You have stepped around
the corner into Greenwich Village, that's all.
"In spots there is an unwonted silence, as though one were in some
country village," says Joseph Van Dyke. "... There are scraps of this
silence to be found about old houses, old walls, old trees."
Here, as in the fairy tales, all things become possible. You know that
a lady in a mob-cap and panniers is playing inside that shyly
curtained window. Hark! You can hear the thin, delicate notes quite
plainly: this is such a quiet little street. A piano rather out of
tune? Perish the thought! Dear friend, it is a spinet,--a harpsichord.
Almost you can smell pot-pourri.
Perhaps it was of such a house that H.C. Bunner wrote:
_"We lived in a cottage in old Greenwich Village,
With a tiny clay plot that was burnt brown and hard;
But it softened at last to my girl's patient tillage,
And the roses sprang up in our little backyard;"_
The garden hunger of the Village! It is something pathetic and yet
triumphant, pitiful and also splendid.
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