“Don’t do it!  Don’t try it!  Here, now, you got no freedom!  Should you spit only on their sidewalk, they fine the heart’s blood out of you.”

* * * * *

Midway between these periods of very early and very late Newbern there was once a shining summer morning on which the Cowan twins, being then nine years old, set out from the Penniman home to pick wild blackberries along certain wooded lanes that environed the town.  They were bare-footed, wearing knee pants buttoned to calico waists, these being patterned with small horseshoes which the twins had been told by their father would bring them good luck.  They wore cloth caps, and carried tin pails for their berries.  These would be sold to the Pennimans at an agreed price of five cents a quart, and it was Winona’s hope that the money thus earned on a beautiful Saturday morning would on Sunday be given to the visiting missionary lately returned from China.  Winona had her doubts, however, chiefly of Wilbur Cowan’s keenness for proselyting, on his own income, in foreign lands.  Too often with money in hand, he had yielded to the grosser tyranny of the senses.

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.