“Yes,” said Mr. Edwin Skreever, “I have. I have heard that before. And I cannot imagine why it is a boy delights in throwing away perfectly good nails for the mere satisfaction of hearing them make a useless noise. You may wish, some day, that you had not thrown away that nail.” “Aw!” Wampus said. “It is a useless and uncalled-for waste,” said Mr. Edwin Skreever. “Nails cost money. Nails cost labor and time. A miner must dig the iron ore, and another miner must dig coal, and laborers must turn the ore into iron and fashion the nails from the iron. Salesmen must go out and sell the nails, railroads must carry them, other salesmen must sell them again. And you throw them into the river! Why? What good does it do you?” Wampus just said “Aw!” again, because he did not know what else to say, and I thought I was gladder than ever that I wasn’t going to marry Mr. Edwin Skreever. I was glad he was going to live in Derlingport and not in Riverbank. I don’t like fellows that lecture you when you throw away an old rusty nail. So I said to Wampus: “Let’s eat a muskmelon.” Well, all summer we had had a pile of muskmelons and watermelons under the cottage. They’re cheap and whenever we wanted to eat one we did. We used to get them by the skiff load. We would sit on the ripraps and eat and throw the rinds into the river, and the yellow-jacket hornets would come by the hundreds and pile all over any rinds that did not fall in the river. They would crowd onto any juice that fell on the rocks, and they would light on the very piece you were eating. There were lots of yellow-jackets, but nobody minded them. If they got in the way we flicked them off with a finger. But there is one queer thing about yellow-jackets. They will buzz around and fly around all summer and never sting you unless, perhaps, you step on one with your bare foot, but there comes a day sooner or later when every yellow-jacket everywhere gets hopping mad. All the yellow-jackets for miles around go crazy on the same day. Maybe they all go crazy at the same hour of the same day--or the same minute--I don’t know. Anyway, this was the day. September 10th was the day the yellow-jackets quit being calm and gentle that year and began to be angry and go around with chips on their shoulders looking for a fight. So the first yellow-jacket Wampus flicked off him swore a blue streak in yellow-jacket language and buzzed in a circle to get up speed and banged right into Wampus’s neck. Zingo!