It was extraordinary how, from year to year, these young birds and even the old ones remembered the best perches about the Square. On Colonel Clayton's ample portico--big enough to shelter half a dozen covies behind its honeysuckles--both young and old would settle side by side; the younger bevy hovering about the Judge's blue-eyed daughter--a bird so blithe and of so free a wing, that the flock always followed wherever she alighted. On Judge Bowman's wide veranda only a few old cocks from the club could be found, and not infrequently, some rare birds from out of town perched about a table alive with the clink of glass and rattle of crushed ice, while next the church, on old Mrs. Pancoast's portico, with its tall Corinthian columns--Mr. Pancoast was the archdeacon of the Noah's ark church--one or two old grandmothers and a grave old owl of a family doctor were sure to fill the rocking-chairs. As for Richard Horn's marble steps they were never free from stray young couples who flew in to rest on Malachi's chairs and cushions. Sometimes only one bird and her mate would be tucked away in the shadow of the doorway; sometimes only an old pair, like Mrs. Horn and Richard, would occupy its corners. These porticoes and stone door-steps were really the open-air drawing-rooms of Kennedy Square in the soft summer nights. Here ices were served and cool drinks--sherbets for the young and juleps and sherry cobblers for the old. At the Horn house, on great occasions, as when some big melon that had lain for days on the cool cellar floor was cut (it was worth a day's journey to see Malachi cut a melon), the guests would not only crowd the steps, but all the hall and half up the slender staircase, where they would sit with plates in their laps, the young men serving their respective sweethearts. This open-air night-life had gone on since Kennedy Square began; each door-step had its habitues and each veranda its traditions. There was but one single porch, in fact, facing its stately trees whereon no flocks of birds, old or young, ever alighted, and that belonged to Peter Skimmerton--the meanest man in town--who in a fit of parsimony over candles, so the girls said, had bared his porch of every protesting vine and had placed opposite his door-step a glaring street gas-lamp---a monstrous and never-to-be-forgotten affront.