And the florists!  The flower shops of the Village are truly lovely, one in particular, the Peculiar Flower Shop, which does not look at all like a shop but like the corner of a country garden.  The Village loves flowers and understands them.  Every Villager who can, grows them.  Believe me, you know nothing about flowers in an intimate sense until you have talked with a flower-loving Villager!

Think of it—­you outsiders who imagine that you are exhibiting a fine, artistic tendency by going to an occasional exhibition, and in knowing what colours can discreetly be worn together!  Here is a small army of vigourous idealists who live, breathe and create beauty; whose happy, hard-working lives are filled with the exhilarating wine of art and artistic expression; who, when night comes, never turn the keys of their workshops without the knowledge that they have made one more beautiful thing since dawn, one more concrete materialisation of the art-dream in man, one more new creation to help to furnish pleasure for a beauty-loving world!

There is something about those new forms of art work which recalls the richer and more leisurely past, when good artisans were scarcely less revered than great artists; when men toiled half a lifetime to fashion one or two perfect things; when even the commonest utilitarian articles were expected to be beautiful and were made so by the applied genius of a race of working artists.  It suggests other lands too—­the East where you will hardly ever see an ugly object, and where everything from a pitcher to a rug is a thing of loveliness; the South where true grace of line and colour is the rule rather than the exception in the homeliest household utensils.  Primitive peoples have always stayed close to beauty; it is odd that it has always remained for civilisation to suggest to man that if a thing is useful it need not necessarily be beautiful.  In a sense, then, our Villagers have returned to a simpler, purer and surer standard.  In shutting out the rest of Philistia they have also succeeded in shutting out Philistia’s inconceivable ugliness.  So the gods give them joy—­the gods give them joy!

Probably no one region on earth has been more misrepresented and miswritten-up than the Village.  Its eccentricities, harmless or otherwise, are sufficiently conspicuous to furnish targets both for the unscrupulous fiction-monger and the professional humourist.  Sometimes when the fun is clever enough and true enough no one minds, the Village least of all; humour is their strong point.  But they are quite subtle souls with all their child-like peculiarities; there is, in their acceptance of ridicule, a shrewd undercurrent suggestive of the “Virginian’s” now classic warning:  “When you call me that, smile!” Hence a novel written not long ago and purporting to be a mirror of the Village—­Village life and Village ideals, or lack of them—­had a peculiar result on the real Village.  They knew