190 Fish Stories 



a stem of sea-wrack and hung with his head down, waiting 

 to see what would happen next, and then he saw another 

 little sea horse hanging on another seaweed. And the other 

 sea horse put out a lot of little eggs, and the little eggs all 

 lay on the bottom of the sea at the foot of the seaweed. 

 So Hippocampus crawled down from the seaweed where 

 he was and gathered up all those little eggs, and down on 

 the underside of his tail where the skin is soft, he made a 

 long slit for a pocket, then he stuffed all the eggs into this 

 pocket, and fastened it together, and stuck it with some 

 slime. So he had all the other sea horse's eggs in his own 

 pocket. 



Then he went up on the sea-wrack again, and twisted his 

 tail around it, and hung there with his head down, to see 

 what would happen next. The sun shone down on him, and 

 by and by the little eggs began to hatch out, and each one 

 of the little eggs was a little sea pony, shaped just like a 

 sea horse. And when he hung there with his head down 

 he could feel all the little sea ponies squirming inside his 

 pocket, and by and by they squirmed so much that they 

 pushed the pocket open, and then every one crawled out and 

 got away from him, and he couldn't get them back, and so 

 he went along with them and watched them to see that 

 nothing should hurt them. And by and by they hung 

 themselves all up on the seaweeds, and they are hanging 

 there yet. And so he crawled back to his own piece of sea- 

 wrack, and twisted his tail around it again, and waited to 

 see what would happen next. And what happened next 

 was just the same thing over again. 



