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Updated: June 11, 2025
"You are an extraordinarily healthy man, to all appearances. Have you ever suffered from bad health?" "Measles." "Immaterial." "Very unpleasant, though." "Nothing else?" "Mumps." "Unimportant." "Not to me. I looked like a water-melon." "Nothing besides? No serious illnesses?" "None." "What is your age?" "Twenty-five." "Are your parents living?" "No." "Were they healthy?" "Fit as fiddles."
Making our way into one of the larger huts, we stroll into the open door, and ask a more important-looking man if he has any water-melon? We get a splendid one for "four-pin," and have a delicious "gouter." Our host a little, dry, withered-up fellow, dressed in a soiled blue cotton jacket, and wide trowsers which flap about his ankles collects the rind for his fowls.
The Captain and I, who were still in the tender, went after it. Did you ever try to fish a big water-melon out of a river? It is about the roundest thing, and the slipperyest thing, and the hardest thing to get hold of, that you could imagine. It rolls over and over, and when you get it out plop! it tumbles back into the water and sinks out of sight.
Passing through the fruit-market, the "Covent Garden" of Canton, where now and in their stated seasons are exposed for sale, singly and in fragrant heaps, among countless other varieties of fruits, the orange, pommeloe, apple, citron, banana, rose-apple, pine-apple, custard-apple, pear, quince, guava, carambola, persimmon, loquat, pomegranate, grape, water-melon, musk-melon, peach, apricot, plum, mango, mulberry, date, cocoa-nut, olive, walnut, chestnut, lichi, and papaya, through the unsavory precincts of the "salt-fish market," and along a street the specialty of which is the manufacture from palm leaves of very serviceable rain cloaks, we arrived at the Ma T'au, a cul de sac resembling in shape, as its name imports, a horse's head, with the broad end opening on the street.
When you hear these four sounds, you may set it down as a warm day. Then it is that one would like to imitate the mode of life of the native at Sierra Leone, as somebody has described it: stroll into the market in natural costume, buy a water-melon for a halfpenny, split it, and scoop out the middle, sit down in one half of the empty rind, clap the other on one's head, and feast upon the pulp.
During years when the rains are unusually abundant, the Kalahari is covered with the 'kengwe', a species of water-melon. Animals and men rejoice in the rich supply; antelopes, lions, hyenas, jackals, mice, and men devour it with equal avidity. The people of the desert conceal their wells with jealous care.
Nicholas; but as to the Gardeniers of Hudson, they were absent on a marauding party, laying waste the neighboring water-melon patches. In a different part of the field were the Van Grolls of Anthony's Nose, struggling to get to the thickest of the fight, but horribly perplexed in a defile between two hills, by reason of the length of their noses.
The Captain brought up the steaming kettle of chowder, and from it we filled our bowls. We also had coffee and bread and butter, and some of the mince turnovers which Ed Mason had brought. Then we remembered the water-melon. "Don't think 'twill give yer the stomach-ache, do yer?" asked the Captain, as he prepared to cut the melon. "You remember how it killed one of them Black Pedros, don't yer?"
The assistant stage-director bent sedulously over the footlights, which had now been turned up, shading his eyes with the prompt script. "Take that over again!" shouted Mr Goble. "Yes, that speech about life being like a water-melon. It don't sound to me as though it meant anything." He cocked his cigar at an angle, and listened fiercely. He clapped his hands. The action stopped again.
The huts of the natives lie scattered here and there along the shore; it is very seldom that a dozen of these huts are seen together. The bread-fruit is somewhat similar in shape to a water-melon, and weighs from four to six pounds. The outside is green, and rather rough and thin.
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