Peter: a novel of which he is not the hero by Francis Hopkinson Smith
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page 13 of 474 (02%)
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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 |
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