And a great treat it is. Did you never wander over the fields, way down South, after the cotton was all picked, and the November breezes came cool and ladened with that delicate, indescribably rare flavor the frost gives when it first nips the mellow-ripe muscadine? You have shouldered your gun and gone out after old Mollie Cotton Tail. It was cool and crisp when you went out, but toward noon it has grown hot again. Flushed and tired, you stop to rest by the big spring that flows from under the roots of the big oak near the cotton field. In the shadow of that oak, half hid in the frost-bitten weeds, you find a little striped watermelon--a guinea melon, as the darkies call it--a kind of a volunteer melon that grows in the cotton every year, the first seeds of which were brought by some Guinea negro, from the coast of Africa, when he first came over to servitude, with silver rings in his nose and ears. And though he failed to bring his idols and his household gods along with him, yet did he not forget the melon of his naked ancestors. Planting it as he hoed his first crop of cotton for a new master, it has never deserted him since, and so, year after year, it comes up amid the cotton, to remind him of the days it grew wild in a sunnier clime. And there you find it this November morning. Boy like, you pounce on it with a shout and soon it is laid open, as red as your first love’s lips and as sweet; and so cold it seems to have been raised in the deep-delved cellars of all the centuries. I am sorry for the boy who has grown to be a man and never, in a November morning’s hunt after Old Mollie, had the exquisite sweetness of this satisfying surprise--the like of which is not equalled by the sweetness of any other surprise on earth. No--not even should he grow to be a man, and awake some morning to find himself famous and the father of twins! Every darkey of any standing in Tennessee “gives a treat” at least once in his life. He will stint and economize for months to save money enough to invest in watermelons and tartaric acid (the acid makes the lemonade). Then, when the glorious day arrives, Nero, giving free entertainment to the citizens of Eternal Rome, is not in it with that darkey. Henceforth he can get anything in that community he wishes, from constable to presiding elder, while the widows of the church are his’n by a large majority! I had heard that old Wash was going to run again for justice of the peace and the “deaconship of Zion” over in the coon district of Big Sandy, and that he was going to give his annual treat. These had always passed off beautifully and ended in the unanimous election of the old man to both offices and anything else he wanted. I thought it was all over and entirely harmonious until he came in the other night, looking like Montejo’s flag-ship after Dewey’s ten-inch shell went through her, “a-rippin’ out her very innards”--as Old Wash himself described it--“from eend to eend.”