Rensselaer Republican, Volume 13, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 April 1881 — Mormaids. [ARTICLE]

Mormaids.

Mr. Editor: —I have often heard girls sing— s limn in thr'diviDC be!?». In the bottom o! the iea. Sweet little mertnaUL-. ]k-:ir little mermaids, All eanie courting me. etc. Now there are no mermaids in our day, but we haVe milk maids, bar maids and home niades (that is old j maids), but you might explore the “fish ponds" from New York to ! Liverpool, froni Shanghai to San ; Francisco, and from the mouth of the Mississippi, up even to the head waters of the murmuring Iroquois, 1 and you would not catch a single mermaid, not even those mere maids lost by York and Owens. The mermaid is represented as a creature having the upiier part of a woman joined to the tail of a fish, which is a fish tril much larger than the fish tail attached to Jonah. The fishy part of tlie maid (it isA t any more fishy than the rest of the story) was covered with scales, but this wasn’t any thing against her, for we observe nowadays that the more scales (of Lilly White, com starch, Magnolia balm etc.) a girl has on, the wnore she is sought after; she is ( the mermaid) represented in ancient pictures as balancing herself on her tail in the water holding a mirror in one hand while she combed her ' flowing locks with the other, canals j have locks, but we are not certain that Garfiekl caught his maid there. There were merry men too, but they were not half so attractive as •the maids, and even now, Joe Hardman is ready to admit that there is nothing near so attractive as a good, i kind, amiable woman though she be a mere-maid. Oh! tliis wretched singleness of ' A Bachelor.