Puck of Pooks Hill | Page 4

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 Cold Iron, or the sound of Church Bells. But I'm Puck!'
He brushed the crumbs carefully from his doublet and shook hands.
'We always said, Dan and I,' Una stammered, 'that if it ever happened we'd know ex-actly what to do; but - but now it seems all different somehow.'
'She means meeting a fairy,'said Dan. 'I never believed in 'em - not after I was six, anyhow.'
'I did,' said Una. 'At least, I sort of half believed till we learned "Farewell, Rewards". Do you know "Farewell, Rewards and Fairies"?'
'Do you mean this?' said Puck. He threw his big head back and began