Join us at the campfire for tales from around the world, told by storytellers of all backgrounds and creeds. From the heros and heroines of old, let us relearn and rediscover the wisdom of our ancestors. Shhh..the story begins..

Along the south coast of Cornwall, where the land rises with fists of granite until it finally surrenders to the battering waves of the sea, generations of fisherfolk once combed the shores in search of shipwrecked treasures. These wreckers profited by the gales that howled up the English Channel, dashing wooden trading vessels to splinters on the Cornish rocks. For days after a storm, fragments of the ships and the cargo they carried...barrels of rum and salted beef, bales of flax, brass fixtures on pieces of flotsam and jetsam...washed up with the tide. The villagers who found such fruits of tragedy considered them to be gifts from the sea, like the catches of pilchard and mackerel that swelled their fishing nets on good days. It seemed that for every life the water took, it gave a living to another.

To one Cornishman, however, the sea gave much more. A man of middle years named Lutey, he lived quietly with his wife and dog in a square stone cottage at Cury, near Lizard Point. With his children grown and now moved away, wrecking was the special pleasure of his idle hours. The thick rudder of a ship made his mantlepiece and on it sat a fine brass clock. In the corner, a gilded figurehead stared out over the earth-floored room with blank, wooden eyes.

It was a hazy spring afternoon when Lutey's life took on a remarkable change. It was a day when bluish mists rose off the sea and pink-flowered thrift ran riot over the walls of his village. In the company of his dog, Lutey wandered among the rocks below his house to see what might be found. After a while, he heard a faint cry and then another, so weak that it was barely audible above the rumble of the waves.

Lutey followed the sound. It led him across a clutter of boulders that ringed a small depression in the shore. At high tide, the surf surged freely in and out, but when the water was at low ebb, the place became a tidal pool, isolated from the great mother sea by a stretch of sand and green-mottled rocks. Was it land then...or was it sea? In truth, it was neither and both...an in-between place, its boundaries shifting with every mood of the moon. At such mutable, magical spots, strange spirits might enter the mortal world, as one had done on this day. Lutey peered down into the circle of rocks. His gaze was met by sea-green eyes from another age and another realm.

They were very frightened eyes, set in a sweet, pale face half-hidden by red-gold curls. The being was clearly female from head to waist but, at the hips, her body faded into a long, smooth shape...a shimmering iridescence beneath the surface of the pool. Lutey stood and gaped. He had found a mermaid!

"Help me," she whimpered. "Help me to the water." She thrashed about in the shallow pool. Lutey advanced cautiously down the rocks, wading through a flurry of tiny fish and crabs.

"I can bestow upon you powers, if only you will get me to the sea," promised the mermaid, raising her arms with the gesture of a trustful child.

Lutey bent down and lifted her up. She was light as a cloud. The sea-maiden wrapped her arms around Lutey's neck as he bore her over the lip of rock that rimmed the pool and picked his way through the furrowed stretch of sand. From among the rocks behind him trotted his dog, whining nervously.

At the edge of the water, Lutey halted. The mermaid looked into his face and made a nestling movement in his arms. "Tell me your heart's desire," she murmured, "and it shall be yours, whatever it might be."

Lutey stared out to sea for a moment. Then he said, "I want the power to break evil spells." Witchcraft was an age-old practice in his remote, sea-ringed land. A disgruntled Cornish villager could bring misfortune on a neighbor by merely ill-wishing it to be so. The man who could reverse such a spell would be sought after indeed.

The sea-maiden smiled and ran a delicate finger along his cheek. "It is done," she said. "And what other boon?"

Lutey was in the water now, breakers foaming about his knees. "I want the magic to cast healing spells."

"Done," replied the mermaid. "And another?"

"I want these powers for my sons and for their sons and for their sons' sons after that, so that my family's name will be honored for all time."

"You have it," responded the sea-maiden. "For your kindness, you shall have all these gifts." As a token of her pledge, she drew from her hair the ivory comb that held her curls in place. The long tresses cascaded around her shoulders, soft against her creamy skin. She pressed the ornament into his hand. Standing in the sea, Lutey felt the dizzying tug of the tide. His feet sank deeper into the sand with every wave that broke about him and, at the shore's edge, his dog set up a howl. The mermaid laughed, tightening her hold on Lutey's neck. Droplets of water sparkled like diamonds on her lashes. Now, the two of them were in her element. She pulled his head down so that her mouth was at his ear. "Stay with me," she whispered. "What pleasures have you left on land?"

Lutey choked and struggled; the frail arms were surprisingly strong. His feet slipped and slid on the floor of the sea, and the dog was now pulling frantically at the leg of his trousers. Stumbling in the shallow surf, Lutey let go of the mermaid. Instinctively, he drew out his pocketknife. At the sight of it, the sea-maiden gave a powerful kick of her tail and arched out of reach. Like many creatures of the other world, she was repelled by iron.

"Farewell then," she sang. "For nine years I will bide, then, we shall meet again." She gave a sudden leap that took her into deep water and the last Lutey saw of her was the streaming, flame-like hair vanishing into the green sea. Urged by his dog, he struggled to the shore and climbed to the cottage with the comb still clutched in one hand and his knife in the other.

Lutey's wife stood watching him from the door. "What's this now?" she asked. "Wet to the skin and naught but a bit of bone to show for an afternoon's wrecking!"

"It's a comb," replied the sullen Lutey.

"A comb is it then?" replied his wife. "It's a row of teeth on a shark jaw, that's what it is!"

Lutey looked and discovered that this was true. "Yet," he said as he walked past her into the cottage, "I'll keep it nonetheless." He carefully hung his prize on a beam, amid the clutter of fishnets and wooden buoys suspended there. Then he spread his soaked clothing before the fire to dry and ate in silence the food his wife set before him. After supper, the woman turned her stolid profile to him and bent to her sewing. Lutey retired early, taking to his bed and staring up at the sea-maiden's strange token until the lull of the waves outside sent him to sleep with their ceaseless ballad.

It was not many days later, as Lutey walked the high road near his village, that the mermaid's promise was first fulfilled. In a wind-stunted tangle of hawthorn trees, he saw a farmer crouching beside a dead cow. This was but one of many, the tight-lipped man told Lutey. His herd was cursed, but who had done it, he did not know.

Lutey knelt down. "This is the work of a witch," he said. "Bleed the next cow that becomes sickly and catch the blood on a pile of straw. When it dries, set fire to the straw and mark well the first person to pass through the smoke. That will be your ill-wisher. Deal with the witch as you will." Lutey fell silent for a moment, astonished at his own words.

"Aye," said the farmer and made no further comment. The odd prescription brought swift results. Word of Lutey's cleverness soon passed quickly about the village of Cury.

It was a child that Lutey saved next. A man came asking for him late one night and, with lantern in hand, led him to a poor, cramped cottage by the bay. The mother looked up from the pallet where her youngest lay racked with fever.

"The tide's turning is close at hand," she said anxiously. The belief was strong that death came only on the ebbing tide. If the ailing one could be held fast through the turning until the flood tide set in, then there would be another six hours of grace.

Lutey carried the child outside, down a rocky path to a grove where a sapling stood in the shadow of its great parent tree. It was an ash...a tree that Englishmen held sacred for reasons long forgotten in the mists of time. Into its branches, Lutey gently thrust the child and, at the moment which marked the slack between the ebb and flood of the sea, the magic of the ages touched the sapling. The child's fever broke.

By autumn, when the pilchard were running, Lutey had no time left for fishing. His reputation as a peller...so named because he could expel spirits of sickness and evil...had spread far beyond Cury and Lizard Point. The poor folk came to Lutey in times of trouble, bearing jugs of fish oil or lengths of stout rope for payment if they could afford no more. It seemed there was nothing that he did not know. He kept a scrap of a hangman's noose for the curing of scrofula and sold written charms to wear around the neck for warding off ill wishes. He knew the secret recipes for medicines made from charred mice and scabious root...the devil's-bit so prized for its healing powers. One by one, the sons of Lutey tied up their fishing boats and joined him. They too understood the power of angelica leaves and elder blossom to cure a cold, and groundsel to stop the fevered shivers of ague. The art of healing came to them in the same mysterious way, as if through the water they bathed in or the air they breathed.

Lutey kept to himself the source of the gift and the comb he held in covenant through winters of endless drizzling rain and summers bright with yellow gorse.

After a few years, Lutey moved to a larger dwelling in the village, a house that boasted an upper story and many rooms to please his fretful wife. But he grew more withdrawn with the passing of time and often returned to the old stone cottage at low tide to sit alone by the tidal pool.

One day, abruptly, he took his herring nets and headed toward the sea. "Going to fish," was all he said. But it was no day for fishing.

In the harbor of the village, angry waves slapped at the boats. Along the shoreline, the sky was heavy with thick clouds that scudded before a threatening wind. Lutey's sons exchanged glances, and the eldest followed the old man to make sure that no harm would befall him. In the end though, the son was helpless against the force that moved his father.

Lutey had pushed a small skiff into the water. It bobbed and pitched in the chop, but he made no move to guide it. Pale arms and a bright head flashed around and around the tiny vessel. The mermaid was sporting in the waves, still young and fair, although the mortal man's hair was now thin and streaked with grey. While the son watched from the shore, the sea-maiden beckoned and Lutey rose to his feet, lurching in the swells.

"My hour has come," he shouted to his son. He plunged into the water and was gone. Later, the young man would report that the sea seemed to have simply swallowed his father alive and, in a sense, it did. For with that plunge, Lutey had crossed the boundary into another world...a world as ancient and fathomless as time itself. The mermaid had him now, drawing him down into the depths through corridors of hazy green until she reached her sea cave nestled far below the Cornish shore.

Whether Lutey ever regretted leaving the life of men and boats...whether the mermaid's dwelling was humble or fine...whether she kept to him only or had others as well...no one will ever know. Lutey was never seen on earth again.

The mermaid's magic endured through his kin. For generations, the Luteys of Cury were renowned for their powers against sickness and witchcraft. The mermaid, however, took her payment just the same. It was said that every nine years, as regularly as the tides, one of Lutey's descendants was lost at sea.