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He built a house among them, with a good deal of the wigwam, no doubt, in its style of architecture, but still a permanent house, near which he established a corn-field, a pumpkin-garden, a melon-patch, and became farmer enough to be entitled to ask the hand of a Puritan maiden.
The city courtship may appear the most genteel in the splendid parlor, with the lover on a sofa displaying his stocks and certificates of wealth to the matron, and through her winning his sweetheart; while the maiden at her piano opens absorbing ears to catch his wooing words; but all must confess the country courtship makes the best picture, with the ruddy maiden in the farm-yard, in her cool sun-bonnet and clean checkered frock; the bloom of the season on her cheeks, and its fragrance in her breath; making music with sweet streams in her milk-pail; while her lover at her elbow, or leaning over the wall, as jocund as a bobolink, tells her of his horses and cows; his wheat-lands and meadow-lands; his berry-fields; his melon-patch, and maple-orchard; his nice little rural home, and his pleasant love of her.
The Indians disappeared quite suddenly; and perhaps it was nothing surprising that, the very next morning after they left, grandpa Parlin should find his beautiful melon-patch stripped nearly bare, with nothing left on the vines but a few miserable green little melons. "It's too bad," said Horace to his sister, "that I didn't get to make baskets; I'd have grown rich so soon.
I think we all felt like schoolboys who had been detected robbing a melon-patch or in some other heinous offence, as we slowly filed down the hall to the elevator. A woman of Mrs. Branford's stamp so readily and successfully puts one in the wrong that I could easily comprehend why Blake wanted to call on Kennedy for help in what otherwise seemed a plain case.
They explored both banks of the river, the islands, and the deep wilderness of the Illinois shore. They could run like turkeys and swim like ducks; they could handle a boat as if born in one. No orchard or melon-patch was entirely safe from them. No dog or slave patrol was so watchful that they did not sooner or later elude it.
Didn't I spade up that old melon-patch and plant sixteen rows of carrots in it, this afternoon?" "I never said you didn't, old scout," said Arthur. "I know you've been working like a cart-horse, Tom," interposed Ralph, who had hobbled around the fields for the first time that day, directing the labors of his friends.
The more completely the melon-patch is by itself, the better, and the nearer the house the better; for while it is liable to all the insects and diseases which attack the cucumber, it encounters, when the fruit is mature, a more fatal enemy in the predatory small boy.
"My God! she shall not!" I cried, and whirled about and galloped back. At the edge of the wood, where we had parted, I tied my horse, and crept along the moonlight shadows of the melon-patch to the stable. The door was ajar. In the interior gloom I passed my hands over the necks and heads of what I recognized to be the pair of small mules I had seen at Gallatin.
On one side was a potato-field, on the other a melon-patch; and before me, in rows, some hundreds of apple-trees. Here I was accustomed to seek the benefits of contemplation and study the manuscripts of Lodi. A few months had passed since I had last visited this spot. What revolutions had since occurred, and how gloomily contrasted was my present purpose with what had formerly led me hither!
From motives of prudence they had not warned the nurse of their coming; but they found the old woman already at work in her melon-patch and learned from her that her son had gone down to his day's labour in the valley.
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