The arrangement of his novels places this among Studies in Place; and the scene is principally March Square, not far from Hyde Park Corner. There lingers about it the atmosphere of the days of St. Anne, a tranquillity hardly disturbed by the din of London; and its bricks and greenery, its fountain and statues, one commemorating a general of the Indian Mutiny and the other a mid-Victorian figure, are the last to hold the strains of mendicant street musicians. To these are added the cries of children at their games, garlands of children on the smooth lawn and under the overhanging trees, and, from around the corner, the bells of St. Matthew’s. Each part has for its central figure a child of one of the houses surrounding the Square, from the three-months-old Henry Fitzgeorge, Marquis of Strether, son of the Duchess of Crole, to young John Scarlett, the offspring of a solid K.C., about to leave home for the adventure of public school. But there is, in the range of the book, the greatest possible diversity of children and houses: ’Enery, the simple-witted son of Mrs. Slater, care-taker for Old Lady Cathcart at No. 21; Nancy Ross, daughter of Munty, of potted shrimp fame, in danger of being turned by an impossible mother into an impossible Dresden china figure, but saved by her ugly black little father; Sarah Trefusis, living in a smart little house with green doors and with a widowed mother of the loveliest and most unscrupulous of eyes, Sarah possessed of a sinister devil; Angelina, who would say "Wosy" when she meant Rose, and infuriated her two neat aunts with rather yellow, squashed-looking faces. It is, perhaps, to Angelina Braid, that the memory most persistently returns; for in the direct story of Angelina and the rag doll she adored above all others--Rachel and Lizzie, two Annies, a Mary, a May, a Blackmoor, a Jap, a Sailor, and a Baby in a Bath--Mr. Walpole has gathered all his art and fury. In it hard meanness, petty destructive tempers, meagreness of heart, are exposed so utterly that it is difficult to suppose anyone, reading it, could ever again support the oppression of a child. The episode of Angelina Braid is told with the utmost restraint, its means are simple, inevitable; but its conveying of irrevocable harm, of the spirit fluttering away from the rigidity of flesh, is matchless. As a whole The Golden Scarecrow is, considering its heart of mystery, amazingly coherent and satisfactory. From the opening paragraphs, when Hugh Seymour, a lonely imaginative boy, is mentally bullied by a stolid school-master, to the last where, a man, he regains the voice of his Friend, that Friend of before-birth, the book is a living entity. Of the golden scarecrow: "To their left a dark brown field rose in an ascending wave to a ridge that cut the sky.... The field was lit with the soft light of the setting sun. On the ridge of the field something suspended, it seemed, in mid-air, was shining like a golden fire.