Front matter
Reading edition
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