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