I have heard of liquid or solidified air, but that's a scientific experiment, and who wants to try scientific experiments on the Village which we all love?
"But such an amount of play-acting and pose!" I hear someone complain, referring to the Village with contemptuous irritation.

"They pretend to be seeking after truth and liberty of thought, and that sort of thing, and yet they are steeped in artificiality." Yes, to a certain extent that is true--true of a portion of the Village, at any rate, and a certain percentage of the Villagers.

But even if it is true, it is the sort of truth that needs only a bit of understanding to make us tender and tolerant instead of scornful and hard.

My dear lady, you who complained of the "play-acting," and you other who, agreeing with her, see in the whimsies and pretenses in Our Village only a spectacle of cheap affectation and artifice, have you lived so long and yet do not know that the play-acting instinct is one of the most universal of all instincts--the very first developed, and the very last, I truly believe, to die in our faded bodies?
From the moment when we try to play ball with sunbeams through those intermediate years wherein we imagine ourselves everything on earth that we are not, down to those last days of all, when we live, all furtive and unsuspected, a secret life of the spirit--either a life of remembrance or a life of imagination visualising what we have wanted and have missed,--what do we do but pretend,--make believe,--pose, if you will?
When we are little we pretend to be knights and ladies, pirates and fairy princesses, soldiers and Red Cross nurses, and sailors and hunters and explorers.

We people the window boxes with elves and pixies and the dark corners with Red Indians and bears.