"He was a little bit of a sea-horse and his name was Hippocampus. 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 Pensacola in Florida, where the water is shallow and warm and there are lots of seaweeds. So he wound his tail around a stem of seaweed 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 under side of his tail where the skin is soft he made a long slit for a pocket, and 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 seawrack 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 all the little eggs began to hatch out, and each one of the 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 away from him, and he couldn't get them back, and so he went along with them and watched 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 seaweed and twisted his tail around it, and waited to see what would happen next. And what happened next was just the same thing over again." =Suborder Hypostomides, the Sea-moths: Pegasidæ.=—The small suborder of _Hypostomides_ (ὑπό, below; στόμα, mouth) consists of the family of _Pegasidæ_. These "sea-moths" are fantastic little fishes, probably allied to the sticklebacks, but wholly unique in form. The slender body is covered with bony plates, the gill-covers are reduced to a single plate. The small mouth underneath a long snout has no teeth. The preopercle and the symplectic are both wanting. The ventrals are abdominal, formed of two rays, and the very large pectoral fin is placed horizontally like a great wing. [Illustration: FIG 190.—Sea-moth, _Zalises umitengu_ Jordan & Snyder. Misaki, Japan. (View from below.) ]