Puck of Pooks Hill | Page 4

ground. A cuckoo sat on a
gate-post singing his broken June tune, 'cuckoo-cuck', while a busy
kingfisher crossed from the mill-stream, to the brook which ran on the
other side of the meadow. Everything else was a sort of thick, sleepy
stillness smelling of meadow-sweet and dry grass.
Their play went beautifully. Dan remembered all his parts - Puck,
Bottom, and the three Fairies - and Una never forgot a word of Titania -
not even the difficult piece where she tells the Fairies how to feed
Bottom with 'apricocks, green figs, and dewberries', and all the lines
end in 'ies'. They were both so pleased that they acted it three times
over from beginning to end before they sat down in the unthistly centre
of the Ring to eat eggs and Bath Olivers. This was when they heard a
whistle among the alders on the bank, and they jumped.

The bushes parted. In the very spot where Dan had stood as Puck they
saw a small, brown, broad- shouldered, pointy-eared person with a snub
nose, slanting blue eyes, and a grin that ran right across his freckled
face. He shaded his forehead as though he were watching Quince,
Snout, Bottom, and the others rehearsing Pyramus and Thisbe, and, in a
voice as deep as Three Cows asking to be milked, he began:
'What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here, So near the cradle
of the fairy Queen?'
He stopped, hollowed one hand round his ear, and, with a wicked
twinkle in his eye, went on:
'What, a play toward? I'll be an auditor; An actor, too, perhaps, if I see
cause.'
The children looked and gasped. The small thing - he was no taller than
Dan's shoulder - stepped quietly into the Ring.
'I'm rather out of practice,' said he; 'but that's the way my part ought to
be played.'
Still the children stared at him - from his dark-blue cap, like a big
columbine flower, to his bare, hairy feet. At last he laughed.
'Please don't look like that. It isn't my fault. What else could you
expect?' he said.
'We didn't expect any one,' Dan answered slowly. 'This is our field.'
'Is it?' said their visitor, sitting down. 'Then what on Human Earth made
you act Midsummer Night's Dream three times over, on Midsummer
Eve, in the middle of a Ring, and under - right under one of my oldest
hills in Old England? Pook's Hill - Puck's Hill - Puck's Hill - Pook's
Hill! It's as plain as the nose on my face.'
He pointed to the bare, fern-covered slope of Pook's Hill that runs up
from the far side of the mill-stream to a dark wood. Beyond that wood

the ground rises and rises for five hundred feet, till at last you climb out
on the bare top of Beacon Hill, to look over the Pevensey Levels and
the Channel and half the naked South Downs.
'By Oak, Ash, and Thorn!' he cried, still laughing. 'If this had happened
a few hundred years ago you'd have had all the People of the Hills out
like bees in June!'
'We didn't know it was wrong,' said Dan.
'Wrong!' The little fellow shook with laughter. 'Indeed, it isn't wrong.
You've done something that Kings and Knights and Scholars in old
days would have given their crowns and spurs and books to find out. If
Merlin himself had helped you, you couldn't have managed better!
You've broken the Hills - you've broken the Hills! It hasn't happened in
a thousand years.'
'We - we didn't mean to,' said Una.
'Of course you didn't! That's just why you did it. Unluckily the Hills are
empty now, and all the People of the Hills are gone. I'm the only one
left. I'm Puck, the oldest Old Thing in England, very much at your
service if - if you care to have anything to do with me. If you don't, of
course you've only to say so, and I'll go.'
He looked at the children, and the children looked at him for quite half
a minute. His eyes did not twinkle any more. They were very kind, and
there was the beginning of a good smile on his lips.
Una put out her hand. 'Don't go,' she said. 'We like you.' 'Have a Bath
Oliver,' said Dan, and he passed over the squashy envelope with the
eggs.
'By Oak, Ash and Thorn,' cried Puck, taking off his blue cap, 'I like you
too. Sprinkle a plenty salt on the biscuit, Dan, and I'll eat it with you.
That'll show you the sort of person I am. Some of us' - he went on, with
his mouth full - 'couldn't abide Salt, or Horse-shoes over a door, or
Mountain-ash berries, or Running Water, or