[Illustration:  THE DUTCH OVEN.  One of the favorite eating places of the Village.  Some of the famous breakfasts are given here.]

II

     “I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

     “Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone.  “Try again: 
     draw a long breath and shut your eyes.”

     Alice laughed.  “There’s no use trying,” she said.  “One
     can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen.  “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.  Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”—­“Through the Looking Glass.”

“But it can’t be this!” I said.  “You’ve made a mistake in the number!”

“It is this,” declared my guide and companion.  “This is where Nanni Bailey has her tea shop.”

“But this is—­is—­isn’t anything!”

Indeed the number to which my friend pointed seemed to indicate the entrance to a sort of warehouse, if it indicated anything at all.  On peering through the dim and gloomy doorway, it appeared instead to be a particularly desolate-looking cellar.  There were old barrels and boxes about, an expanse of general dusty mystery and, in the dingy distance, a flight of ladder-like steps leading upwards to a faint light.

“It’s one of Dickens’ impossible stage sets come true!” I exclaimed.  “It looks as though it might be a burglars’ den or somebody’s back yard, but anyway, it isn’t a restaurant!”

“It is too!” came back at me triumphantly.  “Look at that sign!”

By the faint rays of a street light on nearby Sixth Avenue, I saw the shabby little wooden sign, “The Samovar.”  This extraordinary place was a restaurant after all!

We entered warily, having a vague expectation of pickpockets or rats, and climbed that ladder—­I mean staircase—­to what was purely and simply a loft.

But such a loft!  Such a quaint, delicious, simple, picturesque apotheosis of a loft!  A loft with the rough bricks whitewashed and the heavy rafters painted red; a loft with big, plain tables and a bare floor and an only slightly partitioned-off kitchenette where the hungry could descry piles of sandwiches and many coffee cups.  And there in the middle of the loft was the Samovar itself, a really splendid affair, and one actually not for decorative purposes only, but for use.  I had always thought samovars were for the ornamentation either of houses or foreign-atmosphere novels.  But you could use this thing.  I saw people go and get glasses-full of tea out of it.