CHAPTER XXII 



THE SEA HORSE AND HIS SEA PONIES 



F all fishes none is more strange than the sea 

 horse. Its head is shaped like the head of a 

 horse, for all the world like that of a chess- 

 knight. Its body is fantastic, armed with a 

 coat of mail, with little fins, and the tail twisted about like 

 the tail of a thousand-legged stork. 



Some sea horses fasten themselves by their tails to float- 

 ing seaweeds, and so are borne for great distances across 

 the seas. Some stay at home and cling to sea-wrack, and 

 other weeds that grow in the bay, and there are some about 

 whose habits we know almost nothing at all. They belong 

 to tropical seas and are borne northward, only by warm cur- 

 rents. The original home of the sea horse is in the Sargasso 

 Sea, in the Atlantic, but they are plenty in the Mediter- 

 ranean, and in the West Indies, and all along the coast of 

 Japan. 



The little kinds live in the bays, and I shall tell the story 

 of one of these, from Pensacola, as I once told it to a group 

 of children, and as I once printed it in a children's book : 



He was a little bit of a sea horse, and his name was Hip- 

 pocampus. He was not more than an inch long, and he had 

 a red stripe on the fin on his back, and his head was made of 

 bone, and it had a shape just like a horse's head, but he ran 

 out to a point at his tail, and his head and his tail were all 

 covered with bone. He lived 'in the Grand Lagoon at Pensa- 

 cola in Florida, where the water is shallow and warm and 

 there are lots of seaweeds. So he wound his tail around 



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