e we did not
know what it was we were meeting."

It is odd that the Dutch names in Greenwich have died out as much as
they have. There is something in Holland blood which has a way of
persisting. They--the old Manhattan Dutch anyway--had a certain
stubborn individuality of their own, which refused to give way or
compromise. I have always felt that the way the Dutch ladies used to
drink their tea was a most illuminating sidelight upon their racial
characteristics. They served the dish of tea and the sugar
separately--the latter in a large and awkward hunk from which they
crunched out bites as they needed them. Now I take it that there was
no particular reason for this inconvenient and labourious method,
except that it was _their way_. They were used to doing things in an
original and an unyielding fashion. I believe a real old-world
_Mevrouw_ would have looked as coldly askance upon the innovation of
putting the sugar _in_ the tea, as she looked at the pernicious
ingress of the devil-endowed Church of England.

In 1664 came the English rule in what had been New Amsterdam and with
it British settlers and a new language. So the Bossen Bouwerie became
Green Wich (later clipped in pronunciation to _Grinnich_), the Green
Village, and a peaceful, remote little settlement it remained for many
a long year.

Now came the rich and great in search of country air, health, rest or
change of scene. Colonial society was not so different from twentieth
century society. They, too, demanded occasional doses of rustic
scenery and rest cures; and they began to drift out to the green
little hamlet on the Hudson where they could commune with nature and
fortify themselves with that incomparable air. Captain Warren, Oliver
de Lancey, James Jauncey, William Bayard and Abraham Mortier all
acquired estates there. The road to Greenwich was by far the most
fashionable of all the Colonial drives.

Greenwich Road ran along the line of our present Greenwich Street, and
gave one a lovely view of the water. At Lispenard's Salt Meadows
(Canal Street) it ran upon a causeway, but the marshes overflowed in
the spring, and soon they opened another road known as the Inland Road
to Greenwich. This second lane ran from the Post Road or Bowery,
westward over the fields and passing close to the site of the Potter's
Field. This, I understand, was the favourite drive of the fashionable
world a century and a half ago.

If anyone wants to really taste the