patch of pretty near an acre, sloping to the south from the edge of the
woods, and all overrun with vines and just bulging all over with
watermelons and muskmelons.

The watermelons were some of the big mottled kind, with lightish blotches
among their darker green, like Georgia melons nowadays, and some almost
striped in gray and green, and some were those big, round sugar melons,
nearly black. They were all sizes, but most of them were large, and you
need not "punk" them to see if they were ripe. Anybody could tell that
they were ripe from looking at them, and the muskmelons, which were the
old-fashioned long kind, were yellow as gold.

Now, the big fellows said, you could see why Bunty Williams had let this
patch go to seed. It was because they were such bully melons and would
have the best seeds; and the fellows all agreed to save the seeds for
Bunty, and put them where he could find them. They began to praise Jim
Leonard up, but he did not say anything, and only looked on with his
queer, sleepy eyes, and said his tooth ached, when the fellows plunged
down among the melons and began to burst them open.

They had lots of fun. At first they cut a few melons open with their
knives, but that was too slow, and pretty soon they began to jump on them
and split them with sharp-edged rocks, or anything, to get them open
quick. They did not eat close to the rind, as you do when you have a melon
on the table, but they tore out the core and just ate that; and in about a
minute they forgot all about saving the seeds for Bunty Williams and
putting them in one place where he could get them.

Some of the fellows went into the edge of the woods to eat their melons,
and then came back for more; some took them and cracked them open on the
top rail of the fence, and then sat down in the fence corner and plunged
their fists in and tore the cores out. Some of them squeezed the juice out
of the cores into the shells of the melons and then drank it out of them.

Piccolo Wright was stooping over to pull a melon and Archie Hawkins came
up behind him with a big melon that had a seam across it, it was so ripe;
and he brought it down on Piccolo's head, and it smashed open and went all
over Piccolo. He was pretty mad at first, but then he saw the fun of it,
and he took one end of the melon and scooped it all out, and put it on in
place of his hat and wore it like a helmet. Archie did the same thing with
the other end, and then all the big bo