ble imitators of a barbarous age,
when ladies' names and charms were shouted through the land, and
modest maiden never lent presence to tilt or tourney without hearing a
chronicle of her virtues go round the lists, shouted by wheezy heralds
and taken up by roaring swashbucklers! Perdition overpower such
ostentatious wooers! Marry! shall I shoot the amorous feline who nightly
iterates his love songs on my roof, and yet withhold my trigger finger
from yonder pranksome gallant? Go to! Here is an orange left of last
week's repast. Decay hath overtaken it,--it possesseth neither savor nor
cleanliness. Ha! cleverly thrown! A hit--a palpable hit! Peradventure I
have still a boot that hath done me service, and, barring a looseness of
the heel, an ominous yawning at the side, 'tis in good case! Na'theless,
'twill serve. So! so! What! dispersed! Nay, then, I too will retire.

MELONS

As I do not suppose the most gentle of readers will believe that
anybody's sponsors in baptism ever wilfully assumed the responsibility
of such a name, I may as well state that I have reason to infer that
Melons was simply the nickname of a small boy I once knew. If he had any
other, I never knew it.

Various theories were often projected by me to account for this strange
cognomen. His head, which was covered with a transparent down, like that
which clothes very small chickens, plainly permitting the scalp to show
through, to an imaginative mind might have suggested that succulent
vegetable. That his parents, recognizing some poetical significance in
the fruits of the season, might have given this name to an August child,
was an Oriental explanation. That from his infancy, he was fond of
indulging in melons, seemed on the whole the most likely, particularly
as Fancy was not bred in McGinnis's Court. He dawned upon me as Melons.
His proximity was indicated by shrill, youthful voices, as "Ah, Melons!"
or playfully, "Hi, Melons!" or authoritatively, "You, Melons!"

McGinnis's Court was a democratic expression of some obstinate
and radical property-holder. Occupying a limited space between two
fashionable thoroughfares, it refused to conform to circumstances, but
sturdily paraded its unkempt glories, and frequently asserted itself in
ungrammatical language. My window--a rear room on the ground floor--in
this way derived blended light and shadow from the court. So low was the
window-sill, that had I been the least predisposed to somnambulism, i