nd bores her metals
and shines her stones in their quaint settings, with a rapt absorption
that is balanced by her steady skill. It is no light or easy work,
this making of hand-made jewelry, and it requires no inconsiderable
gift of delicate fancy and artistic judgment. This girl is an artist,
not the less so because she makes her flowers and dragons and symbolic
figures out of metal instead of canvas and paint; not the less so
because her colours do not come in tubes but imprisoned in the rare,
exotic tints of shimmering gems.

Here is a ring of slightly dulled silver--the design is of a water
lily, fragile and delicate. In the heart of it lies, like a dewdrop, a
pale-green jewel called peridot. Here is the soft, rich blue of _lapis
lazuli_--here the keener azure of turquoise matrix. Here is a Mexican
opal, full of fire, almost blood-red, glowing feverishly from its
burnished-copper setting. What a terrible, yet beautiful ornament!
One would be, I imagine, under a sort of fierce and splendid spell
while wearing it. Here, cool and pale and pure as a moonbeam, is a
little water opal,--set in silver of course. Here is an "abalone
blister," iridescent like mother-of-pearl, carrying in it something of
"the shade and the shine of the sea" from which the mother-shell
originally came. Here is matrix opal, and here are numbers of
strange-hued, crystalline gems with names all ending in "ite." To
model with metal for clay--to paint with jewels for colour! Does it
not sound like very real and very fascinating art?

These are passing glimpses of but two of the art industries of the
Village. There are many others--enough to fill a book all by
themselves. There are the Villagers who hammer brass, and those who
carve wood; who make exquisite lace, who make furniture of quaint and
original design. There are the designers and decorators, whose brains
are full of graceful images and whose fingers are quick and facile to
carry them out. There are, in fact, numbers on numbers of enthusiastic
young people--they are nearly all of them young--who from sunrise to
sunset spend their lives in adding to the sum of beauty that there is
on earth.

The making of box furniture, for instance, sounds commonplace enough, but
it is really fascinating. There are places in the Village,--notably one
on Greenwich Avenue,--where these clever craftsmen make wonderful things
from cubic forms of wood, from boxes and sticks and laths and blocks.
They can mak