Tavern, and its proprietors are the Mosses,--poet, editor and
incidental "pirate" on one side of the house; and designer of
enchanting "art clothes" on the other. Lew Kirby Parrish, no less, has
made the decorations, and he told me that the walls were grey with
Indian decorations, and the ceiling a "live colour." I discovered that
that meant a vivid, happy orange.

The spirit of the play is always kept in the Village. Let us take the
opening night of the "Wigwam" as a case in point.

The Indian note is supreme. It is not only the splendid line drawings
of Indian chiefs, forming the panels of the room--those mysterious and
impressive shades created by the imagination of Lew Parrish--it is the
general mood. Only candles are burning,--big, fat candles, giving, in
the aggregate, a magical radiance.

The victrola at the end of the room begins to play a curious Indian
air with an uneven, fascinating, syncopated rhythm. A graceful girl in
Indian dress glides in and places a single candle on the floor,
squatting before it in a circle of dim, yellow light.

She lifts her dark head with its heavy band about the brows and shades
her eyes with her hand. You see remote places, far, pale horizons,
desert regions of sand. There are empty skies overhead, instead of the
"live-colour" ceiling. With an agile movement, she rises and begins to
dance about the candle, and you know that to her it is a little
campfire; it is that to you, too, for the moment. Something like the
west wind blows her fringed dress; there is a dream as old as life in
her eyes.

Faster and faster she dances about the candle, until at last she sinks
beside it and with a strange sure gesture--puts it out.

Silence and the dark. The prairie fades.... The little dark-wood
tables with their flowers and candles begin to glow again; the next
musical number is a popular one step!...

CHAPTER VIII

Villagers

Although the serious affairs of life are met as
conscientiously by the man or woman who has the real spirit
of the Village, nevertheless each of them assuredly shows
less of that sordidness and mad desire for money so
prevalent throughout the land....

The real villager's life is better balanced. He produces
written words of value, or material objects that offer
utility and delight. _He sings his songs. He has a good
time._--From the _Ink Pot_ (a Greenwich Village paper).

I quoted the above to a pract