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It was not dirty dirt, if you know what I mean by that, but dirt that he gathered up in his work bits of hay and straw, and dust off a shed floor; mud over his boots and on his toes, for you could see that the big boots he wore seemed to be like a kind of coarse rough shell with a great open mouth in front, and his toes used to seem as if they lived in there as hermit-crabs do in whelk shells.
Among the bushes we found numbers of large hermit-crabs, crawling, or rather running, about in whelk shells, half a dozen of them occasionally having a grand fight amongst themselves.
Being new to the sea, he didn't know the names of the commonest things on the shore, and if you had seen his face light up as he kept picking up whelk's eggs, and mermaid's purses, and zoophytes, and hermit-crabs, and bits of plocamium or coralline, and asking me all I could tell him about them, you would not have thought him a stupid or worthless boy."
And John in a great big, long, reddish-gray beard always comes crunching down at full speed across the hermit-crabs to meet us. And always just before he reaches us, he he trips on his beard and falls headlong into the ocean and is drowned." "Why what an awful dream!" deprecated her father. "Awful?" queried little Eve Edgarton. "Ha! It makes me laugh.
Some egrets preened their silken feathers on the bank; sand-hill cranes and two coyotes, fat as hogs and dragging tails weighted with mud, feasted on the lively hermit-crabs, which they extracted from their holes and that was all. The sun, just above the lilac-tinted mountains, hung like a great suspended ball of fire. The cloudless sky glared like a furnace.
You know one has to look for fresh-water shrimps in a brook if one wants to find them. In Tank 18 are our old friends the hermit-crabs. As a child, I think I believed that these curious creatures killed the original inhabitants of the shells which they take for their own dwelling. It is pleasant to know that this is not the case.
They strolled on a while in silence. Suddenly Phyllis asked, "Where's Rags this morning?" "He doesn't seem to feel very well to-day. Something seems to have disagreed with him perhaps too many hermit-crabs! Anyway, he's lying around on the veranda and seems to want to stay near Aunt Marcia and sleep. She said she'd keep him there." "Best news I've heard in an age!" exclaimed Phyllis, delightedly.
Here, in that morning's walk, I saw three little hermit-crabs, a limpet, and two ninnycocks in a pool of weeds under a bearded rock.
Another curious feature of the jungle here was the multitude of sea-shells everywhere met with on the ground and high up on the branches and foliage, all inhabited by hermit-crabs, who forsake the beach to wander in the forest. On the beach, which I had to walls along every morning to reach the forest, these creatures swarmed by thousands.
Small hermit-crabs in shells many sizes too big for them toddled about, land-crabs rushed frantically and awkwardly for their holes, and Portuguese men-of-war sailed by the coast, luffing to avoid casting up on the beach. A brief period of observation, and I dashed back to the faré umu, and trimmed the fire.
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