has always remained
for civilisation to suggest to man that if a thing is useful it need
not necessarily be beautiful. In a sense, then, our Villagers have
returned to a simpler, purer and surer standard. In shutting out the
rest of Philistia they have also succeeded in shutting out Philistia's
inconceivable ugliness. So the gods give them joy--the gods give them
joy!

Probably no one region on earth has been more misrepresented and
miswritten-up than the Village. Its eccentricities, harmless or
otherwise, are sufficiently conspicuous to furnish targets both for
the unscrupulous fiction-monger and the professional humourist.
Sometimes when the fun is clever enough and true enough no one minds,
the Village least of all; humour is their strong point. But they are
quite subtle souls with all their child-like peculiarities; there is,
in their acceptance of ridicule, a shrewd undercurrent suggestive of
the "Virginian's" now classic warning: "When you call me that,
_smile_!" Hence a novel written not long ago and purporting to be a
mirror of the Village--Village life and Village ideals, or lack of
them--had a peculiar result on the real Village. They knew it to be
untrue--those few who read it, that is--but they scorned to notice it.
They resented it, but to an astonishing extent they ignored it. The
title of it got to mean very little to them save a general term of
cheap and unmerited opprobrium, like some insulting epithet in a
foreign language which one knows one would dislike if one could
understand it. It is necessary to grasp these first simple facts to
appreciate the following episode:

A certain young Villager--I shall not give his name, but he is an
artist of growing and striking reputation, dark-eyed and rather
attractive looking--burst into a friend's studio pale with anger:

"See here, have you a copy of 'The Trufflers'?"

"Not guilty," swore the surprised friend. "Why on earth do you
want--"

But the young artist had dashed forth again, hot upon his quest. A few
houses down the street, he made another spectacular entrance with the
same cry;--at another and still another. One friend frankly confessed
he had never heard of the book, another expressed indignation that he
should be suspected of owning a copy. But not until the temperamental,
brown-eyed artist had visited several acquaintances was he able to
get what he wanted.

When the long-sought volume was in his grasp, he heaved a sigh of
something more