Yet the "Pirate's Den" is "dry"-- straw-dry, brick-dry -- as dry as the Sahara.

If you want a "drink" the well-mannered "cut-throat" who serves you will give you a mighty mug of ginger ale or sarsaparilla.

And if you are a real Villager and can still play at being a real pirate, you drink it without a smile, and solemnly consider it real red wine filched at the edge of the cutlass from captured merchantmen on the high seas.

On the big, dark centre table is carefully drawn the map of "Treasure Island." The pirate who serves you (incidentally he writes poetry and helps to edit a magazine among other things) apologises for the lack of a Stevensonian parrot.
"A chap we know is going to bring one back from the South Sea Islands," he declares seriously.

"And we are going to teach it to say, 'Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!'" If, while you are at the "Pirate's Den" you care to climb a rickety, but enchanted staircase outside the old building (it's pre-Revolutionary, you know) you will come to the "Aladdin Shop"-- where coffee and Oriental sweets are specialties.