But first he found the house where
he had lived as a boy. It looked painfully rickety and surprisingly small.
So he hastened from before it and went up by a back street across the town
creek and up a hill, where at last he stood before the cemetery gate. It
was locked; so he climbed over the wall. He went still further up the hill,
past tombstones that looked very white, and trees that looked very green in
the moonlight. At the top of the hill he found his father's grave. Beside
it was another mound, and at the head of this, a plain little pillar. The
moon was high now and the tramp was used to seeing in the night. Word by
word he could slowly read upon the marble this inscription:
"William Albert, beloved son of the late Thomas Kershaw and his wife
Rachel; born in Brickville, August 2, 1862; drowned in the Allegheny River
near Pittsburg, July 27, 1877, while heroically endeavouring to save the
life of a child."
The tramp laughed, and then uttered a sigh.
"I wonder," he said, aloud, "what poor bloke it is that's doin' duty for me
under the ground here."
And at the thought that he owed an excellent posthumous reputation to the
unknown who had happened to resemble him fifteen years before, he laughed
louder.
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