lowers of the
heart--which, after all, will do as well as another sort,--in
Greenwich Village, where they know how to make believe.

Here is how Hugh Macatamney describes Greenwich:

"A walk through the heart of this interesting locality--the
American quarter, from Fourteenth Street down to Canal, west
of Sixth Avenue--will reveal a moral and physical
cleanliness not found in any other semi-congested part of
New York; an individuality of the positive sort transmitted
from generation to generation; a picturesqueness in its old
houses, 'standing squarely on their right to be individual'
alongside those of modern times, and, above all else, a
truly American atmosphere of the pure kind."

He adds:

"Please remember, too, that in 1816 Greenwich Village had
individualism enough to be the terminus of a stage line from
Pine Street and Broadway, the stages 'running on the even
hours from Greenwich and the uneven hours from Pine
Street.'"

You walk on through Greenwich Village and you will expect romance to
meet you. Even the distant clang of a cable car out in the city will
not break the spell that is on you now. And if you have a spark of
fancy, you will find your romance. You cannot walk a block in
Greenwich without coming on some stony wall, suggestive alley, quaint
house or vista or garden plot or tree. Everything sings to you there;
even the poorest sections have a quaint glamour of their own. It
gleams out at you from the most forbidding surroundings. Sometimes it
is only a century-old door knocker or an ancient vine-covered
wall--but it is a breath from the gracious past.

And as you cannot go a step in the Village without seeing something
picturesque so you cannot read a page of the history of Greenwich
without stumbling upon the trail of romance or adventure. As, for
example, the tale of that same Sir. Peter Warren, whose name we have
encountered more than once before, as proper a man as ever stepped
through the leaves of a Colonial history and the green purlieus of Old
Greenwich!

CHAPTER III

_The Gallant Career of Sir. Peter Warren_

"... Affection with truth must say
That, deservedly esteemed in private life,
And universally renowned for his public conduct,
The judicial and gallant Officer
Possessed all the amiable qualities of the
Friend, the Gentleman, and the Christian...."

--_Fro