Such was the secret of the speedy settlement of this secluded suburb. It was high and healthy, and had easy access to town by the safe, swift, silent highway of the river; when few cared to go by the land road, bad enough at its best, unsafe even in daylight by reason of the foot-pads; but at last made wide and smooth for his coach by Charles II., recently restored. He used it as the royal route to Hampton Palace, and called it the King’s Private Road. Even that exclusive name did not serve to make it safe; and long after Chelsea Hospital was built, a guard of its pensioners nightly patrolled, as an escort for honest travellers, from where Buckingham Palace now stands, across Bloody Bridge,—at the edge of present Pimlico,—and so away through the Five Fields, “where robbers lie in wait,” as the _Tatler_ puts it. For Mr. Dick Steele often went by this road to Chelsea, where he had a little house somewhere near the river bank: whereto he was fond of taking “a friend to supper,” leaving word at home that he should not be able to return until the next morning, the roads being so unsafe by night! Sometimes his friend Addison was with him; sometimes the latter walked this way alone to his own home, at the farther end of Chelsea; and once on a moonlight night, he strolled out here with Colonel Esmond, as you may remember. A few years later, this same walk was frequently taken by Mr. Jonathan Swift, from Mrs. Vanhomrigh’s house in Suffolk Street, Pall Mall—where he used to leave his “best gown and periwig,” as he tells Stella—“and so to Chelsea, a little beyond the Church.” And still later, in December, 1754, Smollett was robbed of his watch and purse—there was but little in the latter, for he was then in poor case—as he went by coach from London to his residence out in Chelsea. [Picture: Steamboat Pier at Old Battersea Bridge, and the river front, twenty-five years ago] {26} “King’s Road,” as we see it to-day, in dingy letters on the old brick or plaster-fronted houses, makes us almost look for the Merry Monarch—as history has mis-named one of her saddest figures—driving past, on his way to Hampton Court, in company with a bevy of those beauties who still lure our senses from out their canvasses on the walls of the old palace. We see, at intervals along the road, behind its rusty iron railings and flagged front-yard and old-time porch, a long low brick house, . . . “whose ancient casements stare Like sad, dim eyes, at the retreating years,”