OUR SQUARE AND THE PEOPLE IN IT

By Samuel Hopkins Adams

Illustrated by Scott Williams

Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company

1917

WALLED in by slums stands Our Square, a valiant green space, far on the flank of the Great City. Ours is an inglorious little world Sociologists have-not yet remarked and classified us. The Washington Square romancers who bold sentimental revel at the foot of Fifth Avenue reck nothing of their sister park, many blocks to the east. But we are patient of our obscurity. Close-knit, keeping our own counsel, jealous of our own concerns, and not without our own pride of place, we live our quiet lives, a community sufficient unto itself. So far as may be for mortals under the sway of death and love and fate, we maintain ourselves with little change amid the kaleidoscopic shiftings of the surrounding metropolis. Few come into Our Square except of necessity. Few go out but under the same stem impulsion. Some of us are held by tradition, some by poverty, some by affection, and some through loyalty to what once was and is no more. Here we live, and here hope to die, "the kind hearts, the true hearts that loved the place of old." And of all, there is no truer heart or kinder than that of the gentle, shrewd, and neighborly old dominie through whose lips I tell these tales, the real historian of the folk whom I, too, have known and loved in Our Square.

CONTENTS

OUR SQUARE

I

II

III

IV

THE CHAIR THAT WHISPERED

MACLACHAN OF OUR SQUARE

THE GREAT 'PEACEMAKER

ORPHEUS

A TALE OF WHITE MAGIC IN OUR SQUARE

THE MEANEST MAN IN OUR SQUARE

PAULA OF THE HOUSETOP

THE LITTLE RED 'DOCTOR OF OUR SQUARE

List of Illustrations

Whirled Her out of a Pit Of Darkness

Read from Left to Right

Her Hands Slipped to his Shoulder

What Do I Owe Ye But a Curse

We Have Successfully Terminated the Negotiation

I Puh-hut It in My Huh-huh-hair

Jogging Appreciatively Along Behind Schutz's Mouse-hued Mare

OUR SQUARE

I

OUR Square lies broad and green and busy, in the forgotten depths of the great city. By day it is bright with the laughter of children and shrill with the bickering of neighbors. By night the voice of the spellbinder is strident on its corners, but from the remoter benches float murmurs where the young couples sit, and sighs where the old folk relax their weariness. New York knows little of Our Square, submerged as we are in a circle of slums. Yet for us, as for more Elysian fields, the crocus springs in the happy grass, the flash and song of the birds stir our trees, and Romance fans us with the wind of its imperishable wing.

The first robin was singing in our one lone lilac when the Bonnie Lassie came out of the Somewhere Else into Our Square and possessed herself of the ground floor of our smallest house, the nestly little dwelling with the quaint old door and the broad, friendly vestibule, next but one to the Greek church. Before she had been there a month she had established eminent domain over all of us. Even MacLachan, the dour tailor on the corner, used to burst into song when she passed. It was he who dubbed her the Bonnie Lassie, and as it was the first decent word he'd spoken of living being within the memory of Our Square, the name stuck. Apart from that, it was eminently appropriate. She was a small girl who might have been perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four if she hadn't (more probably) been twenty, and looked a good deal like a thoughtful kitten when she wasn't twinkling at or with somebody. When she twinkled—and she did it with eyes, voice, heart, and soul all at once—the cart-peddlers stopped business to look and listen. You can't go further