“Perhaps he thought it best to be on the safe side,” was the reply. “Now here is a point that gives a curious twist of apparent truth to the story. The abbé added that the christening did not seem to make any difference. If he really wanted to color the tale, there was his chance to make a miracle out of it. “In his half-scientific account of the occurrence, the abbé stated that the mermaid breathed like a woman, not a fish. Although warned by the girls, he tried to pick up the strange creature, but she fastened her teeth savagely in his arm, and when he tried to shake her off, she hung on, letting go her hold suddenly when free from the rock-bound pool in which she had been a prisoner. Falling on the flat ledges of the rocks, she shuffled rapidly to the sea, plunged in and was gone. The doctor who cauterized the abbé’s arm added a statement concerning the unusual character of the bite.” “That’s a fishy tale!” exclaimed the boy derisively. “It does sound a bit queer,” the professor admitted, “and yet, it’s not so long ago since Harvard University had in its museum a ‘specimen’ of a mermaid.” “What was it?” “It was a mummied young monkey down to the waist sewed on to the tail of a fish, the monkey’s body being all covered with fish scales. It was a marvelous piece of Japanese workmanship, and the naturalists accepted it as truth.” “What a fake!” exclaimed the boy. “I wonder if there’s anything like that in our Museum at home.” “Probably not. I doubt if a hoax like that could be worked nowadays,” the professor responded, rising from his deck-chair as the bugler blew the call to dinner. All through their trip along the Mediterranean, Perry became a howitzer of questions and kept Antoine and his uncle busy every moment that they were on deck. One of the things which especially caught the lad’s imagination was his friend Antoine’s picture of the constant risings and fallings of the great sea on which they were traveling, so that Perry began to think of the Mediterranean as a huge pond which came and went with changes in geology, being sometimes like a puddle in the roadside on a showery day, and sometimes a vast ocean which linked together the waters of the world. Antoine had whiled away many hours of the trip modeling in clay, while the boy watched his skillful fingers—the Belgian was an excellent sculptor—and so, when one day, he undertook to explain to Perry the geological changes in the Mediterranean, he brought up one of his modeling boards. Spreading on it a lump of clay, he smoothed it out and began the story of the formation and changes of the great inland sea.