noticing any
of the unnecessary and absurd details that are given in the
present day in like cases; neither was her dying speech
recorded...."

Thomas Janvier declares that she was accused of murder, but all other
authorities say that poor Rose's "wickedness" had consisted of
lighting a fire under the staircase of her master's house, with, or
so it was asserted, "a malicious intent." One sees that it was quite
easy to get hanged in those days,--especially if you happened to be a
negro! The great elm tree, on a branch of which Rose was hanged, stood
intact in the Square until 1890. I am glad it is gone at last!

Old Manhattan was as strictly run as disciplinary measures and rules
could contrive and guarantee. The old blue laws were stringently
enforced, and the penalty for infringement was usually a sharp one. In
the unpublished record of the city clerk we find, next to the item
that records Elbert Harring's application for a land-grant, a note to
the effect that a "Publick Whipper" had been appointed on the same
day, at five pounds quarterly.

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 fra