]
"Oh! oh! oh!" roared Jim. "What _have_ I done? What _shall_ I do?" And
with his spade he cut a hole through the melon. It took him a whole
hour, and when he got into the house he found that his poor mother had
fainted from fright.
And all the time the vine and melons kept growing--east, west, north,
south.
Nimble Jim was frantic!
But the vines didn't mind Jim. On they went, growing like mad, a mile
a minute, faster than any railroad train. The big arms filled up the
main roads; the smaller ones crammed themselves into the lanes and
by-paths, while the tendrils embraced the tall trees, the houses, and
the church steeples, and snarled up everything. The leaves grew
so large, thick and green that they covered the whole face of the
country, shutting out the sun from the fields so the crops couldn't
grow; and the whole kingdom became so dark from the awful shade of
Nimble Jim's magic melon-vine, that the people had to burn candles day
and night.
It grew like mad. On! on! Stem, branch, leaf, tendril, fruit--on, on
it went! The melons grew--great, round, smooth, rich, ripe, juicy
melons, as big as houses--at the cross-roads, on the roads, in the
fields, filling barn-yards and door-yards so people and cattle
couldn't pass, or go in or out, till they had eaten their way through
the melons, or got ladders and climbed over, or dug trenches and
crawled under! On, on it went, surrounding the king's palaces and
choking up his forts! Down, down it grew into the brooks and rivers,
and out into the king's harbors, where the tendrils seized and wound
about his ships of war riding at anchor, and climbed up the masts,
while melons grew on the decks till the vessels sank to the bottom!
It choked up and drank up all the rivers and lakes in the kingdom, or
dammed them up so the waters overflowed the land, drowning people and
cattle, and sweeping away houses and barns!
On, on it grew--melons, melons everywhere! Ruin and starvation stared
the nation in the face; while poor, poor Nimble Jim, hid within the
rind of the melon he had dug out, shivered, cried and bewailed his
folly.
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