Book Description

This is the annotated edition including the rare biographical essay by Edwin E. Slosson called "H. G. Wells - A Major Prophet Of His Time". The book is also fully illustrated with a wealth of beautiful drawings. "Such previous landings of mermaids as have left a record have all a flavor of doubt.'' Thus Mr. Wells begins his story of the mermaid, and he tells it with the solemnity and detail which make his most preposterous imaginings as credible as an account of the racing at Cowes. His method is to take an impossibility as premise and to follow out the argument quite logically, with just the same surprise at his own conclusion as the reader might be expected to feel. Here the mermaid is the impossibility, and it was not until she came to shore—shamming cramp—at Sandgate to the astonishment of a party of bathers that Mr. Wells believed in the existence of such creatures. So we have this beautiful being arriving from another world projected into the house of the estimable Buntings and the society of Folkestone, where she has, for obvious reasons, to make her public appearances in a bath chair. Miss Waters—such is her terrestrial name—knows a thing or two; for fashion papers flutter from channel steamers, and certain productions of Dr. Richard Garnett seem to have capsized a ship and brought a liberal education to the sea maidens. Moreover, she naturally talks the language of the Rulers of the Waves. But she has no soul, and of course she has never tasted tea. Now Mrs. Bunting cannot imagine a World without Tea. So, remembering that the Sea Lady has no soul, no morals and is immortal, that she has a tail and an affection for a young man already engaged to the earnest Adeline, you will foresee the dreadful confusion caused by her incursion into a respectable middle-class family.