So the Sailor’s Snug Harbor Estate came into being, later to be transferred to its present home on Staten Island.  As I survey it from the Richmond Terrace, which it faces, I like to recall its origin.  That origin does not in the least seem to interfere with the comfort of the old salts in blue puffing away at their short pipes before the gate or strolling across the broad lawn.  Never mind the source of Captain Tom’s money.  It is not for them to worry about the “Fox,” or the “De Lancey,” a brigantine with fourteen guns, which the “financier” took out in 1757, and with which he made some sensational captures, or the “Saucy Sally.”  Eventually the “De Lancey” was taken by the Dutch and the “Saucy Sally” by the English.  But before these misfortunes befell him Captain Tom had amassed a fat property.  Ostensibly he plied a coastwise trade mostly between New York and New Orleans.  But the same chronicler to whom we owe the significant expression:  “In those days a man was looked upon as highly unfortunate if he had not a vessel which he could put to profitable use,” summed the matter up when he said:  “The Captain went wherever the Spanish flag covered the largest amount of gold.”

At the northeast corner of Washington Square and Fifth Avenue is the James Boorman house, now, I believe, the residence of Mr. Eugene Delano.  Helen W. Henderson, in “A Loiterer in New York,” alludes to certain letters about old New York written by Mr. Boorman’s niece.  “She writes,” says Miss Henderson, “of her sister having been sent to boarding school at Miss Green’s, No. 1 Fifth Avenue, and of how she used to comfort herself, in her home-sickness for the family, at Scarborough-on-the-Hudson, by looking out of the side windows of her prison at her uncle, ’walking in his flower-garden in the rear of his house on Washington Square!’” When James Boorman built his house, it was all open country behind it.  Mr. Boorman built also the houses Nos. 1 and 3 Fifth Avenue and the stables that were the nucleus of the Washington Mews of the present day.  In the houses was opened, in 1835, a select school for young ladies, presided over at first by Mr. Boorman’s only sister, Mrs. Esther Smith.

Soon, from Worcester, Massachusetts, came a Miss Green, a girl of eighteen, to teach in the school.  Another sister followed and in the course of a few years the establishment became the Misses Green School, which, for a long period, before and after the Civil War, was one of the most distinguished institutions of its kind in the city.  Later it was carried on by the Misses Graham.  There were educated the daughters of the commercial and social leaders of New York.  Among the pupils were Fanny and Jenny Jerome, the latter afterwards to become Lady Randolph Churchill, and the mother of Winston Churchill.  A brother of Lucy and Mary Green was Andrew H. Green, the “Father of Greater New York.”  He had for a time a share in the direction of the establishment, and in 1844, taught a class in American