d. The entire plot was ninety lots,--eight lots to an
acre,--and comprised nearly the entire site of the present square. The
extreme western part, a strip extending east of Macdougal Street to
the Brook, a scant thirty feet,--was bought from the Warren heirs.

Minetta Lane, which was close by, had a few aristocratic country
residents by that time, and everyone was quite outraged by the notion
of having a paupers' graveyard so near. Several rich people of the
countryside even offered to present the city corporation with a much
larger and more valuable plot of ground somewhere else; but the
officials were firm. The public notice was relentlessly made, of the
purchase of ground "bounded on the road leading from the Bowerie Lane
at the two-mile stone to Greenwich."

When you next stroll through the little quiet park in the shadow of
the Arch and Turini's great statue of Garibaldi, watching the children
at play, the tramps and wayfarers resting, the tired horses drinking
from the fountain the S.P.C.A. has placed there for their service and
comfort, the old dreaming of the past, and the young dreaming of the
future,--see, if you please, if it is not rather a wistfully pleasant
thought to recall the poor and the old and the nameless and the humble
who were put to rest there a century and a quarter ago?

The Aceldama of the Priests of Jerusalem was "the potter's field to
bury strangers in," according to St. Matthew; and in the Syriac
version that meant literally "the field of sleep." It is true that
when they made use of Judas Iscariot's pieces of silver, they twisted
the syllables to mean the "field of blood," but it was a play upon
words only. The Field of Sleep was the Potter's Field, where the weary
"strangers" rested, at home at last.

There is nothing intrinsically repellent in the memories attached to a
Potter's Field,--save, possibly, in this case, a certain scandalous
old story of robbing it of its dead for the benefit of the medical
students of the town. That was a disgraceful business if you like! But
public feeling was so bitter and retributive that the practice was
speedily discontinued. So, again, there is nothing to make us recoil,
here among the green shadows of the square, from the recollection of
the Potter's Field. But there _is_ always something fundamentally
shocking in any place of public punishment. And,--alas!--there is that
stain upon the fair history of this square of which we are writing.

For--t