Market Square was not a square, however, but a parallelogram, and on one side of it, fronting Main Street, was the town hall, a low building of brick, representing in itself an amazing unity of municipal functions--the germ of the group plan, no doubt, and, after all, in its little way, a civic center indeed. For there, in an auditorium, plays were staged before a populace innocent of the fact that it had a municipal theater, and in another room the city council sat, with representatives from Lighttown, and Gooseville, and Guinea, and the other _faubourgs_ of our little municipality. Under that long low roof, too, were the “calaboose” and the headquarters of the fire department. Back of these the structure sloped away into a market-house of some sort, with a public scales, and broad, low, overhanging eaves, in the shade of which firemen, and the city marshal, and other officials, in the dim retrospect, seem to have devoted their leisure to the game of checkers. On the opposite side of Market Square there was a line of brick buildings, painted once, perhaps, and now of a faint pink or cerise which certain of the higher and more artistic grades of calcimining assume, and there seems to have been a series, almost interminable, of small saloons--declining and fading away somewhere to the east, in the dark purlieus of Guinea. Here, along this line of saloons, if it was a line of saloons, or, if it was not, along the side of the principal saloon which in those wet days commanded that corner, there were always several carts, driven by Irishmen from Lighttown, smoking short clay pipes, and two-wheeled drays driven by negroes from Guinea or Gooseville. These negro drivers were burly men with shining black skins and gleaming eyes and teeth, whose merry laughter was almost belied by the ferocious, brutal whips they carried--whips precisely like that _Simon Legree_ had wielded in the play in the theater just across the Square, now, by a stroke of poetic justice, in the hands of _Uncle Tom_ himself. But on this day the firemen were not to be seen under the eaves of the market-house; their checker-boards were quite abandoned. The mules between the shafts of these two-wheeled drays hung their heads and their long ears drooped under the heat, and their black masters were curled up on the sidewalk against the wall of the saloon, asleep. The Irishmen were nowhere to be seen, and Market Square was empty, deserted, and sprawled there reflecting the light in a blinding way, while from the yellow, dusty level of its cobbled surface rose, wave on wave, palpably, that trembling, shimmering, vibrating heat. And yet, there was one waking, living thing in sight. There, out in the middle of the Square he stood, a dusty, drab figure, with an old felt hat on a head that must have ached and throbbed in that implacable heat, with a mass of rags upon him, his frayed trousers gathered at his ankles and bound about by irons, and a ball and chain to bind him to that spot.