The Presbyterian churches got a foothold fairly early;—­probably the first very fashionable one was that on Mercer Street.  Its pastor, the Reverend Thomas Skinner, is chiefly, but deservedly, renowned for a memorable address he made to an assembly of children, some time in 1834.  Here is an extract which is particularly bright and lucid: 

     “Catechism is a compendium of divine truth.  Perhaps,
     children, you do not know the meaning of that word. 
     Compendium is synonymous with synopsis"!!!

[Illustration:  THE CRADLE OF BOHEMIA.  The first and most famous French restaurant in New York.]

The old Methodist churches were models of Puritanism.  In the beginning they met in carpenter shops, or wherever they could.  When they had real churches, they, for a long time, had separate entrances for the sexes.

It was after I had read of this queer little side shoot of asceticism that I began to fully appreciate what a friend of mine had said to me concerning the New Greenwich.

“The Village,” he said, “is a protest against Puritanism.”  And, he added:  “It’s just an island, a little island entirely surrounded by hostile seas!”

The Village, old and new, is a protest.  It is a voice in the wilderness.  Some day perhaps it will conquer even the hostile seas.  Anyway, most of the voyagers on the hostile seas will come to the Village eventually, so it should worry!

The Green Village is green no longer, except in scattered spots where the foliage seems to bubble up from the stone and brick as irrepressibly as Minetta Water once bubbled up thereabouts.  But it is still the Village, and utterly different from the rest of the city.  Not all the commissioners in the world could change the charming, erratic plan of it; not the most powerful pressure of modern business could destroy its insistent, yet elusive personality.  The Village has always persistently eluded incorporation in the rest of the city.  Never forget this:  Greenwich was developed as independently as Boston or Chicago.  It is not New York proper:  it is an entirely separate place.  At points, New York overflows into it, or it straggles out into New York, but it is first and foremost itself.  It is not changeless at all, but its changes are eternal and superbly independent of, and inconsistent with, metropolitan evolution.

There was a formative period when, socially speaking, the growth of Greenwich was the growth of New York.  But that was when Greenwich was almost the whole of fashionable New York.  Later New York plunged onward and left the green cradle of its splendid beginnings.  But the cradle remained, still to cherish new lives and fresh ideals and a society profoundly different, yet scarcely less exclusive in its way, than that of the Colonies.  It has been described by so many writers in so many ways that one is at a loss for a choice of quotations.  Perhaps the most whimsically descriptive is in O. Henry’s “Last Leaf.”