Their Yesterdays by Harold Bell Wright
page 7 of 221 (03%)
page 7 of 221 (03%)
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not yet wilted. Cut in the block of white marble that marked the
grass-grown grave were the dearest words in any tongue--Wife and Mother; while, for the new-made mound that lay so close beside, the workmen were carving on a companion stone the companion words. There were two other smaller graves nearby--one of them quite small--but they did not seem to matter so much to the tall young fellow who had said to himself so many times: "when I am twenty-one, I will be a man." It was the two graves marked by the companion words that mattered. And certainly he did not, at that time, feel himself a man. As he left the cemetery to go home with an old neighbor and friend of the family, he felt himself rather a very small and lonely boy in a very big and empty world. But there had been many things to do in those next few days, with no one but himself to do them. There had been, in the voices of his friends, a note that was new. In the manner of the men who had come to talk with him on matters of business, he had felt a something that he had never felt before. And he had seen the auctioneer--a lifelong friend of his father--standing on the front porch of his boyhood home and had heard him cry the low spoken bids and answer the nodding heads of the buyers in a voice that was hoarse with something more than long speaking in the open air. And then--and then--at last had come the sharp blow of the hammer on the porch railing and from the trembling lips of the old auctioneer the word: "Sold." It was as though that hammer had fallen on the naked heart of the boy. It was as though the auctioneer had shouted: "Dead." And so the time had come, a week later, when he must go for a last |
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