Full, fair, complete.
1854. He has a good square quarter of a century yet to devote to the welfare of this country.—Mr. Mike Walsh of N.Y., House of Repr., May 19: Cong. Globe, p. 1231.
1856. It was a square, straight-out, unsullied Democratic victory.—Mr. English of Indiana, the same, Dec. 17: id., p. 108, App.
1856. I never ate a lunch in all my life without taking a square drink.—San Francisco Call, Dec. 25.
1863. The principal excitement today [at Colorado city] was a square fight between two good sized individuals.—Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Feb. 5.
1867. Wednesday morning we were furnished with a square meal, so called in military parlance.—J. M. Crawford, ‘Mosby and his Men,’ p. 98.
1869. The transition from the luxurious tables of the East to the “square meals” of the West is, fortunately, gradual.—A. K. McClure, ‘Rocky Mountains,’ p. 30.
1869. About ten o’clock P.M., we reached the first “home-station,” known as Alkali Station, and we were there to try our first “square meal.”—Id., p. 58.
1869. Such a thing as a square, stand-up fight for a train has not occurred in all the Indian depredations this year.—Id., p. 179.
1869. LOOK HERE! For fifty cents YOU CAN GET A GOOD SQUARE MEAL at the HOWLING WILDERNESS SALOON!”—J. Ross Browne, ‘Adventures in the Apache Country,’ p. 348.
1869. Their hungry eyes and their lank forms continually suggested one glaring, unsentimental fact—they wanted what they term in California “a square meal.”—Mark Twain, ‘The Innocents Abroad,’ ch. xxxiv.
1872. I don’t think she done a square day’s work in two years.—J. M. Bailey, ‘Folks in Danbury,’ p. 37.
1883. As to food, it was too delicate. To tell the square truth, we were not satisfied. The complaint was not that it was not good, it was only of its scarcity.—‘Southern Hist. Soc. Papers,’ xi. 334.
1888. The General ordered everything she had in the house, determined, for once in that summer of deprivations, to have, as the soldiers term it, one “good, square meal.”—Mrs. Custer, ‘Tenting on the Plains,’ p. 699.
1909. In most cases the man is chiefly concerned with his three square meals a day. Home represents to him four walls, and nothing more.—N.Y. Evening Post, April 29.
