“Oh, yes!  He’s all right there!” assented Uncle Andy.  “When they are quite grown up they are sometimes as long as a canoe, a seventeen or eighteen foot canoe.  And they are quick as ‘greased lightning’ all right!”

“But how big are they when they’re little?” pursued the Babe, getting around to his favorite line of investigation.

“Well now, that depends on how little you take them!” answered Uncle Andy.  “As they are hatched out of tiny, pearly eggs no bigger than a white currant, which the little silver crabs can play marbles with on the white sand of the sea-bottom till they get tired of the game and eat them up, you’ve got a lot of sizes to choose from in a growing sword-fish.”

“I don’t mean when they’re so very little,” answered the Babe, who did not find things just hatched very interesting.

“I see,” said Uncle Andy, understandingly.  “Of course when they are first hatched, and for a long time afterwards, they are kept so busy trying to avoid getting eaten up by their enemies that I don’t suppose one in ten thousand or so ever manages to survive to the stage where he begins to make things interesting for his enemies in turn.  But then things begin to hum.”

“Tell me how they hum!” said the Babe eagerly, his eyes round with anticipation.

“Well,” began Uncle Andy slowly, looking far across the lake as if he saw things that the Babe could not see, “in one way and another, partly by good luck and partly by good management, Little Sword succeeded in dodging his enemies till he had grown to be about two feet in length, without counting the six inches or so of sharp, tapering blade that stood straight out 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.”