MADAM RACHEL PINCKNEY PEMBERTON TALLAFFERR
solicits the honor of your presence at
Number Seventeen, Our Square,
on Friday, November Eighteenth,
to view an autograph letter
indited to her honored father,
the late Major Bently Pemberton,
by
LIEUTENANT (AFTERWARD GENERAL) THOMAS JONATHAN JACKSON
Of the Army of the Confederate States of America.
Refreshments. R. S. V. P
Our Square had won social recognition.
THE MEANEST MAN IN OUR SQUARE
MILES MORSE was his name. He lived over on the north side of Our Square, two doors from the Varick Mansion, in a small, neat, solid, and very private house. His age was uncertain. His appearance was arid. His garb was plain and black. His expression was unfriendly. His business was making money and his pleasure keeping the money when made. He was a fixture of long standing in our little community, as much so as the paving stones in the park space facing his house, and as insensate to the human struggle around him as they. As to his neighbors, he asked nothing and gave nothing. Behind his back, and not always very far behind it, he was called the Meanest Man in Our Square.
Every morning at eight o'clock the Meanest Man went to his office somewhere far downtown where, it was understood, he did something sly and underhanded connected with notes and loans. Every afternoon at four o'clock he visited the local Y. M. C. A., where he was (mistakenly) supposed to put in his hour and a half in reading, on the theory that it was cheaper to patronize that library than to buy books or rent them from the penny circulator. The rest of his life was strictly and determinedly private. Passing to and fro upon his concerns, he faced the denizens of Our Square with the blank regard of huge, horn-rimmed, blue glasses which he always wore out of doors. Only for Terry the Cop, MacLachan, the Little Red Doctor, and Cyrus the Gaunt, did he have a curt, silent nod, and for the Bonnie Lassie an awkward bow. The rest of us might as well not have existed. Naturally there were few who had a good word for him. Of these Terry the Cop was one.
“Anyway, he has a grand pair of hands,” Terry has been heard to aver.
On the strength of this opinion, the Bonnie Lassie, who needed a really superior pair of hands for a sculpture which she was then employed upon, made a point of catching Miles Morse in the park and compelling him to shake hands with her, to his resentful embarrassment. Subsequently she took our guardian of the peace to task.
“I don't know what you could have been thinking of, Terry,” she declared. “His hands are knuckly outside and puffy inside.”