was navy blue, the running gear white, striped with red, and the lettering and decorations of gold.  A strap which enabled the driver to open and close the door without descending from his seat was looked upon as an impressive innovation!  Inside, there were oil paintings on panels, small candles in glass boxes for illumination, and straw on the floor to keep your feet warm.  These luxuries justified the high rate which was charged.  The fare was ten cents!

In very heavy snowstorms the stages were apt to get stalled, so that a few stage sleighs were run in midwinter, but only in the city proper.  Their farthest uptown terminal was at Fourteenth Street, so they were not much help to suburbanites!

No single article, or chapter, can even attempt to encompass the complete story of Washington Square.  Covering the entire period of the city’s history, passing through startling changes and transformations, the scene of great happenings, the background of illustrious or curious lives,—­it is probably more typical of the vertiginous development of New York than any single section.  The Indians, the Dutch, the English, the Colonials, the Revolutionists, the New Americans, the shining lights of art, science, fashion and the state, have all passed through it, confidently and at home.  The dead have slept there; wicked men have died there and great ones been honoured.  Belles and beaux have minced on their way beneath the thick green branches,—­branches that have also quivered to the sound of artillery fire saluting a mighty nation newborn.  Nothing that a city can feel or suffer or delight in has escaped Washington Square.  Everything of valour and tragedy and gallantry and high hope—­that go to making a great town as much and more than its bricks and mortar—­are in that nine and three-quarters acres that make up the very heart and soul of New York.

The lovely Arch first designed by Stanford White and erected by William Rhinelander Stewart’s public-spirited efforts, on April 30, 1889, was in honour of the centennial anniversary of Washington’s inauguration; it was so beautiful that, happily, it was later made permanent in marble, and in all the town there could have been found no more fitting place for it.

In every really great city there is one place which is, in a sense, sacred from the profanation of too utilitarian progress.  However commercialised Paris might become, you could not cheapen the environs of Notre Dame!  Whatever happens to us, let us hope that we will always keep Washington Square as it is today,—­our little and dear bit of fine, concrete history, the one perfect page of our old, immortal New York!

Father Knickerbocker, may you dream well!

CHAPTER II

The Green Village

     God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb down Greenwich
     way!—­THOMAS JANVIER.

Did you know that “Greenwich Village” is tautology?  That region known affectionately as “Our Village” is Greenwich, pure and simple, and here is the “why” of that statement.