If you want to catch an Æsop prawn you must look for it in the summer, for it always spends the rest of the year in deeper water. But as soon as the weather becomes really warm it travels up and down with the tide, and you may find it in plenty in the pools which are left among the rocks at low-water. PLATE XXVIII THE SHRIMP (3) I told you that a good many of the shadowy forms which you may see darting to and fro in the rock-pools are those of prawns. The rest are quite sure to be shrimps, which are very much more common. Indeed, in most of the rock-pools you will find at least ten shrimps for every prawn. But they are very difficult to see, for they are partly transparent when they are alive, so that they are scarcely visible when they are swimming. And when they are resting at the bottom of the pool their speckled bodies look almost exactly like the sand on which they lie. Besides this, they have a way of nearly burying themselves, by scooping out a kind of furrow with their hind limbs, sinking into it, and then covering themselves with sand by means of their feelers. So the fishermen often call them “sand-raisers.” [Illustration: PLATE XXVIII 1. THE PRAWN. 2. THE ÆSOP PRAWN. 3. THE SHRIMP.] PLATE XXIX THE SANDHOPPER (1 and 1 A) Commoner even than the shrimps are the Sandhoppers. On any sandy part of the shore you may find them in thousands and thousands. If you walk along the beach where the sand is dry, and step rather heavily, you will see their holes opening all round you. If you walk along it where it is damp, you will find that it is honeycombed with their burrows. If you turn over a stone, or lift up a piece of sea-weed which has been thrown up by the waves, twenty, or thirty, or forty of them will come skipping out like so many tiny kangaroos. And if you walk near the edge of the water when the tide is coming in you may often see them leaping about in such vast numbers that they look just like a thick mist rising for a foot or eighteen inches into the air. Yet sandhoppers have so many enemies that it really seems wonderful that any of them should be left alive at all. Nearly all the shore birds feast upon them, and so do many of the land birds. Indeed, when the tide is rising, you may often see a long line of birds standing closely side by side together a few feet in front of the water’s edge and gobbling up the active little creatures in thousands. Then the shore crabs are very fond of them, and destroy thousands more. And even when they are buried deeply in the sand they are not safe, for there is a little beetle which goes down their burrows after them, and catches and eats them there very much as a ferret catches a rabbit in its hole.