And a few of the families stay beneath the roofs their forefathers built, watching, as they watched, the same quiet trees and lawns and paths of the most charming square in all New York:  De Forest, Rhinelander, Delano, Stewart, De Rham, Gould, Wynkoop, Tailer, Guinness, Claflin, Booth, Darlington, Gregory, Hoyt, Schell, Shattuck, Weekes,—­these, and others are still the names of the residents of Washington Square North.  Father Knickerbocker, coming to smoke his pipe here, will be in good company, you perceive!

The recollections of many living persons who recall the old Square and other parts of early New York, bring forcibly to us the realisation of the speed with which this country of ours has evolved itself.  In one man’s lifetime, New York has grown from a small town just out of its Colonial swaddling clothes to the greatest city in the world.  These reminiscences, then, are but memories of yesterday or the day before.  We do not have to take them from history books but from the diaries of men and women who are still wide-eyed with wonder at the changes which have come to their city!

“The town was filled with beautiful trees,” says one man (who remembers Commodore Vanderbilt, with the splendid horses, the fine manner and the unexampled profane eloquence), “but the pavements were very dirty.  Places like St. John’s Park and Abingdon Square were quiet and sweet and secluded.  Where West Fourth Street and West Eleventh Street met it was so still you could almost hear the grass grow between the cobblestones!  Everything near the Square was extremely exclusive and fashionable.  Washington and Waverly places were very aristocratic indeed.”

Waverly Place, by the bye, got its name through a petition of select booklovers who lived thereabouts and adored Sir.  Walter Scott.  It speaks well for the good taste of the aristocratic quarter, even though the tribute came a bit late,—­about twenty years after “Waverley” was published!

The celebrated north side of the Square was called, by the society people, “The Row,” and was, of course, the last word in social prestige.  But, for all its lofty place in the veneration of the world and his wife, its ways were enchantingly simple, if we may trust the tales we hear.  In the Square stood the “Pump With The Long Handle,” and thence was every bucketful of washing water drawn by the gilt-edged servants of the gilt-edged “Row”!  The water was, it is said, particularly soft,—­rain, doubtless,—­and day by day the pails were carried to the main pump to be filled!

When next you look at the motor stages gliding past the Arch, try, just for a moment, to visualise the old stages which ran on Fifth Avenue from Fulton Ferry uptown.  They were very elaborate, we are told, and an immense improvement on the old Greenwich stagecoaches, and the great lumbering vehicles that conveyed travellers along the Post Road.  These new Fifth Avenue stages were brightly painted:  the body of the coach