imperfect human civilization in Europe, it is a boon to be alive
therein!... In half an hour, in three-quarters of an hour, the vitality
is clean gone out of the street. The shops have let down their rich
gathered curtains, the pavements are deserted, and the roadway is no
longer perilous. And nothing save a fire will arouse Fifth Avenue till
the next morning. Even on an election night the sole sign in Fifth
Avenue of the disorder of politics will be a few long strips of
tape-paper wreathing in the breeze on the asphalt under the lonely
lamps.

* * * * *

It is not easy for a visiting stranger in New York to get away from
Fifth Avenue. The street seems to hold him fast. There might almost as
well be no other avenues; and certainly the word "Fifth" has lost all
its numerical significance in current usage. A youthful musical student,
upon being asked how many symphonies Beethoven had composed, replied
four, and obstinately stuck to it that Beethoven had only composed four.
Called upon to enumerate the four, he answered thus, the C minor, the
Eroica, the Pastoral, and the Ninth. "Ninth" had lost its numerical
significance for that student. A similar phenomenon of psychology has
happened with the streets and avenues of New York. Europeans are apt to
assume that to tack numbers instead of names on to the thoroughfares of
a city is to impair their identities and individualities. Not a bit! The
numbers grow into names. That is all. Such is the mysterious poetic
force of the human mind! That curt word "Fifth" signifies as much to the
New-Yorker as "Boulevard des Italiens" to the Parisian. As for the
possibility of confusion, would any New-Yorker ever confuse Fourteenth
with Thirteenth or Fifteenth Street, or Twenty-third with Twenty-second
or Twenty-fourth, or Forty-second with One Hundred and Forty-second, or