"I like you so much," said the Child; "tell me more."
"We have many relations who dress much more magnificently than we do. Some of them have ruffs of rose-colour and crimson, and we are quite dwarfs beside them."
"Do they build cities like you?"
"They do not live in cities," was the reply. "They make their houses more like the cockles and whelks, and live apart: some fix their shelly houses flat on the rocks, some raise them high in the water so as to look around them, some build on oyster-shells far down in the deep sea; and these are the most beautiful of our race."
"I should like to see the deep sea," said the Child; "how beautiful it must be there! How can you go there?"
"We do not know," replied the heads; "we are dwellers in cities, and we are quite content where we are."
Then all the little heads vibrated joyously about, and the Child was silent and heard the sweet music again floating around him in chorus from the hundred little feathered heads.
As he sat still, a hairy little creature came sidling towards him over the rocks. Its head and legs and back were covered with hair; it looked like a miniature trunk of an old tree overgrown with moss, and the Child could not help laughing to see it waddling towards him. It was not until it came quite close that he saw it was a crab, and that what had seemed hairs were sea-weeds and plant-animals growing on its shell.
"What can you carry all that on your back for?" asked the Child, as soon as he could speak for laughing.
"I do not care in the least for it," said the crab good-naturedly. "I suppose they all enjoy it; and it makes very little difference to me as long as they do not come before my eyes."