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.