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.
It would be interesting to examine, in fancy, those lost and sometimes non-existent headstones of the Field,--that is, to try to tell a few of the tales that cling about those who were buried there.

But the task is difficult, and after all, tombstones yield but cheerless reading.