Pip was a young hermit crab on a rocky shore. His shell had become too small: his legs stuck out and he could not pull in his claws. At low tide a gull walked along the rock pools, and Pip, slow and squeezed, did not like the look of it.
On the sand he found a big empty shell, cream and brown, far too big for him, like a house with an echo. He could not take it, so he waited beside it. A large old crab came, as big as a plum. She tried the shell, walked round it twice and liked it. She stepped out of her old shell, naked and quick.
Then Pip saw something he had never seen. The crabs came out from under the stones and lined up on the sand from the biggest to the smallest, nine in all, antennae touching, and waited. The old crab moved into the big shell, the second crab slid into the shell she had left, the third into the second's, one after another, while the gull circled and the first long wave of the tide slid up the sand.
At last the eighth crab left a shell that fitted Pip exactly. He climbed in and felt his claws pull in safely. He scuttled into a rock pool just as the gull landed where he had stood. Eight crabs had a new home from one empty shell.
