Around these giants, like a democracy accustomed to endure from time to time the attack of the strong, crayfish and shrimps were swimming in shoals.

Their movements were free and graceful, and their sensitiveness so acute that the slightest agitation made them start, taking tremendous springs.
Ulysses kept thinking of the slavery that Nature had imposed upon these animals, giving them their beautiful, defensive envelopment.
They were born armored and their development obliged them repeatedly to change their form of arms.

They sloughed their skins like reptiles, but on account of their cylindrical shape were able to perform this operation with the facility of a leg that abandons its stocking.

When it begins to crack, the crustaceans have to withdraw from out their cuirass the multiple mechanism of their members and appendages,--claws, antennae and the great pincers,--a slow and dangerous operation in which many perish, lacerated by their own efforts.

Then, naked and disarmed, they have to wait until a new skin forms that in time is also converted into a coat of mail,--all this in the midst of a hostile environment, surrounded with greedy beasts, large and small, attracted by their rich flesh,--and with no other defense than that of keeping themselves in hiding.
Among the swarm of small crustaceans moving around on the sandy bottom, hunting, eating, or fighting with a ferocious entanglement of claws, the onlookers always search for a bizarre and extravagant little creature, the _paguro_, nicknamed "Bernard, the Hermit." It is a snail that advances upright as a tower, upon crab claws, yet having as a crown the long hair of a sea-anemone.
This comical apparition is composed of three distinct animals one upon the other--or, rather, of two living beings carrying a bier between them.