It is easy to regard the Lane of the Mad Eccentrics from the point of view of metropolitan sophistication; to dismiss the Vermilion Hound and the Hell Hole and the Pirate’s Den and the Purple Pup and Polly’s as clap-trap and tinsel designed for the mystification of yokels and social investigators from Long Island City.  But it is impossible to deny that the crazy decorations have added a touch of real colour to what had been a drab corner of the town.  The present writer has no intention of going into a detailed sketch of this fragment of Bohemia for the reason that Anna Alice Chapin discussed it so well, so buoyantly, and so sympathetically in her book on “Greenwich Village” published a year or so ago.  A few lines from her description of the Pirate’s Den will give the flavour of any one of the enterprises that line the Lane of the Mad Eccentrics and are to be found, here and there, in the neighbouring streets.

“It is a very real pirate’s den, lighted only by candles.  A coffin casts a shadow, and there is a regulation ‘Jolly Roger,’ a black flag ornamented with skull and crossbones.  Grim?  Surely, but even a healthy-minded child will play at gruesome and ghoulish games once in a while.

“There is a Dead Man’s Chest, too—­and if you open it you will find a ladder leading down into the mysterious depths unknown.  If you are very adventurous you will climb down and bump your head against the cellar ceiling and inspect what is going to be a subterranean grotto as soon as it can be fitted up.  You climb down again and sit in the dim, smoky little room and look about you.  It is the most perfect pirate’s den you can imagine.  On the walls hang huge casks and kegs and wine bottles in their straw covers—­all the sign manuals of past and future orgies.  Yet the ‘Pirate’s Den’ is ’dry’—­straw-dry, brick-dry—­as dry as the Sahara.  If you want a ‘drink’ the well-mannered ‘cut-throat’ who serves you will give you a mighty mug of ginger-ale or sarsaparilla.  If you are a real Villager and can still play at being a real pirate you drink it without a smile, and solemnly consider it real red wine filched at the end of a cutlass from captured merchantmen on the high seas.  On the big, dark centre table is carefully drawn the map of ‘Treasure Island.’

“The pirate who serves you (incidentally he writes poetry and helps to edit a magazine among other things) apologizes for the lack of a Stevenson parrot.  ’A chap we know is going to bring back one from the South Sea Islands,’ he declares seriously.  ’And we are going to teach it to say:  “Pieces of eight!  Pieces of eight!"’”