The boatmen too were continually whispering to
one another in dismay and looking with distrust at the three strangers
whose servants even began more and more to forebode something uncanny
and to watch their masters with suspicious glances. Huldbrand often
said to himself, "This comes from like not being linked with like,
from a man uniting himself with a mermaid!" Excusing himself, as we
all love to do, he would often think indeed as he said this, "I did
not really know that she was a sea-maiden. Mine is the misfortune that
every step I take is disturbed and haunted by the wild caprices of her
race; but mine is not the guilt." By such thoughts as these he felt
himself in some measure strengthened, but, on the other hand, he felt
increasing ill-humor and almost animosity toward Undine. He would look
at her with an expression of anger, the meaning of which the poor
wife understood well. Wearied with this exhibition of displeasure and
exhausted by the constant effort to frustrate Kuehleborn's artifices,
she sank one evening into a deep slumber, rocked soothingly by the
softly gliding bark.
Scarcely, however, had she closed her eyes when every one in the
vessel imagined he saw, in whatever direction he turned, a most
horrible human head; it rose out of the waves, not like that of a
person swimming, but perfectly perpendicular as if invisibly supported
upright on the watery surface and floating along in the same course
with the bark.
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