The twins ran races in the soft dust of the highway until they reached the first outlying berry patch. Here they became absorbed in their work. 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.
"I guess nobody would want 'em that owns 'em," conceded Wilbur.
"We better both go together at the same time."
"No, one of us better try it first and see; then, if it's all right, I'll climb over, too."
"Aw, I know a better patch up over West Hill in the Whipple woods."
"What you afraid of? Nobody would care about a few old blackberries."
"You act like it, I must say. If you wasn't afraid you'd climb that fence pretty quick, wouldn't you? Looky, the big ones!"