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The Wrong Twin by Harry Leon Wilson
page 5 of 455 (01%)
They were finding well-laden bushes along the fence of what to-day is
known as the old graveyard.

Newbern now has a sophisticated new cemetery, with carved marble and
tall shafts of polished granite, trimmed shrubs, and garnished mounds,
contrasting--as the newer town to the old--with the dingy inclosure
where had very simply been inhumed the dead of that simpler day. In the
new cemetery blackberry bushes would not be permitted. Along the older
plot they flourished. The place itself is over-grown with rank grasses,
with ivy run wild, with untended shrubs, often hiding the memorials,
which are mostly of brown sandstone or gray slate. It lies in deep
shadow under cypress and willow. It is very still under the gloom of its
careless growths--a place not reassuring to the imaginative.

The bottoms of the tin pails had been covered with berries found outside
the board fence, and now a hunt for other laden bushes led the twins to
a trove of ripened fruit partly outside and partly inside that plot
where those of old Newbern had been chested and laid unto their fathers.
There was, of course, no question as to the ownership of that fruit out
here. It was any one's. There followed debate on a possible right to
that which grew abundantly beyond the fence. By some strange but not
unprecedented twisting of the mature mind of authority, might it not
belong to those inside, or to those who had put them there? Further,
would Mrs. Penniman care to make pies of blackberries--even the largest
and ripest yet found--that had grown in a graveyard?

"They taste just the same," announced the Wilbur twin, having, after a
cautious survey, furtively reached through two boards of the fence to
retrieve a choice cluster.

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