First, my comrades, going to bed romping, like English schoolboys, and not in the least like the effeminate and luxurious Creoles who figure in the English imagination, broke a four-post bedstead down among them with hideous roar and ruin; and had to be picked up and called to order by their elders.

Next, the wind, which ranged freely through the open roof, blew my bedclothes off.

Then the dogs exploded outside, probably at some henroost-robbing opossum, and had a chevy through the cocos till they tree'd their game, and bayed it to their hearts' content.

Then something else exploded--and I do not deny it set me more aghast than I had been for many a day-- exploded, I say, under the window, with a shriek of Hut-hut-tut-tut, hut-tut, such as I hope never to hear again.

After which, dead silence; save of the surf to the east and the toads to the west.