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 our 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 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 at the second line:
'Good housewives now may say,
For now foul sluts in dairies, Do fare as well as they;,
And though they sweep their hearths no less,
('Join in, Una!')
Than maids were wont to do,
Yet who of late for cleanliness, Finds sixpence in her shoe?'
The echoes flapped all along the flat meadow.
'Of course I know it,' he said.
'And then there's the verse about the rings,' said Dan. 'When I was little it always made me feel unhappy in my inside.'
'"Witness those rings and roundelays", do you mean?' boomed Puck, with a voice like a great church organ.
'Of theirs which yet remain,
Were footed in Queen Mary's days On many a grassy plain,
But since of late Elizabeth, And, later, James came in,
Are never seen on any heath As when the time hath been.'
'It's some time since I heard that sung, but there's no good beating about the bush: it's true. The People of the Hills have all left. I saw them come into Old England and I saw them go. Giants, trolls, kelpies, brownies, goblins, imps; wood, tree, mound, and water spirits; heath-people, hill-watchers, treasure-guards, good people, little people, pishogues, leprechauns, night-riders, pixies, nixies, gnomes, and the rest—gone, all gone! I came into England with Oak, Ash and Thorn, and when Oak, Ash and Thorn are gone I shall go too.'
Dan looked round the meadow—at Una's Oak by the lower gate; at the line of ash trees that overhang Otter Pool where the mill-stream spills over when the Mill does not need it, and at the gnarled old white-thorn where Three Cows scratched their necks.
'It's all right,' he said; and added, 'I'm planting a lot of acorns this autumn too.'
'Then aren't you most awfully old?' said Una.
'Not old—fairly long-lived, as folk say hereabouts. Let me see—my friends used to set my dish of cream for me o' nights when Stonehenge was new. Yes, before the Flint Men made the Dewpond under Chanctonbury Ring.'
Una clasped her hands, cried 'Oh!' and nodded her head.
'She's thought a plan,' Dan explained. 'She always does like that when she thinks a plan.'
'I was thinking—suppose we saved some of our porridge and put it in the attic for you? They'd notice if we left it in the nursery.'
'Schoolroom,' said Dan quickly, and Una flushed, because they had made a solemn treaty that summer not to call the schoolroom the nursery any more.
'Bless your heart o' gold!' said Puck. 'You'll make a fine considering wench some market-day. I really don't want you to put out a bowl for me; but if ever I need a bite, be sure I'll tell you.'
He stretched himself at length on the dry grass, and the children stretched out beside him, their bare legs waving happily in the air. They felt they could not be afraid of him any more than of their particular friend old Hobden the hedger. He did not bother them with grown-up questions, or laugh at the donkey's head, but lay and smiled to himself in the most sensible way.
'Have you a knife on you?' he said at last.
Dan handed over his big one-bladed outdoor knife, and Puck began to carve out a piece of turf from the centre of the Ring.
'What's that for—Magic?' said Una, as he pressed up the square of chocolate loam that cut like so much cheese.
'One of my little magics,' he answered, and cut another. 'You see, I can't let you into the Hills because the People of the Hills have gone; but if you care to take seizin from me, I may be able to show you something out of the common here on Human Earth. You certainly deserve it.'
'What's taking seizin?' said Dan, cautiously.