THE STORY OF A STONE. 225 
things, and opened and shut its umbrella pretty 
much as the jelly-fishes do now on a sunny day off 
Nahant Beach when the tide is coming in. It hada 
great many little feelers that hung down all around 
like so -many little snakes; so it was named Me- 
dusa, after a queer woman who lived a long while 
ago, when all sorts of stories were true. She 
wore snakes instead of hair, and used to turn peo- 
ple into stone images if they dared to make faces 
at her. So this little Medusa floated around, and 
opened and shut her umbrella for a good while, — 
a month or two, perhaps, we don’t know how long. 
Then one morning, down among the sea-weeds, she 
laid a whole lot of tiny eggs, transparent as crab- 
apple jelly, and smaller than the dew-drop on the 
end of a pine leaf. That was the last thing she 
did; so she died, and our story henceforth concerns 
only one of those little eggs. 
One day the sun shone down into the water,— 
the same sun that shines over the Oconto saw-mills 
now, — and touched these eggs with life; and a lit- 
tle fellow whom we will call Favosites, because that 
was his name, woke up inside of the egg, and came 
out into the world. He was only a little piece of 
floating jelly, shaped like a cartridge pointed at 
both ends, or like’a grain of barley, although very 
much smaller. He had a great number of little 
paddles on his sides. These kept flapping all the 
time, so that he was constantly in motion. And 
at night all these little paddles shone with a rich 
green light, to show him the way through the 
water. It would have done you good to see them 
some night when all the little fellows had their 
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