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Their Yesterdays by Harold Bell Wright
page 7 of 221 (03%)
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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