fatal fascinations of her reputation as her abode is from the languorous tropics to which the myth of natural history has assigned her. She doesn't haunt the soft Aegean or comb her streaming locks on sunny Grecian shores. It's the Bering sea for hers; and if any one goes a-wooing sirens, he can omit the tortoise-shell comb and the white bristle brush from the toilet set he's taking along. They may prove baldheaded. The mermaid as she has appeared in the flesh wouldn't arouse the jealousy of a two-weeks’ bride.     The zoologists of France are just now trailing along with their microscopes and measuring tapes in the wake of the crowds of ordinary humans who are flocking to Dijon, in France, to gaze on a natural-born siren, who, that or which has been placed on public view. She—or is she It?—was found in a cave on Bering sea. She—might as well give her the benefit of the doubt—was, alas! extremely dead when found. But she is all there except her hair, the skull being covered with a bare yellowish skin. Nobody can tell yet whether she was born that way or whether a rival snatched her tresses from her to make an extra rat; fashions are a bit behind-hand near the north pole.     As far down as her waist the siren at Dijon is a woman, with a woman's breasts and with arms and hands altogether human, except that the fingers end in great claws. Her teeth, instead of being pearly jewels of beauty set in coral, are as pedalled a cat's—very useful in the assimilation of porgies and whitefish, but scarcely an asset for a Venus.     Below the waist she is plain fish; of enormous proportions as to the tall, as might be expected of any fish

equipped with an upper body the size, of a woman. If there is beauty to her at all, it is to be found in the fish half, which is all elegance and grace from the piscatorial point of view, where the human features above are those of a freak or monstrosity.     French scientists, for the time being, seem to have taken the specimen seriously and are giving her an honest consideration. The local public is divided as to her genuineness, although with the majority seeing is believing. In the past mermaid fakes have been worked in the United States as well as in Europe, with appeals to, the credulity of all classes of people. A few years ago the mermaid was a common sideshow attraction with the small circus—not a very difficult illusion to produce under conditions of flickering artificial light and a stream of spectators hustled along so fast that they had only a hurried glimpse of the blonde lady from Fourth avenue, New York, wearing a scaly tail more or less neatly attached to her at the hips.     In an eastern “medical” museum there was shown for many years the mummy of a little mermaid which in most particulars, corresponded to the formation of the siren now on view at Dijon. But it stayed in the museum window so long and it dried out so completely that, after a while, passersby had no difficulty in discerning where and how the fishtail had been joined to the body of a malformed and very small infant.     The siren from Bering sea, should she by any wonderful chance prove to be the real thing, would leave the human belles of the seashore forever free from mermaid rivalry.