Really, there is nothing quainter about it than this intimate and casual quality, such as is known in genuine, small country towns.  Fancy a part of New York City—­Gotham, the cold, the selfish, the unneighbourly, the indifferent—­in which everyone knows everyone else and takes a personal interest in them too; where distances are slight and pleasant, where young men in loose shirts with rolled-up sleeves, or girls hatless and in working smocks stroll across Sixth Avenue from one square to another with as little self-consciousness as though they were meandering down Main Street to a game of tennis or the village store!  Sixth Avenue, indeed, has come to mean nothing more to them than a rustic bridge or a barbed-wire fence,—­something to be gotten over speedily and forgotten.  They even, by some alchemy of view point, seem to give it a rural air from Jefferson Market down to Fourth Street—­these cool-looking, hatless young people who make their leisurely way down Washington Place or along Fourth Street.  People pass them,—­people in hats, coats and carrying bundles; but the Villagers do not notice them.  They do not even look at them pityingly; they do not look at them at all.  Your true Green-Village denizen does not like to look at unattractive objects if he can possibly avoid it.

Of course, they do make use of Sixth Avenue occasionally, on their rare trips uptown.  But it is in the same spirit that a country dweller would take the railway in order to get into the city on necessary business.  As a matter of fact there is no corner of New York more conveniently situated for transportation than this particular section of Greenwich.  I came across a picturesque real estate advertisement the other day: 

“If you ever decide to kill your barber and fly the country, commit the crime at the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue.  There is probably no other place in the world that offers as many avenues of flight.”

But nothing short of dire necessity ever takes a Villager uptown.  He, or she, may go downtown but not up.  Uptown nearly always means something distasteful and boring to the Village; they see to it that they have as few occasions for going there as possible.

Anyway, uptown, for them, ends very far downtown!  The fifties, forties, thirties, even the twenties, are to them the veritable wilderness, the variously repugnant sections of relatively outer darkness.

Do you remember Colonel Turnbull who had so much trouble in selling his house at Eighth Street because it was so far out of town?  Here is a modern and quite surprisingly neat analogy: 

Two Village women of my acquaintance met the other day.  Said one tragically:  “My dear, isn’t it awful?  We’ve had to move uptown!  Since the baby came, we need a larger house, but it almost breaks my heart!”

“I should think so!” gasped the second woman in consternation.  “You’ve always been such regular Villagers.  What shall we do without you?  It’s terrible!  Where are you moving to, dear?”