WATERMELON FEED

UP to this time I'm telling about, I don't remember to have seen a watermelon. But one summer, Bill Courtney, our neighbor, planted melons. It was getting time that they should be ripe. The older youngsters had been reading Tom Sawyer, and they conceived a plan. They, Lola, Pete, and Revvie, would steal some of those melons. They wouldn't tell Maurice and me where they were going, or what they were going to do. We were "the babies" and the older ones were afraid we'd tell. (Which, I suppose, we would have.) But the three older children started out on their pirating. They came near to the Courtney garden, slipped from cover to cover, ran, hid, ran again, until they saw the green striped beauties lying before their hungry eyes. They each seized a melon, then began to retreat — hide, run, slip behind a bush, run again, until they were too far from the neighbor house to be seen. They skipped over the hills until they felt they were at a safe distance from the scene of the theft, then sat down under a tree to enjoy the fruit of their crime. The boys had knives, so they cut the melons. But imagine the consternation of those children. Instead of juicy pink meat in those melons, there were only white meat and seeds. In their haste they had picked citrons instead of watermelons. The story eventually leaked out, and we still like to joke about the watcrmelon stealing party.