is remarkable for one curious
custom. Its managing board is a profound mystery. No one knows who is
responsible for the invitations sent out, so there can be no jealousy
nor rancour if people don't get asked. If an invited guest chooses to
bring a friend he may, but he is solely responsible for that friend
and if his charge proves undesirable he will be held accountable and
will thereafter be quietly dropped from the guest list of subsequent
balls. And still he will never know who has done it! Hence, the Kit
Kat is a most formidable institution, and invitations from its
mysterious "Board" are hungrily longed for!

Every season there are other balls, too; among the last was the "Apes
and Ivory" affair, a study in black and white, as may be gathered;
then there was the "Rogue's Funeral" ball. This was to commemorate the
demise of a certain little magazine called the _Rogue_, whose
career was short and unsuccessful. They kept the funeral atmosphere
so far as to hire a hearse for the transportation of some of the
guests, _but_--

"We put the first three letters of funeral in capitals," says one of
the participants casually.

The proper thing, when festivities are over, is to go to
breakfast,--at "Polly's," the Village Kitchen or the Dutch Oven,
perhaps. Of course, nothing on earth but the resiliency, the electric
vitality of youth, could stand this sort of thing; but then, the
Village is young; it is preeminently the land of youth, and the wine
of life is still fresh and strong enough in its veins to come
buoyantly through what seems to an older consciousness a good bit more
like an ordeal than an amusement!

And yet--and yet--somehow I cannot think that these balls and pageants
and breakfasts are truly typical of the real Village--I mean the
newest and the best Village--the Village which, like the Fairy Host,
sings to the sojourners of the grey world to come and join them in
their dance, with "the wind sounding over the hill." My Village is
something fresher and gayer and more child-like than that. There is in
it nothing of decadence.

But, as John Reed says--

_"... There's anaemia
Ev'n in Bohemia,
That there's not more of it--_ there _is the miracle!"_

For still the Village is, or has been, inarticulate. Individually it
has found speech--it has expressed itself in diverse and successful
forms. But there remains a void of voices! A community must strongly
utter something, and must find m