I went with a fishing party down the coast to Matanzas, an abandoned fort of the early Spanish days, and passed there the most impressive open-air night in my recollection. We camped on the beach, and my shelter was a gauze mosquito netting stretched over four poles, about three feet high, driven in the sand, and as wide as high, and my bed was the sea sand, no covering being required. Through the gauze the sea breeze blew gently; on one side of the long, narrow beach the great Atlantic breakers roared a monotonous bass, and on the other there came from the lagoon the many-toned murmur of a thousand bird voices, some familiar and some strange, whooping of cranes and chattering of coots, ducks, and divers, cries of pelicans, and now and then the sound of flapping wings, as if some great bird had been routed out and had changed his feeding-ground. Around me on the sand ran and crawled the host of crabs, some pulling curiously at the gauze of my shelter; and now and then a huge spider crab climbed up the netting like a squirrel and danced an infernal jig over my head, skipping about on the very tips of his claws, until I tired of his frivolity and hit him from underneath, when he scuttled away, and after half an hour, more or less, was succeeded by another, as if they found an intoxication in dancing over my head. The gnats sang their monody, and the midges put in their treble, but the meshes of my gauze were too fine to let them pass; and after hours of this strange pandemonium I fell asleep, to be waked in the morning by the sun streaming over me from the broad Atlantic.