green trees of the big Square outside, this little woman heats and bends and bores her metals and shines her stones in their quaint settings, with a rapt absorption that is balanced by her steady skill.  It is no light or easy work, this making of hand-made jewelry, and it requires no inconsiderable gift of delicate fancy and artistic judgment.  This girl is an artist, not the less so because she makes her flowers and dragons and symbolic figures out of metal instead of canvas and paint; not the less so because her colours do not come in tubes but imprisoned in the rare, exotic tints of shimmering gems.

Here is a ring of slightly dulled silver—­the design is of a water lily, fragile and delicate.  In the heart of it lies, like a dewdrop, a pale-green jewel called peridot.  Here is the soft, rich blue of lapis lazuli—­here the keener azure of turquoise matrix.  Here is a Mexican opal, full of fire, almost blood-red, glowing feverishly from its burnished-copper setting.  What a terrible, yet beautiful ornament!  One would be, I imagine, under a sort of fierce and splendid spell while wearing it.  Here, cool and pale and pure as a moonbeam, is a little water opal,—­set in silver of course.  Here is an “abalone blister,” iridescent like mother-of-pearl, carrying in it something of “the shade and the shine of the sea” from which the mother-shell originally came.  Here is matrix opal, and here are numbers of strange-hued, crystalline gems with names all ending in “ite.”  To model with metal for clay—­to paint with jewels for colour!  Does it not sound like very real and very fascinating art?

These are passing glimpses of but two of the art industries of the Village.  There are many others—­enough to fill a book all by themselves.  There are the Villagers who hammer brass, and those who carve wood; who make exquisite lace, who make furniture of quaint and original design.  There are the designers and decorators, whose brains are full of graceful images and whose fingers are quick and facile to carry them out.  There are, in fact, numbers on numbers of enthusiastic young people—­they are nearly all of them young—­who from sunrise to sunset spend their lives in adding to the sum of beauty that there is on earth.

The making of box furniture, for instance, sounds commonplace enough, but it is really fascinating.  There are places in the Village,—­notably one on Greenwich Avenue,—­where these clever craftsmen make wonderful things from cubic forms of wood, from boxes and sticks and laths and blocks.  They can make anything from a desk to a tall candlestick, and, softly coloured, the square, wooden objects make a highly decorative effect.  It is a simple art but a striking one, and the aesthetic sense, the instinct for balance and proportion and ultimate beauty of line and composition, has a splendid outlet.

There is, too, the trade of the designer of garments:  the word is advisedly substituted for dresses.  The real designer plans and executes pictures, mood-expressions, character settings.  She dreams herself into the personalities of her clients, also the necessities and the limitations!  Do you think all the artistic costume-creating is done in the Rue de la Paix?  Try the Village!