“This rural picture of a point near where Charlton now crosses Varick Street naturally strikes the prosaic mind familiar with the locality at the present day as a trick of the imagination.  But truth is stranger, and not infrequently more interesting, than fiction.”

And now go back to the beginning.

A very large section of this part of the island was held under the grant of the Colonial Government, by the Episcopal Church of the city of New York—­later to be known more succinctly as Trinity Church Parish.  St. John’s,—­not built at that time, of course—­is part of the same property.  This particular portion (Richmond Hill), as we may gather from the enthusiastic accounts of those who had seen it, must have been peculiarly desirable.  At any rate, it appealed most strongly to one Major Abraham Mortier, at one time commissary of the English army, and a man of a good deal of personal wealth and position.

In 1760, Major Mortier acquired from the Church Corporation a big tract including the especial hill of his desires and, upon it, high above the green valleys and the silver pond, he proceeded to put a good part of his considerable fortune into building a house and laying out grounds which should be a triumph among country estates.

That he was a personage of importance goes without saying, for His Majesty’s forces had right of way in those days, in all things social as well as governmental.  He proceeded to entertain largely, as soon as he had his home ready for it, and so it was that at that time Richmond Hill established its deathless reputation for hospitality.

Mortier did not buy the property outright but got it on a very long lease.  Though his first name sounds Hebraic and his last Gallic, he was, we may take it, a thoroughly British soul, for he called it Richmond Hill to remind him of England.  The people of New York used to gossip excitedly over the small fortune he spent on those grounds, the house was the most pretentious that the neighbourhood had boasted up to that time.  Of course the Warren place was much farther north, and this particular locality was only just beginning to be fashionable.

[Illustration:  WASHINGTON ARCH. “...  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.”]

A friend of the Commissary’s, and a truly illustrious visitor at the Hill, was Sir.  Jeffrey Amherst, later Lord Amherst.  He made Mortier’s house his headquarters at the close of his campaigns waged against French power in America.  He is really not so well known as he should be, for in those tangled beginnings of our country we can hardly overestimate the importance of any one determined or strategic move, and it is due to Amherst, very largely, that half of the State of New York was not made a part of Canada.  Incidentally, Amherst College is named for him.