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.  Do you know he’s one of the most delightful men you will meet in a day’s journey?”

“No—­never knew anything of the kind.  Thought he was just plain tailor.”

“And an intimate friend of many of the English actors who come over here?” continued Peter.

“I never heard a word about it” I answered meekly; Peter’s acquaintances being too varied and too numerous for me to keep track of.  That he should have a tailor among them as learned and wise as Solomon, and with friends all over the globe, was quite to be expected.

“Well, he is,” answered Peter.  “They always hunt him up the first thing they do.  He lived in London for years and made their costumes.  There’s no one, I assure you, I am more glad to see when he makes an excuse to rap at my door.  You’ll come up, of course, until I read my letters.”

“No, I’ll keep on to my rooms and meet you later at the club.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind, you restless mortal.  You’ll come upstairs with me until I open my mail.  It’s really like touching the spring of a Jack-in-the-box, this mail of mine—­all sorts of things pop out, generally the unexpected.  Mighty interesting, I tell you,” and with a cheery wave of the hand to his friend Isaac, whose eyes had been looking streetward at the precise moment, Peter pushed me ahead of him up the worn marble steps flanked by the rust-eaten iron railing which led to the hallway and stairs, and so on up to his apartment.