ur age, I always did it for half-an-hour a
day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible
things before breakfast."--"Through the Looking Glass."

"But it can't be this!" I said. "You've made a mistake in the number!"

"It is this," declared my guide and companion. "This is where Nanni
Bailey has her tea shop."

"But this is--is--isn't anything!"

Indeed the number to which my friend pointed seemed to indicate the
entrance to a sort of warehouse, if it indicated anything at all. On
peering through the dim and gloomy doorway, it appeared instead to be
a particularly desolate-looking cellar. There were old barrels and
boxes about, an expanse of general dusty mystery and, in the dingy
distance, a flight of ladder-like steps leading upwards to a faint
light.

"It's one of Dickens' impossible stage sets come true!" I exclaimed.
"It looks as though it might be a burglars' den or somebody's back
yard, but anyway, it isn't a restaurant!"

"It is too!" came back at me triumphantly. "Look at that sign!"

By the faint rays of a street light on nearby Sixth Avenue, I saw the
shabby little wooden sign, "The Samovar." This extraordinary place was
a restaurant after all!

We entered warily, having a vague expectation of pickpockets or rats,
and climbed that ladder--I mean staircase--to what was purely and
simply a loft.

But such a loft! Such a quaint, delicious, simple, picturesque
apotheosis of a loft! A loft with the rough bricks whitewashed and the
heavy rafters painted red; a loft with big, plain tables and a bare
floor and an only slightly partitioned-off kitchenette where the
hungry could descry piles of sandwiches and many coffee cups. And
there in the middle of the loft was the Samovar itself, a really
splendid affair, and one actually not for decorative purposes only,
but for use. I had always thought samovars were for the ornamentation
either of houses or foreign-atmosphere novels. But you could use this
thing. I saw people go and get glasses-full of tea out of it.

Under the smoke-dimmed lights were curious, eager, interesting faces:
a pale little person with red hair I recognised instantly as an
actress whom I had just seen at the Provincetown Players--a Village
Theatrical Company--in a tense and terribly tragic role. Beyond her
was a white-haired man with keen eyes--a distinguished writer and
socialist. A shabby poet announced to the sympathetic that he had sold
something after two y