DOWN   LOVE  LANE
 

AS all the world knows — barring, of course,
that small portion of the world which is not
familiar with old New York—the Kissing Bridge
of a century ago was on the line of the Boston
Post Road (almost precisely at the intersection
of the Third Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street
of the present day), about four miles out of town.
And all the world, without any exception what¬
ever, must know that after crossing a kissing-
bridge the ridiculously short distance of foui
miles is no distance at all. Fortunately for the
lovers of that period, it •was possible to go round¬
about from the Kissing Bridge to New York by
a route which very agreeably prolonged the oscu-
pontine situation : that is to say, by the Abingdon
Road, close on the line of the present Twenty-
first Street, to the Fitzroy Road, nearly paral¬
lel from Fifteenth Street to Forty-second Street
with the present Eighth Avenue ; thence down
to the Great Kiln Road, on the line of the pres¬
ent Gansevoort Street ; thence to the Greenwich
Road, on the line of the present Greenwich Street
—and so, along the river-side, comfortably slowly
back to town.