from the tip of his nose. He was as handsome a
youngster as you would wish to see, slender, gracefully tapering to the
base of the broad, powerful tail, wide-finned, radiant in silver and
blue-green, and with a splendid crest-like dorsal fin of vivid
ultramarine extending almost the whole length of his back. His eyes
were large, and blazed with a savage fire. Hanging poised a few feet
above the tops of the waving, rose-and-purple sea-anemones and the
bottle-green trailers of seaweed, every fin tense and quivering, he was
ready to dart in any direction where a feast or a fight might seem to
be waiting for him.

"You see, the mere fact that he was alive at all was proof that he had
come triumphantly through many terrible dangers, so it was no wonder he
had a good deal of confidence in himself. And his shapely little body
was so packed full of energy, so thrilling with vitality, that he felt
himself already a sort of lord in those shoal-water domains.

"But with all his lively experiences, there were things, lots of
things, which Little Sword didn't know even yet."

"I _guess_ so!" murmured the Babe, suddenly impressed with the extent
of his own ignorance.

"For instance," Uncle Andy went on, ignoring the interruption, "he had
not yet learned anything about the Inkmaker."

Here he paused impressively, as if to lure the Babe on. But into the
latter's head popped so many questions all together, at the mention of
a creature with so strange a name, that for the moment he could not for
the life of him get any one of them into words. He merely gasped. And
Uncle Andy, delighted with this apparent self-restraint, went on
graciously.

"You're improving a lot," said he. "You're getting quite a knack of
holding your tongue. Well, you're going to know all about it in half a
minute.

"Little Sword caught sight of a queer, watery-pinkish, speckled
creature on the bottom, just crossing a space of clear sand. It was
about twice as long as himself, with a pair of terrible big, ink-black
eyes, and a long bunch of squirming feelers growing out of its head
like leaf-stalks out of the head of a beet. He noticed that two of
these feelers were twice as long as the rest, which did not seem to him
a matter of the least importance. But he noticed at the same time that
the creature looked soft and good to eat. The next instant, like a ray
of light flashed suddenly, he darted at it.

"But swift as he was, the pale creature's in