Not so different from the lure that drew Sir.

Peter out to the Green Village between his spectacular and hazardous voyages; that gave Thomas Paine his "seven serene months" before death came to him; that filled the grassy lanes with a mushroom business-life which had fled before the scourge of yellow fever; not so different from the refreshing ease of heart that came to Abigail Adams and Theodosia Alston when they came there from less comforting atmospheres.
Greenwich, you see, maintains its old and honourable repute--that of being a resort and shelter and refuge for those upon whom the world outside would have pressed too heavily.
There is no one who has caught the inconsequent, yet perfectly sincere spirit of the Village better than John Reed.

In reckless, scholarly rhyme he has imprisoned something of the reckless idealism of the Artists' Quarter--that haven for unconventional souls.
_"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.