Hooking Watermelons | Page 4

It was dusk when they reached home and found Mr. and Mrs. Steele on
the piazza, which served as an out-door parlor in summer, with a
neighbor who had dropped in to see Arthur. So he got out his cigar-case
and told stories of city life and interesting law cases to an intent
audience till the nine o'clock bell rang, and the neighbor "guessed he 'd
go home," and forthwith proved that his guess was right by going.
"'Gad, I'd forgotten all about the watermelons! Perhaps they 're at 'em
already!" cried Arthur, jumping up and running around the end of the
piazza to the garden.
When he returned, it was to meet a combined volley of protestations
against his foolish project of keeping watch all night, from his father,
his mother, and Amy. But he declared it was no use talking; and where
were the gun and the beans? So they adjourned from the piazza, a lamp
was lit, the articles were hunted up, and the gun duly loaded with a
good charge of powder and a pint of hard beans. It was about ten
o'clock when Arthur, with a parting protest from his mother, went out
into the garden, lugging his gun and a big easy-chair, while Amy

followed, bringing one or two wraps, and a shocking old overcoat
hunted up in the garret, for the chill hours after midnight.
The front of Mr. Steele's lot abutted on one of the pleasantest and most
thickly housed streets of the village; but the lot was deep, and the rear
end rested on a road bordered by few houses, and separated from the
garden by a rail fence easy to climb over or through. The watermelon
patch was located close to this fence, and thus in full view and
temptingly accessible from the road.
Undoubtedly the human conscience, and especially the boyish article,
recognizes a broad difference between the theft of growing crops--of
apples on the trees, for instance, or corn on the stalk, or melons in the
field--and that of other species of property. The surreptitious
appropriation of the former class of chattels is known in common
parlance as "hooking," while the graver term "stealing" describes the
same process in other cases. The distinction may arise from a feeling
that, so long as crops remain rooted to the ground, they are nature's, not
man's, and that nature can't be regarded as forming business contracts
with some individuals to the exclusion of others, or in fact as acceding
to any of our human distinctions of meum and tuum, however useful we
find them. Ethical philosophers may refuse to concede the sanction of
the popular distinction here alluded to between "hooking" and stealing;
but, after all, ethics is not a deductive but an empirical science, and
what are morals but a collection of usages, like orthography and
orthoepy? However that may be, it is the duty of the writer in this
instance merely to call attention to the prevalent popular sentiment on
the subject, without any attempt to justify it, and to state that Arthur
Steele had been too recently a boy not to sympathize with it. And
accordingly he laid his plans to capture the expected depredators
to-night from practical considerations wholly, and quite without any
sense of moral reprobation toward them.
Closely adjoining the edge of the melon-patch was a patch of green
corn, standing ten feet high, and at the fullest perfection of foliage. This
Arthur selected for his ambush, its position being such that he could cut
off the retreat to the fence of any person who had once got among the

melons. Hewing down a hill of corn in the second row from the front,
he made a comfortable place for his easy-chair. Amy lingered for a
while, enjoying the excitement of the occasion, and they talked in
whispers; but finally Arthur sent her in, and as her dress glimmered
away down the garden path, he settled himself comfortably for his
watch.
In the faint moonlight he could just descry the dark shapes of the
melons on the ground in front of him. The crickets were having a high
time in the stubble around, and the night air drew sweet autumnal
exhalations from the ground; for autumn begins by night a long time
before it does by day. The night wind rustled in the corn with a crisp
articulateness he had never noticed in daytime, and he felt like an
eavesdropper. Then for a while he heard the music of some roving
serenaders, down in the village, and grew pensive with the vague
reminiscences of golden youth, romance, and the sweet past that
nightly music suggests,--vague because apparently they are not
reminiscences of the individual but of the race, a part of the
consciousness and ideal of humanity.