FOUR IMPORTANT CHARACTERS
sharply as they came abreast of him. His freckled, clean-shaven face looked strangely old, and the big, gold-rimmed spectacles bridged halfway down his nose added to his ludicrous appearance. He raised his eyebrows and surveyed the two young people.
"There 's an accident over there," he said briefly and without any preliminary.
Indeed," said the young man politely.
There have been several accidents in Gray Square," said the strange old man meditatively. "There was one in 1875, when the corner house—you can see the end of it from here—collapsed and buried fourteen people, seven of whom were killed, four of whom were injured for life, and three of whom escaped with minor injuries."
He said this calmly and apparently without any sense that he was acting at all unconventionally in volunteering the information, and went on:
"There was another accident in 1881, on the seventeenth of October, a collision between
45
