“Are there any more snakes, Uncle Hen?” inquired Paul expectantly.
“Yes, a sea-serpent made of very faint stars,” said Uncle Henry, “but he is rather hard to trace out and the only other creature I have left now that is anything like a snake is a dolphin, or porpoise, and he isn’t much like one. We’ll find him, anyway, and then if you prefer to make a sea-horse out of the dolphin, or Delphinus, as you would say in Latin, why go ahead and do it. The animals in Starland are very obliging. They will turn into anything you like to see in them.”
“Where is the dolphin, Uncle Henry?” asked Betty.
“Well,” said he, “draw a line through the beak of the swan and the arrow, or Sagitta, and it will strike Delphinus. ([16]) The arrow is about halfway between the swan and the dolphin. See it?”
The children soon found the dolphin and mapped his skeleton with pebbles. Then Uncle Henry put it to a vote of the Society of Star-Gazers whether Delphinus should be finished up as a dolphin or a sea-horse. The vote was two to one for the sea-horse.
Uncle Henry drew a sigh of relief; he didn’t know quite what a dolphin looked like, and he had seen a picture of a sea-horse in the dictionary only the day before. So Delphinus turned out to look like this. If you insist on having him a dolphin, why draw him differently yourself:
“I wonder,” said Betty thoughtfully, “who rides the sea-horses. Do the mermaids, Uncle Henry?”
“I don’t know about the mermaids,” he answered, “but I do know that an ancient poet and musician, named Arion, was saved from drowning by riding to shore on a dolphin. It was like this: