A. Shute, F. Hopkinson Smith, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Howard V.
Sutherland, John B. Tabb, Bert Leston Taylor, Juliet Wilbor Tompkins,
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Eugene F. Ware, Anne Warner French and
Stanley Waterloo for permission to reprint selections from their works
and for many valuable suggestions.




THE WIT AND HUMOR OF AMERICA




MELONS

BY BRET HARTE


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