OF THE SOUTH SEAS 371 



a myriad of their brothers, and who fixed the countless 

 stars in the firmament to guide them in the darkness. 



The hermit-crabs drew my minute attention, and I 

 anchored my canoe and with the lunette watched them 

 by the hour. They were as provident and as handy — 

 with claws — as the bee that stores honey. The hermit 

 inhabits the vacant shells of other moUusks, entering one 

 soon after birth, sometimes finding them untenanted, 

 and sometimes killing the rightful occupant, and chang- 

 ing his house as he grows. I had been surprised to see 

 small and large shells moving fast over the reef, and 

 on the beach at the water's-edge; shells as big as my 

 thumbnail and nearly as big as my head. I seized one, 

 and behold ! the inmate was walking on ten legs with the 

 shell on his back, like a man carrying a dog-house. I 

 attempted to pull him out of his lodging, and he was so 

 firmly fastened to the interior by hooks on his belly that 

 he held on until he was torn asunder. His abdomen is 

 soft and pulpy and without protecting plates, as have 

 other crabs, and he survived only by his childhood cus- 

 tom of stealing a univalve abode, though he murdered 

 the honest tenant. In one I saw the large pincher of 

 the crab so drawn back as to form a door to the shell as 

 perfect as the original. When he felt growing pains the 

 hermit-crab unliooked himself from his ceiling and mi- 

 grated in search of a more commodious dwelling. 



Interesting as were these habits of the cenobite crus- 

 tacean, his keeping a policeman or two on guard on his 

 roof, and moving them to his successive domiciles, was 

 more so. These policemen are anemones, and I saw 

 hermit crab-shells with three or four on them, and one 

 even in the mouth of the shell. When the anchorite 



