rather looked upon as solid and ponderous furniture for the
mind—an instrument of mental discipline. Fancy, imagination, amusement,
were ideas much too light and frivolous to be connected with anything so
grave, solid and respectable as the intellectual drill for which alone
Latin and Greek were intended. So when Isaac Torrey talked about the old
gods as if they had been real existences, and spoke of Achilles, Hector
and Andromache as though they had been live creatures, he rather
startled the excellent young divinity student who was his tutor.

Once upon a time his father detecting a smell of burning followed it up
to Isaac’s room, where he found his son in the midst of a cloud of blue
smoke. He asked the cause, and was told that in order to procure fair
weather for the next day’s fishing excursion he (Isaac) had been
sacrificing a paper bull to Jupiter.

Mr. Torrey senior was inexpressibly shocked at the thought that his son
should have been guilty of such a heathenish performance. He gave the
boy a lecture of an hour long, ending with a whipping. He called in the
minister to talk to him. That gentleman, on being informed of the act of
idolatry perpetrated in his parish, only took a prodigious pinch of
snuff and said: “Pooh! pooh! child’s play! child’s play! No use to talk
about it. Let the boy alone.” Mr. Torrey had the highest respect for his
clergyman, and the boy _was_ let alone accordingly, and was deeply
grateful to the Rev. Mr. Bartlett.

Isaac grew up tall and handsome, went to school and to college, and in
spite of numerous prophecies that he would never be good for anything,
neither went into debt nor disgraced himself in any way. In due course
of time he succeeded to his father’s business, and astonished every one
by making money and being successful, in spite of his tasteful dress,
his “wild ways” of talking and a report that he actually wrote poetry.

At the present time he was devoted to Miss Anna Jane Shuttleworth, a
beautiful still image of a girl, who was supposed to have a great fund
of good sense, propriety, prudence and piety, because she liked to sit
still and sew from morning to night, and hardly ever opened her lips.
Ichabod Sterns was the old clerk of Isaac’s father. He and his young
master exasperated each other in many ways, but they were fond of each
other for all that.

From the counting-house on the wharf and the talk with Ichabod Sterns,
Master Torrey went to the workshop of Job Chippit, who in those days was
famous for his skill in the carving of figure-heads.

In these times Job would probably have been a sculptor, have gone to
Rome and been famous in marble and bronze. But the idea