Once, in the middle of the night, I was awakened by a small, sharp, repeated sound--knick, knick, knack. It was the opening of tropical flowers. I went outside and there I saw the lovely Queen of Night, which blossoms by the light of the tropical stars. It is a great, gorgeous bloom, eight or ten inches across. There were thousands of them. Scores of glowworms, far brighter than any we know, hovered above each, eager to catch the magnificent perfume that the opening Queen of Night gives forth. In the darkness I could see the flowers only by the light of the glowworms. On every side were these eerie nocturnal lights, a dancing lamp of gathered glowworms illuminating each flower. In that unearthly gleaming, like a kind of moonlight only stranger, the odorous petals shone with the ghostly nuances of their naturally flaming colours, white, crimson, sapphire blue, violet blue. In the South Seas, the flowers have little scent by day, while the sun shines on them. At night, when the dew falls, perfume awakens. It is truly a perfumed night. And the nostrils of man are excited by the rich and almost oppressive blending of odours. The Queen of Night gives off the perfume of vanilla. Mingled with it comes the scent of hyacinth, orchid, mayflower, and heliotrope. Sweet-smelling breezes blow, and above is the tropical sky with its clustered flashing stars and gorgeous Milky Way. Hanging above the horizon is the far-famed Southern Cross. XXV LET'S GO RAIDING AGAIN My "subjects" somehow managed to get along on terms of general amity. Our American prisoners took no exception to my mandates handed on to them by Leudemann, my prime minister. They said that, since they had been treated so well aboard the _Seeadler_, they wanted no other command over our colony. The two captains and their lady had made mutually satisfactory arrangements among themselves, and, so far as we knew, there was no unpleasant incident, although, for the purposes of my tale, it would have helped a lot if they had fought a duel with swords or cocoanuts or chunks of jagged coral on the shore of our tropic lagoon. The three Kanakas proved to be thoroughly good fellows and helped us in many ways. We got along with them in pidgin English at first until one of them picked up a little German.