Bike Odyssey Day 10, contd.

The Square is much smaller and cosier than a photograph can easily convey. On the left, among trees, the courthouse – burnt down by Union troops but rebuilt in the 1870s – around which the houses of the Square cluster protectively.

Anglophile Oxford is proud of its deliberately-named connection with the British seat of learning. Now that the cellphone age has effected the disappearance of public telephones, this phone booth (beyond it, the courthouse, left of picture) may soon be the last public telephone available in the States. A vestige of the past, with a British smirk on its face.

Fortunately found, two Oxford ladies who could have stepped out of a Faulkner novel, sitting talking outside one of the numerous sections of the Square Bookstore that dots the periphery of the Square, composing one of the most famous – Mississipians say the most famous – bookstore in the world. As befits Ole Miss (the place and the university) and William Faulkner.