Captain Stedman tells us, that one of his sentinels, one night, called out that he saw a negro, with a lighted tobacco-pipe, cross a creek near by in a canoe. At which alarm they lost no time in leaping out of their hammocks, and were not a little mortified when they found the pipe was nothing more than a Fire-fly on the wing.[163] An individual of this species, brought to Paris in some wood, in the larva or nymph state, there underwent its metamorphosis, and by the light which it emitted, excited the greatest surprise among many of the inhabitants of the Faubourg St. Antoine, to whom such a phenomenon had hitherto been unknown.[164] When Cortes and Narvaez were at war with one another in Mexico, Bernal Diaz relates “that one night in the midst of darkness numbers of shining Beetles (_Elater noctilucus_) kept continually flying about, which Narvaez’s men mistook for the lighted matches of our fire-arms, and this gave them a vast idea of the number of our matchlocks.”[165] Thomas Campanius tells us that one night the Cucuji frightened all the soldiers at Fort Christina, in New Sweden (Pennsylvania?): they thought they were enemies advancing toward them with lighted torches.[166] Another such like story, which is not incredible by any means, is told us by Mouffet. He says that when Sir Thomas Cavendish and Sir Robert Dudley first landed in the West Indies, and saw an infinite number of moving lights in the woods, which were merely these Elaters, they supposed that the Spaniards were advancing upon them with lighted matches, and immediately betook themselves to their ships.[167] The Indians of the Carribbee Islands, Ogleby remarks, “anoint their bodies all over (at certain solemnities wherein candles are forbidden) with the juice squeezed out of them (Cucuji), which causes them to shine like a flame of fire.”[168] And in the Spanish Colonies, on certain festival days in the month of June, these insects are collected in great numbers, and tied as decorations all over the garments of the young people, who gallop through the streets on horses similarly ornamented, producing on a dark evening the effect of a large moving body of light. On such occasions the lover displays his gallantry by decking his mistress with these living gems.[169]