to
be modern and prosaic.

It is full of romance. You cannot escape it, no matter how hard you
try to be practical. You start off on some commonplace stroll
enough--or you tell yourself it will be so; you are in the middle of
cable car lines and hustling people and shouting truck drivers, and
street cleaners and motors and newsboys, and all the component parts
of a modern and seemingly very sordid city--when, lo and behold, a
step to the right or left has taken you into another country
entirely--I had well-nigh said another world. Where did it come
from--that quaint little house with the fanlight over the door and the
flower-starred grassplot in front? Did it fall from the skies or was
it built in a minute like the delectable little house in "Peter Pan"?
Neither. It has stood there right along for half or three-quarters of
a century, only you didn't happen to know it. You have stepped around
the corner into Greenwich Village, that's all.

"In spots there is an unwonted silence, as though one were in some
country village," says Joseph Van Dyke. "... There are scraps of this
silence to be found about old houses, old walls, old trees."

Here, as in the fairy tales, all things become possible. You know that
a lady in a mob-cap and panniers is playing inside that shyly
curtained window. Hark! You can hear the thin, delicate notes quite
plainly: this is such a quiet little street. A piano rather out of
tune? Perish the thought! Dear friend, it is a spinet,--a harpsichord.
Almost you can smell pot-pourri.

Perhaps it was of such a house that H.C. Bunner wrote:

_"We lived in a cottage in old Greenwich Village,
With a tiny clay plot that was burnt brown and hard;
But it softened at last to my girl's patient tillage,
And the roses sprang up in our little backyard;"_

The garden hunger of the Village! It is something pathetic and yet
triumphant, pitiful and also splendid. It is joyous life and growth
hoping in the most unpromising surroundings: it is eager and gallant
hope exulting in the very teeth of defeat. Do you remember John
Reed's--

_"Below's the barren, grassless, earthen ring
Where Madame, with a faith unwavering
Planted a wistful garden every spring,--
Forever hoped-for,--never blossoming."_

Yet they do blossom, those hidden and usually unfruitful
garden-places. Sometimes they bloom in real flowers that anyone can
see and touch and smell. Sometimes they come only as f