“On Thursday afternoon, as a man of genteel appearance was passing along Beekman Street, he was attacked by a cow, and notwithstanding his efforts to avoid her, and the means he used to beat her off, we are sorry to say that he was so much injured as to be taken up dead.  The cow was afterward killed in William Street.  We have not been able to learn the name of the deceased"!!

Some of the items contain genuine if unconscious humour,—­such as the record of the question brought up before the City Council:  “Whether attorneys are thought useful to plead in courts or not?” Answer:  “It is thought not.”

Then there is the proclamation that if any Indian was found drunk in any street, and it could not be ascertained where he got the liquor, the whole street was to be fined!

Among the earlier laws duly published in the press was that hogs should not be “suffered to goe or range in any of the streets or lands.”  In 1684 eight watchmen were appointed at twelve-pence a night.  But read them for yourselves,—­they are worth the trouble you will have to find them!

There were many queer trades in New York, and all of them, or nearly all, advertised in the daily journals.  In column on column of yellowed paper and quaint f-for-s printing, we read exhortations to employ this or that man, most of them included in the picturesque verse whose author I do not know: 

"Plumbers, founders, dyers, tanners, shavers, Sweepers, clerks and criers, jewelers, engravers, Clothiers, drapers, players, cartmen, hatters, nailers, Gaugers, sealers, weighers, carpenters, and sailors!"

And read the long-winded, yet really beautiful old obituary notices; the simple news of battles and high deeds; the fiery, yet pedantic, political editorials.  Oh, no one knows anything about Father Knickerbocker until he has read the same newspapers that Father Knickerbocker himself read,—­when he wasn’t writing for them!

The Revolution had passed and Greenwich was a real village, and growing with astonishing rapidity, even in that day of lightning development.

In 1807 they started to do New York over, and they kept at it faithfully and successfully until 1811.  Then began the laying out of streets according to numbers and fixed measurements, instead of by picturesque names and erratic cow-path meanderings.  Gouverneur Morris, Simeon de Witt and John Rutherford were appointed by the city to take charge of this task, and, as one writer points out, they did not do it as badly as they might have done, nor as we are inclined to think they did when we try to find our way around lower New York today.  The truth is that Greenwich had grown up, and always has grown up ever since, in an entirely independent and obstinate fashion all its own.  There was not the slightest use in trying to make its twisty curlicue streets conform to any engineering plan on earth; so those sensible old-time folk didn’t try.  William Bridges, architect and city surveyor, entrusted with the job, mentions “that part of the city which lies south of Greenwich Lane and North Street, and which was not included in the powers vested in the commissioners.”  And so Our Village remains itself, utterly and arrogantly untouched by the confining orthodoxy of the rest of the town!