I think the meaning
Of all this oil I've found;
It's this--a school of sardines
Right here is swimming round."

R. K. M.

THE WATERMELON TIDE.

BY EARLE TRACY.

The great still tide that comes from the Gulf when no one is expecting
it reached up through the marshes one summer night, and spread itself
over the banks of the bayou, and found numberless things in places of
safety, and when it was ready to go out again it took them along.

Among its discoveries was a schooner-load of watermelons, about which
Captain Lazare and the boss of the big farm had disagreed so radically
that the melons had been left in a pile on the landing to wait for other
transport. The tide charged itself with them, and when morning broke
they were on their way to New Orleans.

Bascom had been tossing in his sleep as the little _Mystery_ did when
the tide went in one direction along Potosi Channel and the wind went in
the other. With the first glimmer of light he was up and down at the
beach.

"Me, but it's been high," he gasped, coming up from his first plunge and
leaning back in the water as if it were a steamer-chair. "It would be
beautiful to run out with in the _Mystery_--an' me goin' to pick figs
all day in them dumb ole trees! I wish the canning factory would bust!"

Bascom was ready for the hardest kind of work at sea, but things on
shore were unutterably lifeless to him, and how Captain Tony could have
contracted to sell his figs instead of letting the birds take care of
them was past Bascom's understanding.

While he was floating and thinking mournfully of the figs, one of the
watermelons struck him softly on the cheek. He bounded clear out of the
water with fright, and as he made for shore another melon came up under
him and sent him pelting through the shoals. He was not followed, and
when he felt grass under his feet, and realized that he had fled
shoreward for safety and that he had not been hurt at all, he felt very
queer.

"If they was popusses they'd be a-splashin'," he reasoned; "an' if they
was sharks they'd have eaten me--least-ways they wouldn't have been so
polite about lettin' me excuse myse'f. I wonder what they is?"

He moved gingerly into the deep water again, and at last swam out to
investigate. He could see two or three dark round surfaces letting the
tide sway them easily away from shore. At his approach they neither
dived nor turned to attack him. "They mighty tame," said Bascom, l