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 ou