There was nothing new in the discussion.  Sometimes I would laugh at him; sometimes I would only touch my hat in unison; sometimes I let him do the bowing alone, an act on his part which never attracted attention—­looking more as if he had accosted some passing friend.

We had reached Broadway by this time and were crossing the street opposite Trinity Churchyard.

“Come over here 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