Peter | Page 8

with me," he cried, "and let us look in through the iron railings. The study of the dead is often more profitable than knowledge of the living. Ah, the gate is open! It is not often I am here at this time, and on a foggy afternoon. What a noble charity, my boy, is a fog--it hides such a multitude of sins--bad architecture for one," and he laughed softly.
I always let Peter run on--in fact I always encourage him to run on. No one I know talks quite in the same way; many with a larger experience of life are more profound, but none have the personal note which characterizes the old fellow's discussions.
"And how do you suppose these by-gones feel about what is going on around them?" he rattled on, tapping the wet slab of a tomb with the end of his umbrella. "And not only these sturdy patriots who lie here, but the queer old ghosts who live in the steeple?" he added, waving his hand upward to the slender spire, its cross lost in the fog. "Yes, ghosts and goblins, my boy. You don't believe it?--I do--or I persuade myself I do, which is better. Sometimes I can see them straddling the chimes when they ring out the hours, or I catch them peeping out between the slats of the windows away up near the cross. Very often in the hot afternoons when you are stretching your lazy body under the tents of the mighty--" (Peter referred to some friends of mine who owned a villa down on Long Island, and were good enough to ask me down for a week in August) "I come up here out of the rush and sit on these old tombstones and talk to these old fellows--both kinds--the steeple boys and the old cronies under the sod. You never come, I know. You will when you're my age."
I had it in my mind to tell him that the inside of a dry tent had some advantages over the outside of a damp tomb, so far as entertaining one's friends, even in hot weather, was concerned, but I was afraid it might stop the flow of his thoughts, and checked myself.
"It is not so much the rest and quiet that delights me, as the feeling that I am walled about for the moment and protected; jerked out of the whirlpool, as it were, and given a breathing spell. On these afternoons the old church becomes a church once more--not a gate to bar out the rush of commercialism. See where she stands--quite out to the very curb, her warning finger pointing upward. 'Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther,' she cries out to the Four Per Cents. 'Hug up close to me, you old fellows asleep in your graves; get under my lea. Let us fight it out together, the living and the dead!' And now hear these abominable Four Per Cents behind their glass windows: 'No place for a church,' they say. 'No place for the dead! Property too valuable. Move it up town. Move it out in the country--move it any where so you get it out of our way. We are the Great Amalgamated Crunch Company. Into our maw goes respect for tradition, reverence for the dead, decency, love of religion, sentiment, and beauty. These are back numbers. In their place, we give you something real and up-to-date from basement to flagstaff, with fifty applicants on the waiting list. If you don't believe it read our prospectus!'"
Peter had straightened and was standing with his hand lifted above his head, as if he were about to pronounce a benediction. Then he said slowly, and with a note of sadness in his voice:
"Do you wonder, now, my boy, why I touch my hat to His Excellency?"
CHAPTER II

All the way up Broadway he kept up his good-natured tirade, railing at the extravagance of the age, at the costly dinners, equipages, dress of the women, until we reached the foot of the dilapidated flight of brown-stone steps leading to the front door of his home on Fifteenth Street. Here a flood of gas light from inside a shop in the basement brought into view the figure of a short, squat, spectacled little man bending over a cutting-table, a pair of shears in his hand.
"Isaac is still at work," he cried. "If we were not so late we'd go in and have a word with him. Now there's a man who has solved the problem, my boy. Nobody will ever coax Isaac Cohen up to Fifth Avenue and into a 'By appointment to His Majesty' kind of a tailor shop. Just pegs away year after year--he was here long before I came--supporting his family, storing his mind with all sorts of rare knowledge.