n to Henry
Rosa's pastry shop, and buy a slab of cinnamon bun. Then we walk round
Washington Square, musing, and gradually walking round and engulfing the
cinnamon bun at the same time. It is surprising what a large
circumference those buns of Henry's have. By the time we have gnashed
our way through one of those warm and mystic phenomena we don't want to
eat again for a month.

The real reason for the cinnamon bun is to fortify us for the
contemplation and onslaught upon a tragic problem that Washington Square
presents to our pondering soul.

Washington Square is a delightful place. There are trees there, and
publishing houses and warm green grass and a fire engine station. There
are children playing about on the broad pavements that criss-cross the
sward; there is a fine roof of blue sky, kept from falling down by the
enormous building at the north side of the Square. But these things
present no problems. To our simple philosophy a tree is a vegetable, a
child is an animal, a building is a mineral and this classification
needs no further scrutiny or analysis. But there is one thing in
Washington Square that embodies an intellectual problem, a grappling of
the soul, a matter for continual anguish and decision.

On the west side of the Square is the Swiss consulate, and, it is this
that weighs upon our brooding spirit. How many times we have paused
before that quiet little house and gazed upon the little red cross, a
Maltese Cross, or a Cross of St. Hieronymus; or whatever the heraldic
term is, that represents and symbolizes the diplomatic and spiritual
presence of the Swiss republic. We have stood there and thought about
William Tell and the Berne Convention and the St. Gothard Tunnel and St.
Bernard dogs and winter sports and alpenstocks and edelweiss and the
Jungfrau and all the other trappings and trappists that make Switzerland
notable. We have mused upon the Swiss military system, which is so
perfect that it has never had to be tested by war; and we have wondered
what is the name of the President of Switzerland and how he keeps it out
of the papers so successfully. One day we lugged an encyclopedia and the
Statesman's Year Book out to the Square with us and sat down on a bench
facing the consulate and read up about the Swiss cabinet and the
national bank of Switzerland and her child labor problems. Accidentally
we discovered the name of the Swiss President, but as he has kept it so
dark we are not going to give