Excerpt from Square Pegs A Common kitchen garden and small orchard plantation ran down from before the back stoop to the rough fence that shut off a bit of meadow. Beyond the meadow strip, hidden under low, weedy banks, where alders grew and blackbirds nested in the tangled coverts, scampered a bright little brook, making its own music all the time, accompanied in the day by the whistle and chirr of the restless winged creatures, and all night long by the booming and shrilling of the frogs. Over the brook began a stretch of quiet woodland. Out of its stillness came, in the long evenings, the cry of the whippoorwill: sometimes an owl hooted. Besides the blackbirds who especially homed and haunted, other singing birds made the mornings sweet, and the tender iteration of his two notes betrayed the near, shy presence of the quail. The house standing at the head of this garden and meadow slope was a plain, low structure, two rooms deep. It fronted on the village street, with only a fifteen-foot dooryard, shaded, however, by two majestic elms, one on either side the gateway, whose inner branches swept the roof. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.