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“George, it’s crazy”
“We don’t have to tell anybody For my own satisfaction”
“George, let go of it For cry-yi Whinnikers, George”
“It’ll be a clear night, cool and warm both”
“That’s dirty and nasty, it’s not clean”
“Where’s your spunk?”
“It ain’t in digging up nice people, darn it!”
“Old people always braggin’, they should stop that”
“Soe Take it easy Why you want to take things away froot so much taken ahy take the last bit, can you tell me?”
THERE WAS nothing inside the great box
Or, at first, there see And then the wind blew just a little bit and stirred a few things there And George Gray stood looking down upon these few things and counted them and named them over to himself and remembered them for many years after, and the o from his eyes and from around his mouth and from the muscles in his jaws and his lips, and the meanness drain from the hard muscles under his ribs and in the tendons of his back as he bent there He let all thein the rain in a suit made of tissue papers and the first wash made him naked
For inside of the box were the following things:
A single delicate green fern, as soft as breathing A sprig of fresh suust peach, with the bloole violet, purple and alive A red rose And one blade of green surass
That was all
These things were placed, the green fern so, the peach this way, the red rose that, the suest a fore Gray found tiination the entire elaborate afternoon just over, Mr Pearce, and a half dozen other old men, and the keeper of this vast and quiet land inside the fence and the iron gate, taking turns in the sun, digging, planning, arranging, and burying again, and going off in the sun, spades on shoulders, s him into their clan, the last one in the town, the skeptic, the cynic To stop his mouth, to stop his doubt, to put an end forever to his threat He glanced at the chimney of the oven-house on the far side of this marbled field; the faintest trace of smoke still went up to the sky