to two hundred thousand dollars.  Keeping still to the bucolic days of the Avenue, we pass, going from Fifteenth to Eighteenth Street, through what was the farm of Thomas and Edward Burling, relatives of John and James Burling, old-time merchants whose name was given to Burling Slip, down by the East River.  Also in the course of these blocks the Avenue crosses land that was the farm of John Cowman until 1836.  Between Eighteenth and Twenty-first Streets was part of the farm acquired in 1791 by Isaac Varian, who bought from the heirs of Sir Peter Warren.

This Sir Peter Warren was one of the great figures of the old town.  Many have written of him.  It was only a year or so ago that Miss Chapin devoted to his story a chapter of her book on Greenwich Village.  So here the outline of his career will be of the briefest possible nature.  It was in 1728 that he first saw New York Harbour.  He was twenty-five years of age then, and in command of the frigate “Solebay.”  Irish to the core, a Warren of Warrenstown, County Meath, who got their estates in the time of “Strongbow,” he had already seen a dozen years of active service in southern and African waters, and as captain of the “Grafton,” had had a share in the seizure of the rock of Gibraltar by the British.  But New York was his first official post, and here he had been sent at the orders of the home government, to keep an eye on events, and to sound the loyalty of the American colonies.  The little island above the great bay and between the two broad rivers won his heart from the first, and after every new adventure he returned to it, until, in 1747, he was summoned to London, to enter Parliament and to be made Admiral of the Red Squadron.  The affection for the town seems to have been reciprocal, for two years after his introduction to New York, the Common Council of the city voted to him the “freedom of the city.”  Then, when he was twenty-eight years old he married Susanna DeLancey, whose father, Etienne DeLancey, was a Huguenot refugee, who, settling here, soon changed the Etienne to Stephen, and married a daughter of one of the Dutch Van Cortlandts.  At first the young Warrens lived downtown, but in later years, when wealth came as the result of treasure-seeking adventure on the high seas, Peter bought lands in Greenwich Village, and eventually there erected a great mansion.

Throughout the 1730’s he was busy, but his opportunity did not come until the end of that decade.  In 1739 trouble broke out between Great Britain and Spain.  Five years later Captain Warren was fabulously rich.  Early in 1744 he had been made commodore of a sixteen-ship squadron in the Caribbean.  Before summer of that year he had captured twenty-four French and Spanish merchant ships, had brought them to New York, turned them over to his father-in-law’s firm, “Messieurs Stephen De Lancey and Company,” and had pocketed the proceeds of the sale.  His “French and Spanish swag,” is the way Thomas A. Janvier expressed