_"Yet we are free who live in Washington Square,
We dare to think as uptown wouldn't dare,
Blazing our nights with arguments uproarious;
What care we for a dull old world censorious,
When each is sure he'll fashion something glorious?"_
So we find that the romance of Colonial days still blooms freshly
below Fourteenth Street and that people still rush to the Village to
escape the world and its ways as eagerly as they fled a hundred years
ago. But the third and last point of unity is perhaps the most
striking. Always, we know, Greenwich has refused rebelliously to
conform to any rule of thumb. We know that when the Commissioners
checker-boarded off the town they found they couldn't checker-board
Greenwich. It was too independent and too set in its ways. It had its
lanes and trails and cow-paths and nothing could induce it to become
resigned to straight streets and measured avenues. It would not
conform, and it never has conformed. And even more strenuously has its
mental development defied the draughtsman's compass and triangle.
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