Have you ever read that most enchanting book of Celtic mysticism, inconsequent whimsey and profound symbolism--"The Crock of Gold"--by one James Stevens? The author is not a Villager, and his message is one which has its root and spring in the signs and wonders of another, an older and a more intimately wise land than ours. But when I read of those pure, half-pagan immortals in the dance of the _Sluaige Shee_ (the Fairy Hosts) I could not help thinking that Greenwich Village might well adopt certain passages as fitting texts and interpretations of themselves and their own lives--"The lovers of gaiety and peace, long defrauded." The Shee, as they dance, sing to the old grey world-dwellers,--or Stevens says they do, and I for one believe he knows all there is to know about it ('tis a Leprechaun he has for a friend): "Come to us, ye who do not know where ye are--ye who live among strangers in the houses of dismay and self-righteousness. Poor, awkward ones! How bewildered and be-devilled ye go!... In what prisons are ye flung? To what lowliness are ye bowed? How are ye ground between the laws and the customs? Come away! For the dance has begun lightly, the wind is sounding over the hill...." CHAPTER IX _And Then More Villagers_ ... A meeting place for the few who are struggling ever and ever for an art that will be truly American. An art that is not hidebound by the deadening influences of a decadent Europe, or the result of intellectual theories evolved by those whose only pleasure in existence is to create laws for others to obey ... an art, let us say, that springs out of the emotional depths of creative spirit, courageous and unafraid of rotting power, or limited scope ... an art whose purpose is flaming beauty of creation and nothing else.--HAROLD HERSEY, in _The Quill_ (Greenwich Village). Someone said today to the author of this book: "How can you write about the Village? You don't live here. Live here a few years and then perhaps you'll have something to say!" It is by way of answer that the following little tale is quoted; it is an old tale but, after a fashion, it seems to fit. Once upon a time an explorer discovered a country and set about to write a book concerning it. Then the people of the country became somewhat indignant and asked: "Why should a stranger, who has scarcely learned his way about in our land, attempt to describe it? We, who have lived in it and know it, will write its chronicles ourselves." So the traveller sat down and shut the book in which he had begun to write and said: "Well and good. Do you write about your country, the land you have lived in so long and know so well, and we will see what we shall see."