Easter child.  Strange and potent gifts of entrancing, and of looking into the future, are bestowed upon Easter children of the female sex by the fairies.  Every one knows that!  Whatever the girl might be, it was an astounding thing for Black Dennis Nolan to turn his back on a stranded and unlooted vessel to escort a stranger—­aye, or even a friend—­to shelter.  They knew that, for all his overbearing and hard-fisted ways toward men, he was kind to women; but this matter seemed to them a thing of madness rather than of kindness; and never before had they known him to show any sign of infatuation.  They glanced over their shoulders, and, seeing the skipper some distance off, supervising the construction of the hammock, they began to whisper and surmise.

“Did ye mark the glint in the eyes o’ her, Pat?” inquired one of another.  “Sure, lad, ‘twas like what I once see before—­an’ may the holy saints presarve me from seein’ it agin!  ’Twas the day, ten year back come July, when I see the mermaid in Pike’s Arm, down nort’ on the Labrador, when I was hook-an’-linin’ for Skipper McDoul o’ Harbor Grace.  She popped the beautiful head o’ her out o’ the sea widin reach o’ a paddle o’ me skiff an’ shot a glimp at me out o’ her two eyes that turned me heart to fire an’ me soul to ice, an’ come pretty nigh t’rowin’ me into the bay.”

“Aye,” returned the other in a husky whisper.  “Aye, ye bes talkin’ now, Tim Leary.  Sure, bain’t that power o’ the glimp o’ the eye a mark o’ the mermaid?  They bewitches a man’s heart, does mermaids, an’ kills the eternal soul of him!  Sure, b’y!  Didn’t me own great-gran’father, who sailed foreign viyages out o’ Witless Bay, clap his own two eyes on to one o’ they desperate sea-critters one night he was standin’ his trick at the wheel, one day nort’ o’ Barbados?  Sure, b’y!  He heared a whisper behind him, like a whisper o’ music, and when he turned his head ’round there she was, nat’ral as any girl o’ the harbor, a-gleamin’ her beautiful, grand eyes at him in the moonshine.  An’ when he come ashore didn’t he feel so desperate lonesome that he died o’ too much rum inside the year, down on the land-wash wid his two feet in the sea?”

“Aye, Pat,” returned Tim, “but I bain’t sayin’ as this one bes a mermaid.  She was lashed to the cross-trees like any human.”

“An’ that would be a mermaid’s trick,” retorted the other.  “Where be the other poor humans, then?”

At that moment the skipper approached.

“Mind the wrack, men,” said he.  “Make fast some more lines to her, if ye kin.  I’ll be back wid ye afore long.”