The swordfish carries his sword not in his tail, but on the tip of his snout more like a bayonet than a sword.

I don't think Bill has ever been at all intimate with swordfish--eh, what ?" The Babe shook his blonde head sadly over this instance of Bill's inaccuracy.
"And are they as big as Bill says ?" he inquired.
"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.