Public notices of that time, printed in the current press, remind the reader of some of these aforementioned rules and regulations.  We read that “Tapsters are forbid to sell to the Indians,” and that “unseasonable night tippling” is also tabooed; likewise drinking after nine in the evening when curfew rings, or “on a Sunday before three o’clock, when divine service shall be over.”

I wonder whether little old “Washington Hall” was built too late to come under these regulations?  It was a roadhouse of some repute in 1820, and a famous meeting place for celebrities in the sporting world.  It was, too, a tavern and coffee house for travellers (its punch was famous!) and the stagecoaches stopped there to change horses.  At this moment of writing it is still standing, on the south of Washington Square,—­I think number 58,—­with other shabby structures of wood, which, for some inscrutable reason, have never been either demolished or improved.  Now they are doomed at last, and are to make way for new and grand apartment houses; and so these, among the oldest buildings in Greenwich, drift into the mist of the past.

And in that same part of the Square—­in number 59 or 60, it is said—­lived one who cannot be omitted from any story of the Potter’s Field:  Daniel Megie, the city’s gravedigger.  In 1819 he bought a plot of ground from one John Ireland, and erected a small frame house, where he lived and where he stored the tools of his rather grim trade.  For three years he dwelt there, smoothing the resting places in the Field of Sleep; then, in 1823, a new Potter’s Field was opened at the point now known as Bryant Park, and the bodies from the lower cemetery were carried there.  Megie, apparently, lost his job, sold out to Joseph Dean and disappeared into obscurity.  It is interesting to note that he bought his plot in the first place for $500; now it is incorporated in the apartment house site which is estimated at about $250,000!

There is a legend to the effect that Governor Lucius Robinson later occupied this same house, but the writer does not vouch for the fact.  The Governor certainly lived somewhere in the vicinity, and his favourite walk was on Amity Street,—­why can’t we call it that now, instead of the cold and colourless Third Street?

I find that I have said nothing of Monument Lane,—­sometimes called Obelisk Lane,—­yet it was quite a landmark in its day, as one may gather from the fact that Ratzer thought it important enough to put in his official map.  It ran, I think, almost directly along North Washington Square, and, at one point, formed part of the “Inland Road to Greenwich” which was the scene of Revolutionary manoeuvres.  Monument Lane was so called because at the end of it (about Fifteenth Street and Eighth Avenue) stood a statue of the much-adored English general, James Wolfe, whose storming of the Heights of Abraham in the Battle of Quebec, and attendant defeat of the Marquis de Montcalm, have made him illustrious in history.  After the Revolution, the statue disappeared, and there is no record of its fate.