The costumes,—­many of them at least,—­are largely—­paint!  This is not nearly as improper as it sounds.  Splashes of clever red and subtle purple will quite creditably take the place of more cumberous and expensive dressing,—­or at least will pleasantly eke it out.  Colour has long been recognised as a perfectly good substitute for cloth.  Have you forgotten the small boy’s abstract of the first history book—­” ...  The early Britons wore animals’ skins in winter, and in summer they painted themselves blue.”  I am convinced that wode was the forerunner of the dress of the Village ball!

The Kit Kat, an artists’ association, is remarkable for one curious custom.  Its managing board is a profound mystery.  No one knows who is responsible for the invitations sent out, so there can be no jealousy nor rancour if people don’t get asked.  If an invited guest chooses to bring a friend he may, but he is solely responsible for that friend and if his charge proves undesirable he will be held accountable and will thereafter be quietly dropped from the guest list of subsequent balls.  And still he will never know who has done it!  Hence, the Kit Kat is a most formidable institution, and invitations from its mysterious “Board” are hungrily longed for!

Every season there are other balls, too; among the last was the “Apes and Ivory” affair, a study in black and white, as may be gathered; then there was the “Rogue’s Funeral” ball.  This was to commemorate the demise of a certain little magazine called the Rogue, whose career was short and unsuccessful.  They kept the funeral atmosphere so far as to hire a hearse for the transportation of some of the guests, but—­

“We put the first three letters of funeral in capitals,” says one of the participants casually.

The proper thing, when festivities are over, is to go to breakfast,—­at “Polly’s,” the Village Kitchen or the Dutch Oven, perhaps.  Of course, nothing on earth but the resiliency, the electric vitality of youth, could stand this sort of thing; but then, the Village is young; it is preeminently the land of youth, and the wine of life is still fresh and strong enough in its veins to come buoyantly through what seems to an older consciousness a good bit more like an ordeal than an amusement!

And yet—­and yet—­somehow I cannot think that these balls and pageants and breakfasts are truly typical of the real Village—­I mean the newest and the best Village—­the Village which, like the Fairy Host, sings to the sojourners of the grey world to come and join them in their dance, with “the wind sounding over the hill.”  My Village is something fresher and gayer and more child-like than that.  There is in it nothing of decadence.

But, as John Reed says—­

"...  There’s anaemia
Ev’n in Bohemia,
That there’s not more of it—­ there is the miracle!"