Then take the “Mad Hatter’s.”  The entrance alone is a monument to the make-believe capabilities of the Village.  Scrawled on the stone wall beside the steps that lead down to the little basement tea room, is an inscription in chalk.  It looks like anything but English.  But if you held a looking-glass up to it you would find that it is “Down the Rabbit Hole” written backward!  Now, if you know your “Alice” as well as you should, you will recall delightedly her dash after the White Rabbit which brought her to Wonderland, and, incidentally, to the Mad Tea Party.

You go in to the little room where Villagers are drinking tea, and the proprietress approaches to take your order.  She is a good-looking young woman dressed in a bizarre red and blue effect, not unlike one of the Queens, but she prefers to be known as the “Dormouse”—­not, however, that she shows the slightest tendency to fall asleep.

On the wall is scribbled, “‘There’s plenty of room,’ said Alice.”

The people around you seem only pleasantly mad, not dangerously so.  There is a girl with an enchanting scrap of a monkey; there is a youth with a manuscript and a pile of cigarette butts.  The great thing here once more is that they are taking their little play and their little stage with a heavenly seriousness, all of them.  You expect somebody to produce a set of flamingos at any moment and start a game of croquet among the tiny tables.

Not all of the Greenwich restaurants have definite individual characters to maintain consistently.  Sometimes it is just a general spirit of picturesqueness, of adventure, that they are trying to keep up.  The “Mouse Trap,” except for the trap hanging outside and a mouse scrawled in chalk on the wall of the entry, carries out no particular suggestion either of traps or mice.  But take a look at the proprietress (Rita they call her), with her gorgeous Titian hair and delft-blue apron; at her son Sidney, fair, limp, slim, English-voiced, with a deft way of pouring after-dinner coffee, and hair the colour of corn.  They are obviously play-acting and enjoying it.

Ask Rita her nationality.  She will fix you with eyes utterly devoid of a twinkle and answer:  “I?  I am part Scotch terrier, and part Spanish mongrel, but mostly mermaid!”

Rita goes to the sideboard to cut someone a slice of good-looking pie.  She overhears a reference to the “Candlestick,” a little eating place chiefly remarkable for its vegetables and poetesses.

“If they eat nothing but vegetables no wonder they take to poetry,” is her comment.  But still she does not smile.  If you giggle, as every child knows, you spoil the game.  They laugh heartily enough and often enough down in the Village, but they never laugh at the Village itself,—­not because they take it so reverentially, but because they know how to make believe altogether too well.

Let me whisper here that the most fascinating hour in the “Mouse Trap” is in the late afternoon, when no one is there, and the ebony hand-maiden in the big back kitchen is taking the fat, delicious-smelling cakes from the oven.  Drop in some afternoon and sniff the fragrance that suggests your childhood and “sponge-cake day.”  You will feel that it is a trap no sane mouse would ever think of leaving!  On a table beside you is a slate with, obviously, the day’s specials: