The proper thing, when festivities are over, is to go to
breakfast,--at "Polly's," the Village Kitchen or the Dutch Oven,
perhaps. Of course, nothing on earth but the resiliency, the electric
vitality of youth, could stand this sort of thing; but then, the
Village is young; it is preeminently the land of youth, and the wine
of life is still fresh and strong enough in its veins to come
buoyantly through what seems to an older consciousness a good bit more
like an ordeal than an amusement!
And yet--and yet--somehow I cannot think that these balls and pageants
and breakfasts are truly typical of the real Village--I mean the
newest and the best Village--the Village which, like the Fairy Host,
sings to the sojourners of the grey world to come and join them in
their dance, with "the wind sounding over the hill." My Village is
something fresher and gayer and more child-like than that. There is in
it nothing of decadence.
But, as John Reed says--
_"... There's anaemia
Ev'n in Bohemia,
That there's not more of it--_ there _is the miracle!"_
For still the Village is, or has been, inarticulate.
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