“It was real enough,” was the reply. “There’s no doubt of that. The only question is: What was it that they saw? The sketch—I copied it in my book, here it is—shows that it wasn’t a serpent. The captain thought it was a serpent, because it was long and thin. A worm is long and thin, but it isn’t a serpent; an eel is long and thin, but it isn’t a serpent; and a ribbon-fish may be fifty or sixty feet long, but it’s not in the least like a snake. Look at the head in the sketch, Perry, and you’ll see that it isn’t like a snake’s head, at all.” Perry took the note-book and looked at the drawing with the intensest interest. “It doesn’t look like anything in particular,” he said, “it’s more like a cross between a seal and a whale.” The scientist nodded approvingly. “Once in a while, Perry,” he said, “you show a whole lot of good sense. Professor Owen, the great naturalist, when the _Dædalus_ sketch was shown him, wrote a long article suggesting that what Captain M’Quhae had seen was a sea-elephant, of which specimens have been found nearly thirty feet in length. And a sea-elephant is of the family of the seals. “Personally, I rather question whether Professor Owen was right, because so conspicuous a thing as the trunk-like prolongation of the nose, at least a foot long, would not have escaped the attention of sailors. Seamen’s eyes are keen for objects in the water. Some of the supposed sea-serpents probably have been squids, some have been schools of porpoises, some have been ribbon-fish, but I think the monster seen from the quarter-deck of the _Dædalus_ probably some aged and patriarchal creature of the seal variety, a mammal and not a reptile, a creature of this age, not of an age of two million years ago.” The porpoises had passed far out of sight long before this conversation was ended, but his uncle’s belief that there was some huge creature still swimming in the seas quickened the lad’s interest, and he scanned the waters with the professor’s field-glass eagerly and often. He thought of the phrase “beginner’s luck” and his hopes continued unabated. Two days later land was sighted, and the steamer came to the great gateway of that sea which has formed the basin of civilization, that great Mediterranean Sea on which Venice, Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Phœnicia have played their part. To the right, lay mysterious Africa; to the left, frowning and sheer, rose the great rock of embattled Gibraltar, Great Britain’s guardian of the straits. The boy was enjoying the sight of land and picturing to himself the scene if the dogs of war were loosed and that front of rock should suddenly belch forth a flame curtain of fire and death before which no vessel could live for a moment. “No signs of Scylla and Charybdis,” said a voice behind him.