nd 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.

Closely adjoining the edge of the melon-patch was a patch of green corn,
standing ten feet high, and at the fullest perfection of foliage. This
Arthur selected for his ambush, its position being such that he could
cut off the retreat to the fence of any person who had once got among
the melons. Hewing down a hill of corn in the second row from the front,
he made a comfortable place for his easy-chair. Amy lingered for a
while, enjoying the excitement of the occasion, and they talked in
whispers; but finally Arthur sent her in, and as her dress glimmered
away down the garden path, he settled himself comfortably for his watch.

In the faint moonlight he could just descry the dark shapes of the