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 theflank of the Great City. Ours is an inglorious little world Sociologistshave-not yet remarked and classified us. The Washington Square romancerswho bold sentimental revel at the foot of Fifth Avenue reck nothing oftheir sister park, many blocks to the east. But we are patient of ourobscurity. Close-knit, keeping our own counsel, jealous of our ownconcerns, and not without our own pride of place, we live our quietlives, a community sufficient unto itself. So far as may be for mortalsunder the sway of death and love and fate, we maintain ourselves withlittle change amid the kaleidoscopic shiftings of the surroundingmetropolis. Few come into Our Square except of necessity. Few go out butunder the same stem impulsion. Some of us are held by tradition, some bypoverty, some by affection, and some through loyalty to what once wasand 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 notruer heart or kinder than that of the gentle, shrewd, and neighborlyold dominie through whose lips I tell these tales, the real historian ofthe folk whom I, too, have known and loved in Our Square.

CONTENTS

OUR SQUARE

III

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