"BEFORE NIMBLE JIM COULD GET BACK TO THE HOUSE, THE YARD WAS FULL OF MELON-VINE."
Grew? No! they raced, they tore, they dashed through the country far and wide! In no time, before Nimble Jim could get back to the house door, the whole yard was full of melon-vine, and one great big melon, bigger than the cottage itself, blocked the door-way.
"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.
THE MAGIC MELON OVERRUNS THE COUNTRY.
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!