THE ALEXANDRIA GAZETTE — AUGUST 01, 1867
A Tradition
In a valley near Perranzabuloe, by “the buried church of the sands,” there is a wild tradition. The wife of a yeoman named Penna, while bathing her infant daughter in a pool amid the arched rocks of Perran, suddenly saw the child, as if in a paroxysm of joy, leap from her arms and disappear in the water. The mother’s terror and agony were soon, however, removed by the babe swimming up to the surface of the water smiling, and brighter and more beautiful than before. The mother saw no difference in the child, but the old crones in the village at once dubbed it a mermaid’s changeling. Years passed away, as they are in the habit of passing, and Selina Penna grew up a beautiful woman. The squire’s nephew, urged by the praises of a malevolent man, a rejected suitor of her mother’s, saw her, fell in love with her, and seduced her. Broken-hearted at her disgrace, she died, and was buried in the churchyard on the sands. The night after a revel, the squire’s nephew (Walter Trewoofe,) straying on the sands, heard a dirge, and passing round a rock, discovered a beautiful woman seated at the mouth of a cavern. She was like his buried love, but she disappeared when he seized her by the hand. On another visit to the same cavern, the maiden, as he addressed her, turned into a mermaid, who seized him in her arms. A storm rose, the waves broke round the rock, and Walter Trewoofe found too late that the vengeance of the water spirits had overtaken him. Still the mermaid clasped him, till the sea washed them both to the highest pinnacle of the rocks, and then bore them out to the ocean. That night, during the fiercest of the storm, the water spirits were seen tossing from one to another the corpse of the seducer and destroyer of one of their race.
Indiana American. (Brookville, Ind.), 20 March 1868. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
