Hooking Watermelons | Page 6

"This is only from
my brother Charley."
"The one at Watertown 'Sem.'?"
"Yes," said Lina; "and oh, girls," she went on, with gloomy energy, "we
don't have any good times at all compared with those boys. They do
really wicked things, hook apples, and carry off people's gates and
signs, and screw up tutors' doors in the night, and have fights with what
he calls 'townies,'--I don't know exactly what they are,--and everything.
I thought before that we were doing some things too, but we 're not,

compared with all that, and I shall be so ashamed when I meet him at
home not to have anything to tell except little bits of things."
A depressing pause followed. Lina's disparaging view of achievements
in the way of defying the proprieties, of which all the girls had been
very proud, cast a profound gloom over the circle. The blonde seemed
to voice the common sentiment when she said, resting her chin on
Lina's knee, and gazing pensively at the wall:--
"Oh, dear! that comes of being girls. We might as well be good and
done with it. We can't be bad so as to amount to anything."
"Good or bad, we must eat," said Nell Barber. "I must go and get the
spread ready. I forgot all about it, Lina; but we came in just to invite
you. Eleven sharp, remember. Three knocks, a pause, and another, you
know. Come, girls."
The brunette followed her, but Lina's little sweetheart remained.
"What have they got?" demanded the former listlessly.
"Oh, Nell has a jar of preserves from home, and I smuggled up a plate
of dried beef from tea, and cook let us have some crackers and plates.
We tried hard to get a watermelon there was in the pantry, but cook
said she did n't dare let us have it. It's for dinner to-morrow."
Lina's eyes suddenly became introspective; then after a moment she
rose slowly and stood in her tracks with an expression of deep thought,
absent-mindedly took one step, then another, and after a pause a third,
finally pulling up before the mirror, into which she stared vacantly for a
moment, and then muttered defiantly as she turned away:--
"We 'll see, Master Charley."
"Lina Maynard, what's the matter with you?" cried the blonde, who had
watched the pantomime with open mouth and growing eyes.
Lina turned and looked at her thoughtfully a moment, and then said

with decisiveness:--
"You just go to Nell's, my dear, and say I 'm coming pretty soon; and if
you say anything else, I 'll--I 'll never marry you."
The girls were in the habit of doing as Lina wanted them to, and the
blonde went, pouting with unappeased curiosity.
To gain exit from the Seminary was a simple matter in these lax days,
and five minutes later Lina was walking rapidly along the highway, her
lips firm set, but her eyes apprehensively reconnoitring the road ahead,
with frequent glances to each side and behind. Once she got over the
stone wall at the roadside in a considerable panic and crouched in the
dewy grass while a belated villager passed, but it was without further
adventure that she finally turned into the road leading behind Mr.
Steele's lot, and after a brief search identified the garden where she
remembered seeing some particularly fine melons, when out walking a
day or two previous. There they lay, just the other side the fence,
faintly visible in the dim light She could not help congratulating herself,
by the way, on the excellent behavior of her nerves, whose tense,
fine-strung condition was a positive luxury, and she then and there
understood how men might delight in desperate risks for the mere sake
of the exalted and supreme sense of perfect self-possession that danger
brings to some natures. Not, indeed, that she stopped to indulge any
psychological speculations. The coast was clear; not a footfall or
hoof-stroke sounded from the road, and without delay she began to
look about for a wide place between the rails where she might get
through. Just as she found it, she was startled by an unmistakable
human snore, which seemed to come from a patch of high corn close to
the melons, and she was fairly puzzled until she observed, about ten
rods distant in the same line, an open attic window. That explained its
origin, and with a passing self-congratulation that she had made up her
mind not to marry a man that snored, she began to crawl through the
fence. When halfway through the thought struck her,--wasn't it like any
other stealing, after all? This crawling between rails seemed dreadfully
so. Her attitude, squeezed between two rails and half across the lower
one, was neither graceful nor comfortable, and perhaps that fact

shortened