From a Bench in Our Square by Samuel Hopkins Adams
page 114 of 259 (44%)
page 114 of 259 (44%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
"What was little Minnie to you?" I asked, and answered myself. "You're Hines. You're the man she married." "Yes. I'm Chris Hines." "You've brought her back to us," I said stupidly. "She made me promise." Strange how Our Square binds the heartstrings of those who have once lived in it! To find it unendurable in life, to yearn back to it in the hour of death! Many have known the experience. So our tiny God's Acre, shrunk to a small fraction of human acreage through pressure of the encroaching tenements, has filled up until now it has space but for few more of the returning. Laws have been invoked and high and learned courts appealed to for the jealously guarded right to sleep there, as Minnie Munn was so soon to sleep beside her mother. I told Hines that I would see the Bonnie Lassie about the statuette, and led him on, through the nagged and echoing passage and the iron gate, to the white-studded space of graves. The new excavation showed, brown against the bright verdure. Above it stood the headstone of the Munns, solemn and proud, the cost of a quarter-year's salary, at the pitiful wage which little, broken Mr. Munn drew from his municipal clerkship. Hines's elegant coat rippled on his chest, above what may have been a shudder, as he looked about him. "It's crowded," he muttered. |
|