The One I Knew Best of All Author:Frances Hodgson Burnett Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V. Islington Square. It was one of those rather interesting places which one finds in all large English towns—places which have seen better days. T... more »hey are only interesting on this account. Their early picturesque- ness has usually been destroyed by the fact that a railroad has forced its way into their neighborhood, or factories, and their accompanying cottages for operatives, have sprung up around them. Both these things had happened to Islington Square, and only the fact that it was an enclosed space, shut in by a large and quite imposing iron gateway, aided it to retain its atmosphere of faded gentility. Such places are often full of story, though they have no air of romance about them. The people who live in them have themselves usually seen better days. They are often- est widowed ladies with small incomes, and un- widowed gentlemen with large families—people who, not having been used to cramped quarters, are glad to find houses of good size at a reduced rent. Some of the houses in the Square were quitestately in proportion, and in their better days must have been fine enough places. But that halcyon period was far in the past. Islington Hall—the most imposing structure—was a " Select Seminary for young ladies and gentlemen ; " its companion house stood empty and deserted, as also did several others of the largest ones, probably because the widowed ladies and unwidowed gentlemen could not afford the corps of servants which would have been necessary to keep them in order. In the centre of the Square was a Lamp Post. 1 write it with capital letters because it was not an ordinary lamp post. It was a very big one, and had a solid base of stone, which all the children thought had been put there for a seat. Four or five little girls could sit on it, and four or ...« less