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“Who was that?” he asked, as they passed out of hearing.

He only thought of asking for one, although there were six, nor she apparently of answering differently.

“Lina Maynard. They are ‘Sem.’ girls.”

It was a dulled voice she spoke in, quite unlike her usual eager way of giving information. She, poor thing, was terribly afraid he would ask her why they did not seem acquainted with her, and it would have been a painful humiliation to have explained. Arthur was conscious that he no longer had exactly the same feeling of merely contemptuous annoyance toward Lina Maynard, on account of her treatment of Amy. He sympathized as much with his sister, of course, but somehow felt that to be recognized by Lina Maynard was not such a childish ambition as he had taken for granted.

It was dusk when they reached home and found Mr. and Mrs. Steele on the piazza, which served as an out-door parlor in summer, with a neighbor who had dropped in to see Arthur. So he got out his cigar-case and told stories of city life and interesting law cases to an intent audience till the nine o’clock bell rang, and the neighbor “guessed he ‘d go home,” and forthwith proved that his guess was right by going.

“‘Gad, I’d forgotten all about the watermelons! Perhaps they ‘re at ’em already!” cried Arthur, jumping up and running around the end of the piazza to the garden.

When he returned, it was to meet a combined volley of protestations against his foolish project of keeping watch all night, from his father, his mother, and Amy. But he declared it was no use talking; and where were the gun and the beans? So they adjourned from the piazza, a lamp was lit, the articles were hunted up, and the gun duly loaded with a good charge of powder and a pint of hard beans. It was about ten o’clock when Arthur, with a parting protest from his mother, went out into the garden, lugging his gun and a big easy-chair, while Amy followed, bringing one or two wraps, and a shocking old overcoat hunted up in the garret, for the chill hours after midnight.

The front of Mr. Steele’s lot abutted on one of the pleasantest and most thickly housed streets of the village; but the lot was deep, and the rear end rested on a road bordered by few houses, and separated from the garden by a rail fence easy to climb over or through. The watermelon patch was located close to this fence, and thus in full view and temptingly accessible from the road.

Undoubtedly the human conscience, and especially the boyish article, recognizes a broad difference between the theft of growing crops–of apples on the trees, for instance, or corn on the stalk, or melons in the field–and that of other species of property. The surreptitious appropriation of the former class of chattels is known in common parlance as “hooking,” while the graver term “stealing” describes the same process in other cases. The distinction may arise from a feeling that, so long as crops remain rooted to the ground, they are nature’s, not man’s, and that nature can’t be regarded as forming business contracts with some individuals to the exclusion of others, or in fact as acceding to any of our human distinctions of meum and tuum, however useful we find them. Ethical philosophers may refuse to concede the sanction of the popular distinction here alluded to between “hooking” and stealing; but, after all, ethics is not a deductive but an empirical science, and what are morals but a collection of usages, like orthography and orthoepy? However that may be, it is the duty of the writer in this instance merely to call attention to the prevalent popular sentiment on the subject, without any attempt to justify it, and to state that Arthur Steele had been too recently a boy not to sympathize with it. And accordingly he laid his plans to capture the expected depredators to-night from practical considerations wholly, and quite without any sense of moral reprobation toward them.