For—­there was a gallows in the old Potter’s Field.  Upon the very spot where you may be watching the sparrows or the budding leaves, offenders were hanged for the edification or intimidation of huge crowds of people.  Twenty highwaymen were despatched there, and at least one historian insists that they were all executed at once, and that Lafayette watched the performance.  Certainly a score seems rather a large number, even in the days of our stern forefathers; one cannot help wondering if the event were presented to the great Frenchman as a form of entertainment.

In 1795 came one of those constantly recurring epidemics of yellow fever which used to devastate early Manhattan; and in 1797 came a worse one.  Many bodies were brought from other burying grounds, and when the scourge of small-pox killed off two thousand persons in one short space, six hundred and sixty-seven of them were laid in this particular public cemetery.  During one very bad time, the rich as well as the poor were brought there, and there were nearly two thousand bodies sleeping in the Potter’s Field.

People who had died from yellow fever were wrapped in great yellow sheets before they were buried,—­a curious touch of symbolism in keeping with the fantastic habit of mind which we find everywhere in the early annals of America.  Mr. E.N.  Tailer, among others, can recall, many years later, seeing the crumbling yellow folds of shrouds uncovered by breaking coffin walls, when the heavy guns placed in the Square sank too weightily into the ground, and crushed the trench-vaults.

It would be interesting to examine, in fancy, those lost and sometimes non-existent headstones of the Field,—­that is, to try to tell a few of the tales that cling about those who were buried there.  But the task is difficult, and after all, tombstones yield but cheerless reading.  That the sleepers in the Potter’s Field very often had not even that shelter of tombstones makes their stories the more elusive and the more melancholy.  One or two slight records stand out among the rest, notably the curious one attached to the last of the stones to be removed from Washington Square.  I believe that it was in 1857 that Dr. John Francis, in an address before the Historical Society of New York, told this odd story, which must here be only touched upon.

One Benjamin Perkins, “a charlatan believer in mesmeric influence,” plied his trade in early Manhattan.  He seems to have belonged to that vast army of persons who seriously believe their own teachings even when they know them to be preposterous.  Perkins made a specialty of yellow fever, and insisted that he could cure it by hypnotism.  That he had a following is in no way strange, considering his day and generation, but the striking point about this is that, when he was exposed to the horror himself, he tried to automesmerise himself out of it.  After three days he died, as Dr. Francis says, “a victim of his own temerity.”