Stories such as these might discourage one if one did not keep remembering that even in far deeper and greater affairs of life, “A hair perhaps divides the false and true.”  Who are we to improve on Omar’s wise and tolerant philosophy?

I have less sympathy with the girl who wrote poetry, and even occasionally sold it, at so much a line.  Having sold a poem of eighteen lines for $9.00 she almost wept because, as she ingenuously complained, she might just as easily have written twenty lines for $10.00!

Then there is the fair Villager who intones Walt Whitman to music of her own composition; that is a bit trying, I grant you.  And the male Villager who frequents spiritualistic seances and communes with dead poets.

One night Emerson presided.  And, after the ghosts had departed, the spiritualistic Villager read some of his own poems.

“And do you know,” he declared, enraptured, “everyone thought it was still Emerson who was speaking!”

Now for him we may have sympathy.  He is perhaps a faker, but I am inclined to believe that he is that anachronism, a sincere faker.  He is on the level.  Like two-thirds of the Village, he is playing his game with his whole heart and soul, with all that is in him.  I am afraid that it would be hard to say as much for a certain class of outside-the-Village fakers who, from time to time, drift into the cheery confines thereof and carry away sacks of shekels—­though not, let us hope, as much as they wanted to get!

Have you ever heard, for instance, of the psychoanalysts?  They diagnose soul troubles as regular doctors diagnose diseases of the body, and they are in great demand.  Some of them are alienists, healers of sick brains; some of them are just—­fakers.  They charge immense prices, and just for the moment the blessed Village—­always passionately hospitable to new cults and theories and visions—­is receiving them cordially, with arms and purses that are both wide open.

None of us can afford to depreciate the genius nor the judgment of Freud, but I defy any Freud-alienist to efficiently psychoanalyse the Village!  By the time he were half done with the job he would be a Villager himself and then—­pouf!  That for his psychoanalysis!

Have you ever read that most enchanting book of Celtic mysticism, inconsequent whimsey and profound symbolism—­“The Crock of Gold”—­by one James Stevens?  The author is not a Villager, and his message is one which has its root and spring in the signs and wonders of another, an older and a more intimately wise land than ours.  But when I read of those pure, half-pagan immortals in the dance of the Sluaige Shee (the Fairy Hosts) I could not help thinking that Greenwich Village might well adopt certain passages as fitting texts and interpretations of themselves and their own lives—­“The lovers of gaiety and peace, long defrauded.”

The Shee, as they dance, sing to the old grey world-dwellers,—­or Stevens says they do, and I for one believe he knows all there is to know about it (’tis a Leprechaun he has for a friend):