I noticed that little spouts and bursts of sand were coming from many of these holes and with a little patience I could see some of the hoppers coming up as if to look around, as is customary with gophers and chipmunks, and then turning around and going back down again. What they were doing of course was a major job of digging, passing the sand up from one pair of legs to another and throwing it out the hole with a jerk. There was hardly time or inclination to pause and look around the far horizon. It was work that had to be done unceasingly, between tides and between seasons. Perhaps, if tomorrow brought consistently freezing temperatures, they might not appear again in any great numbers until spring; but their usual daily round meant frenzied feeding at low tide and after dark when no winged predators were around, followed by another return to the upper beach and another furiously energetic period of digging homes for themselves. Terrestrial animals, which might drown after a period of immersion, and yet bound on this strip of sand to the tides, they had a more legitimate claim to the beach than most of us. Looking down at them, or in on their busyness, I had an extraordinary Gulliverlike feeling of encroaching on a world to which I did not belong. It was one kind of an eye looking at another without any sense of whether it was seen in turn or not, in a dichotomy of function, race, size, and place. It took the beach out of my possession. This was a place of other-world connections at which I could hardly guess. Do we need to wait for the men from Mars? These are extravagant animals, with their grandiose if relatively blind eyes, with their feats of digging, their hunger dance. In a sense they have a very narrow range, between upper and lower tide, between one season and the next, between feeding and digging on their strip of sand, between hiding and emerging, and their life span is short; but what a use they make of it! _Talorchestia megalopthalma_ is now on my life list, as the “birders” put it, a pearly prodigy of moon leaps that may, for all I know, be the beach’s foremost citizen. I also caught a glimpse of another little animal as I turned over a piece of driftwood. It had numerous legs (seven pairs in all, I have learned), and a flattened body, though slightly rounded on top, and oval in shape, reminding me of a pill bug or sow bug, one of my most familiar landed neighbors, which can be found under almost any boulder or log that provides shade and moisture. The marine, or beached member of the family I met, was grayish white in color, and apparently had the same preference for moisture--if not too much, since it evidently lived at the high-tide line, and was “terrestrial” like the sand hoppers. Some of these isopods swim in the open sea, others live in shallow water, or at the low-tide line, and most are scavengers, feeding on dead animal matter.