stain upon the fair history of this square of which we are writing.

For--there was a gallows in the old Potter's Field. Upon the very spot
where you may be watching the sparrows or the budding leaves,
offenders were hanged for the edification or intimidation of huge
crowds of people. Twenty highwaymen were despatched there, and at
least one historian insists that they were all executed at once, and
that Lafayette watched the performance. Certainly a score seems rather
a large number, even in the days of our stern forefathers; one cannot
help wondering if the event were presented to the great Frenchman as a
form of entertainment.

In 1795 came one of those constantly recurring epidemics of yellow
fever which used to devastate early Manhattan; and in 1797 came a
worse one. Many bodies were brought from other burying grounds, and
when the scourge of small-pox killed off two thousand persons in one
short space, six hundred and sixty-seven of them were laid in this
particular public cemetery. During one very bad time, the rich as well
as the poor were brought there, and there were nearly two thousand
bodies sleeping in the Potter's Field.

People who had died from yellow fever were wrapped in great yellow
sheets before they were buried,--a curious touch of symbolism in
keeping with the fantastic habit of mind which we find everywhere in
the early annals of America. Mr. E.N. Tailer, among others, can
recall, many years later, seeing the crumbling yellow folds of shrouds
uncovered by breaking coffin walls, when the heavy guns placed in the
Square sank too weightily into the ground, and crushed the
trench-vaults.