There is a Dead Man’s Chest too,—­and if you open it you will find a ladder leading down into 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 up 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 signs manual 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.  And 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 edge of the 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) apologises for the lack of a Stevensonian parrot.

“A chap we know is going to bring one back from the South Sea Islands,” he declares seriously.  “And we are going to teach it to say, ‘Pieces of eight!  Pieces of eight!’”

If, while you are at the “Pirate’s Den” you care to climb a rickety, but enchanted staircase outside the old building (it’s pre-Revolutionary, you know) you will come to the “Aladdin Shop”—­where coffee and Oriental sweets are specialties.  It is a riot of strange and beautiful colour—­vivid and Eastern and utterly intoxicating.  A very talented and picturesque Villager has painted every inch of it himself, including the mysterious-looking Arabian gentleman in brilliantly hued wood, who sits cross-legged luring you into the little place of magic.  The wrought iron brackets on the wall are patches of vivid tints; the curtains at the windows are colour-dissonances, fascinating and bizarre.  As usual there is candlelight.  And, as usual, there is the same delicious spirit of seriously and whole-heartedly playing the game.  While you are there you are in the East.  If it isn’t the East to you, you can go away—­back to Philistia.

And speaking of candlelight.  I went into the poets’ favourite “Will o’ the Wisp” tea shop once and found the gas-jet lighted!  The young girl in charge jumped up, much embarrassed, and turned it out.

“I’m so sorry!” she apologised.  “But I wanted to see just a moment, and lighted it!”

I peered at her face in the ghostly candlelight.  It was entirely and unmistakably earnest.

Just the same, Mrs. Browning’s warning that “colours seen by candlelight do not look the same by day” is not truly applicable to these Village shrines.  Even under the searching beams of a slanting, summer afternoon sun, they are adorable.  Go and see if you don’t believe this.