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Updated: June 16, 2025
A pretty green lawn covered the whole courtyard, clinging to the walls were creeping fig and apricot trees; in the background was a pretty vine; heart-shaped flower-beds had been cut out of the lawn, and they were full of fine wallflowers and the most fragrant sylvan flowers of every species; further away stood melon beds, sending their far-reaching shoots in every direction, red currant bushes, a weeping willow or two, yellow rose bushes, myriad hued full-blown poppies and little white red-eyed rabbits were bounding all over the grass plot.
She stooped over, grabbed the end of the bag and started back down the trail again, but at the first step she stopped. It was the wrong end of the sack she had clutched, and the melon had rolled out into the sand. "Oh, gracious!
I soon found that I ought to have been grateful for having been cast on this island. Scarcely had I left my abode the next morning, when I came upon a tree with enormous leaves, many of them a foot wide and a foot and a half long. From it hung a fruit in the form of a melon, attached by its stem directly to the trunk or limbs. I recognised it at once as the valuable bread-fruit tree.
Around their long bark tenements, stretched carefully cultivated fields of corn and pumpkins, the trailing bean, the full-bunched grapevine, the juicy melon, and the big-leafed tabah, or tobacco.
As I looked at it I pictured the ecstasy of contemplation from which I must have roused him, and congratulated myself on finding him in such a mood, since I had made up my mind to ask him a favour. Then I noticed that his face, instead of looking as calm as an egg-shell, was distorted and whimpering and without stopping to greet me he pointed passionately to the melon.
"See, see!" said he, in perfect astonishment; "would not any one believe that all those things were only a delusion of the mind? If the great melon did not lie there now, I should be inclined to think that I had, in a mad fancy, taken the bees and wasps for large figures of men." At these words, he turned to the side where the melon had been, and, lo! that had also disappeared.
My crimps were beautiful; the green harps danced on my freshly-ironed frock, and I had on my new chain and locket. I relied upon a sort of mechanism in me to say: O greenly and fair in the lands of the sun, The vines of the gourd and the rich melon run. In this seemly manner Whittier's ode to the pumpkin began.
"Half a melon each ain't much. Why, Len Abbott must have eaten two whole ones at the church sociable the other night. Can you carry your half?" "Yes," panted the younger lass, bravely tugging at her heavy load.
The picture that these places offered, tropic, squalid, and fecund, often caused me to walk through them and watch the basking population; the intricate, broken wooden galleries, the rickety outside stair cases, the red and yellow splashes of color on the clothes lines, the agglomerate rags that stuffed holes in decaying roofs or hung nakedly on human frames, the small, choked dwellings, bursting open at doors and windows with black, round-eyed babies as an overripe melon bursts with seeds, the children playing marbles in the court, the parents playing cards in the room, the grandparents smoking pipes on the porch, and the great-grandparents stairs gazing out at you like creatures from the Old Testament or the jungle.
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?"
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