Hooking Watermelons | Page 4

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. At last the music was succeeded by the baying of a dog in some distant farmyard, and then, ere the ocean of silence had fairly smoothed its surface over that, a horse began to kick violently in a neighboring barn. Some time after, a man chopped some kindlings in a shed a couple of lots off.