AN ISLAND EXISTENCE 93 



and watched them each evening for two months before the 

 first quivering baby cut itself a neat lid from the end of its 

 prison, crawled out and went scampering forth to its fate fully 

 equipped to meet the complex problems of adult lizard-hood. 

 Consider what a marvelous provision this is. For these, the 

 smallest reptiles in the world, there is no responsibility of par- 

 ent to offspring, no weary hours of training and education. 

 On the day of mating there is planted in the waiting ova all 

 that is ever required for the baby Sphaerodactylus to know. It 

 seems a divine attention is given to even the least of nature's 

 children. 



A family of scorpions lived in the interstices of the roof 

 thatching and immediately under the ridge pole was the nest 

 of a common house mouse. Like myself, it was an intruder, a 

 foreigner, islander by adoption, having escaped probably by 

 proxy of an ancestor several generations removed from the 

 hold of some visiting schooner. I did not disturb it, nor did I 

 make any further attempt to remove the black and yellow 

 spider that was still occupying the crack over the lintel. I knew 

 they were really harmless and I was well repaid for my for- 

 bearance by many hours of entertainment. 



The most thrilling times of all were the evenings. Then the 

 hermit crabs came out of their hiding places and began their 

 nocturnal wanderings. Hermit crabs occur on Inagua literally 

 in the hundreds of thousands, every hole and crevice shelters 

 them, and night is their period of activity. These crabs are 

 remarkable in that nature has taken away the hard chitinous 

 covering on their tails, leaving these members soft, white and 

 vulnerable. In order to protect these delicate appendages they 

 thrust them in abandoned seashells which they carry wherever 

 they go. The clattering and banging of these shells over the 

 rocks made the night hideous. Every hermit crab thought its 

 neighbor's shell was bigger and better than the one it carried 



