Of course there are mermaids. The man who gets up and asserts to contrary is mad because he never saw one himself. Mermaids do not live it mill-ponds, rivers or lakes, but make their homes in the green sea. Several attempts have been made to induce a band of them to set up housekeeping in Lake Erie, but the waters are too fresh and lake Captains swear too much.
    Those who have seen 300 or 40 mermaids agree in pronouncing them all that the most fastidious could desire. They have sparkling eves, Grecian noses, small ears, delicate hands, white teeth, dimpled chins and swan-like throats, and the way they smile at an old widower is enough to melt the iron nails in the heels of his boots.
    The genuine mermaid is half fish, half woman, and there is no more beautiful sight in the world than to stand on the ocean beach at sunrise on a summer morning and watch a dozen of these creatures disporting in the flashing element. At one moment they dive down and secure handfuls of pearls to toss in tho air; at another they fan each other with pieces of coral worth $600 per pound. Their sweet voices blend deliciously as they strike up their morning song, and their ringing laughter sounds to the man on the sands like the steady fall of silver dollars upon a golden bell. Now they swim seawards until almost lost sight of —now they are so close on the shore that it can be plainly made out that every one of them is far better looking than the Circassian beauty of a traveling show.
    While the life of a mermaid is full of pearls and corals and diamonds and grottoes and parties, we would not advise any young lady to make the change without proper reflection. In the first place, a young lady who is used to dry land would feel awfully damp for several weeks after becoming a mermaid. Then she would have to change her diet, costume, style of piano playing and singing, and she would probably miss the young man who calls every Sunday evening. So far as can be learned from Paul Du Chaillu, Eli Perkins and New Bedford whaling captains, mermaids never marry. Once in a while an old widower of a sea horse comes spooning around after a second wife, but he gets his walking papers with promptness and dispatch.
    It seems horrible to think of a beautiful girl living single forever—for mermaids do not die—but nature’s ways are ways of wisdom and everything is for the best. It was probably the intention to furnish them husbands from the sailors who fell overboard, but it seems that such sailors drown before the date of the wedding is fixed, and the mermaid is therefore doomed to warm her cold feet on a flat-iron and do her own marketing.—Detroit Free Press.

From— The Daily enterprise. (Livingston, Mont.), 23 Nov. 1883. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.