See you the dimpled track that runs,
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns
That smote King Philip's fleet!
See you our little mill that clacks,
So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her tax
Ever since Domesday Book.
See you our stilly woods of oak,
And the dread ditch beside?
O that was where the Saxons broke,
On the day that Harold died!
See you the windy levels spread
About the gates of Rye?
O that was where the Northmen fled,
When Alfred's ships came by!
See you our pastures wide and lone,
Where the red oxen browse?
O there was a City thronged and known,
Ere London boasted a house!
And see you, after rain, the trace
Of mound and ditch and wall?
O that was a Legion's camping-place,
When Caesar sailed from Gaul!
And see you marks that show and fade,
Like shadows on the Downs?
O they are the lines the Flint Men made,
To guard their wondrous towns!
Trackway and Camp and City lost,
Salt Marsh where now is corn;
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,
And so was England born!
She is not any common Earth,
Water or Wood or Air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare.
The children were at the Theatre, acting to Three Cows as much as they
could remember of Midsummer Night's Dream. Their father had made them
a small play out of the big Shakespeare one, and they had rehearsed it
with him and with their mother till they could say it by heart. They
began when Nick Bottom the weaver comes out of the bushes with a
donkey's head on his shoulders, and finds Titania, Queen of the
Fairies, asleep. Then they skipped to the part where Bottom asks three
little fairies to scratch his head and bring him honey, and they ended
where he falls asleep in Titania's arms. Dan was Puck and Nick Bottom,
as well as all three Fairies. He wore a pointy-cloth cap for Puck, and
a paper donkey's head out of a Christmas cracker--but it tore if you
were not careful--for Bottom. Una was Titania, with a wreath of
columbines and a foxglove wand.
The Theatre lay in a meadow called the Long Slip. A little
mill-stream, carrying water to a mill two or three fields away, bent
round one corner of it, and in the middle of the bend lay a large old
Fairy Ring of darkened grass, which was the stage. The millstream
banks, overgrown with willow, hazel, and guelder-rose, made convenient
places to wait in till your turn came; and a grown-up who had seen it
said that Shakespeare himself could not have imagined a more suitable
setting for his play. They were not, of course, allowed to act on
Midsummer Night itself, but they went down after tea on Midsummer Eve,
when the shadows were growing, and they took their supper--hard-boiled
eggs, Bath Oliver biscuits, and salt in an envelope--with them. Three
Cows had been milked and were grazing steadily with a tearing noise
that one could hear all down the meadow; and the noise of the Mill at
work sounded like bare feet running on hard 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 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 millstream 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 seisin 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 seisin?' said Dan, cautiously.
'It's an old custom the people had when they bought and sold land.
They used to cut out a clod and hand it over to the buyer, and you
weren't lawfully seised of your land--it didn't really belong to
you--till the other fellow had actually given you a piece of it--'like
this.' He held out the turves.
'But it's our own meadow,' said Dan, drawing back. 'Are you going to
magic it away?'
Puck laughed. 'I know it's your meadow, but there's a great deal more
in it than you or your father ever guessed. Try!'
He turned his eyes on Una.
'I'll do it,' she said. Dan followed her example at once.
'Now are you two lawfully seised and possessed of all Old England,'
began Puck, in a sing-song voice. 'By right of Oak, Ash, and Thorn are
you free to come and go and look and know where I shall show or best
you please. You shall see What you shall see and you shall hear What
you shall hear, though It shall have happened three thousand year; and
you shall know neither Doubt nor Fear. Fast! Hold fast all I give
you.'
The children shut their eyes, but nothing happened.
'Well?' said Una, disappointedly opening them. 'I thought there would
be dragons.'
"'Though It shall have happened three thousand year,"' said Puck, and
counted on his fingers. 'No; I'm afraid there were no dragons three
thousand years ago.'
'But there hasn't happened anything at all,' said Dan. 'Wait awhile,'
said Puck. 'You don't grow an oak in a year--and Old England's older
than twenty oaks. Let's sit down again and think. I can do that for a
century at a time.'
'Ah, but you're a fairy,' said Dan.
'Have you ever heard me say that word yet?' said Puck quickly.
'No. You talk about "the People of the Hills", but you never say
"fairies",' said Una. 'I was wondering at that. Don't you like it?'
'How would you like to be called "mortal" or "human being" all the
time?' said Puck; 'or "son of Adam" or "daughter of Eve"?'
'I shouldn't like it at all,' said Dan. 'That's how the Djinns and
Afrits talk in the Arabian Nights.'
'And that's how I feel about saying--that word that I don't say.
Besides, what you call them are made-up things the People of the Hills
have never heard of--little buzzflies with butterfly wings and gauze
petticoats, and shiny stars in their hair, and a wand like a
schoolteacher's cane for punishing bad boys and rewarding good ones. I
know 'em!'
'We don't mean that sort,'said Dan. 'We hate 'em too.'
'Exactly,' said Puck. 'Can you wonder that the People of the Hills
don't care to be confused with that painty-winged, wand-waving,
sugar-and-shake-your-head set of impostors? Butterfly wings, indeed!
I've seen Sir Huon and a troop of his people setting off from Tintagel
Castle for Hy-Brasil in the teeth of a sou'-westerly gale, with the
spray flying all over the Castle, and the Horses of the Hills wild with
fright. Out they'd go in a lull, screaming like gulls, and back they'd
be driven five good miles inland before they could come head to wind
again. Butterfly-wings! It was Magic--Magic as black as Merlin could
make it, and the whole sea was green fire and white foam with singing
mermaids in it. And the Horses of the Hills picked their way from one
wave to another by the lightning flashes! That was how it was in the
old days!'
'Splendid,' said Dan, but Una shuddered.
'I'm glad they're gone, then; but what made the People of the Hills go
away?' Una asked.
'Different things. I'll tell you one of them some day--the thing that
made the biggest flit of any,' said Puck. 'But they didn't all flit at
once. They dropped off, one by one, through the centuries. Most of
them were foreigners who couldn't stand our climate. They flitted
early.'
'How early?' said Dan.
'A couple of thousand years or more. The fact is they began as Gods.
The Phoenicians brought some over when they came to buy tin; and the
Gauls, and the Jutes, and the Danes, and the Frisians, and the Angles
brought more when they landed. They were always landing in those days,
or being driven back to their ships, and they always brought their Gods
with them. England is a bad country for Gods. Now, I began as I mean
to go on. A bowl of porridge, a dish of milk, and a little quiet fun
with the country folk in the lanes was enough for me then, as it is
now. I belong here, you see, and I have been mixed up with people all
my days. But most of the others insisted on being Gods, and having
temples, and altars, and priests, and sacrifices of their own.'
'People burned in wicker baskets?' said Dan. 'Like Miss Blake tells us
about?'
'All sorts of sacrifices,' said Puck. 'If it wasn't men, it was
horses, or cattle, or pigs, or metheglin--that's a sticky, sweet sort
of beer. I never liked it. They were a stiff-necked, extravagant set
of idols, the Old Things. But what was the result? Men don't like
being sacrificed at the best of times; they don't even like sacrificing
their farm-horses. After a while, men simply left the Old Things
alone, and the roofs of their temples fell in, and the Old Things had
to scuttle out and pick up a living as they could. Some of them took
to hanging about trees, and hiding in graves and groaning o' nights.
If they groaned loud enough and long enough they might frighten a poor
countryman into sacrificing a hen, or leaving a pound of butter for
them. I remember one Goddess called Belisama. She became a common wet
water-spirit somewhere in Lancashire. And there were hundreds of other
friends of mine. First they were Gods. Then they were People of the
Hills, and then they flitted to other places because they couldn't get
on with the English for one reason or another. There was only one Old
Thing, I remember, who honestly worked for his living after he came
down in the world. He was called Weland, and he was a smith to some
Gods. I've forgotten their names, but he used to make them swords and
spears. I think he claimed kin with Thor of the Scandinavians.'
'Heroes of Asgard Thor?' said Una. She had been reading the book.
'Perhaps,' answered Puck. 'None the less, when bad times came, he
didn't beg or steal. He worked; and I was lucky enough to be able to
do him a good turn.'
'Tell us about it,' said Dan. 'I think I like hearing of Old Things.'
They rearranged themselves comfortably, each chewing a grass stem.
Puck propped himself on one strong arm and went on:
'Let's think! I met Weland first on a November afternoon in a sleet
storm, on Pevensey Level.'
'Pevensey? Over the hill, you mean?' Dan pointed south.
'Yes; but it was all marsh in those days, right up to Horsebridge and
Hydeneye. I was on Beacon Hill--they called it Brunanburgh then--when
I saw the pale flame that burning thatch makes, and I went down to
look. Some pirates--I think they must have been Peor's men--were
burning a village on the Levels, and Weland's image--a big, black
wooden thing with amber beads round his neck--lay in the bows of a
black thirty-two-oar galley that they had just beached. Bitter cold it
was! There were icicles hanging from her deck and the oars were glazed
over with ice, and there was ice on Weland's lips. When he saw me he
began a long chant in his own tongue, telling me how he was going to
rule England, and how I should smell the smoke of his altars from
Lincolnshire to the Isle of Wight. I didn't care! I'd seen too many
Gods charging into Old England to be upset about it. I let him sing
himself out while his men were burning the village, and then I said (I
don't know what put it into my head), "Smith of the Gods," I said, "the
time comes when I shall meet you plying your trade for hire by the
wayside."'
'What did Weland say?' said Una. 'Was he angry?'
'He called me names and rolled his eyes, and I went away to wake up the
people inland. But the pirates conquered the country, and for
centuries Weland was a most important God. He had temples
everywhere--from Lincolnshire to the Isle of Wight, as he said--and his
sacrifices were simply scandalous. To do him justice, he preferred
horses to men; but men or horses, I knew that presently he'd have to
come down in the world--like the other Old Things. I gave him lots of
time--I gave him about a thousand years--and at the end of 'em I went
into one of his temples near Andover to see how he prospered. There was
his altar, and there was his image, and there were his priests, and
there were the congregation, and everybody seemed quite happy, except
Weland and the priests. In the old days the congregation were unhappy
until the priests had chosen their sacrifices; and so would you have
been. When the service began a priest rushed out, dragged a man up to
the altar, pretended to hit him on the head with a little gilt axe, and
the man fell down and pretended to die. Then everybody shouted: "A
sacrifice to Weland! A sacrifice to Weland!"'
'And the man wasn't really dead?' said Una.
'Not a bit. All as much pretence as a dolls' tea-party. Then they
brought out a splendid white horse, and the priest cut some hair from
its mane and tail and burned it on the altar, shouting, "A sacrifice!"
That counted the same as if a man and a horse had been killed. I saw
poor Weland's face through the smoke, and I couldn't help laughing. He
looked so disgusted and so hungry, and all he had to satisfy himself
was a horrid smell of burning hair. Just a dolls' tea-party!
'I judged it better not to say anything then ('twouldn't have been
fair), and the next time I came to Andover, a few hundred years later,
Weland and his temple were gone, and there was a Christian bishop in a
church there. None of the People of the Hills could tell me anything
about him, and I supposed that he had left England.' Puck turned, lay
on his other elbow, and thought for a long time.
'Let's see,' he said at last. 'It must have been some few years
later--a year or two before the Conquest, I think--that I came back to
Pook's Hill here, and one evening I heard old Hobden talking about
Weland's Ford.'
'If you mean old Hobden the hedger, he's only seventy-two. He told me
so himself,' said Dan. 'He's a intimate friend of ours.'
'You're quite right,' Puck replied. 'I meant old Hobden's ninth
great-grandfather. He was a free man and burned charcoal hereabouts.
I've known the family, father and son, so long that I get confused
sometimes. Hob of the Dene was my Hobden's name, and he lived at the
Forge cottage. Of course, I pricked up my ears when I heard Weland
mentioned, and I scuttled through the woods to the Ford just beyond Bog
Wood yonder.' He jerked his head westward, where the valley narrows
between wooded hills and steep hop-fields.
'Why, that's Willingford Bridge,' said Una. 'We go there for walks
often. There's a kingfisher there.'
'It was Weland's Ford then, dearie. A road led down to it from the
Beacon on the top of the hill--a shocking bad road it was--and all the
hillside was thick, thick oak-forest, with deer in it. There was no
trace of Weland, but presently I saw a fat old farmer riding down from
the Beacon under the greenwood tree. His horse had cast a shoe in the
clay, and when he came to the Ford he dismounted, took a penny out of
his purse, laid it on a stone, tied the old horse to an oak, and called
out: "Smith, Smith, here is work for you!" Then he sat down and went to
sleep. You can imagine how I felt when I saw a white-bearded, bent old
blacksmith in a leather apron creep out from behind the oak and begin
to shoe the horse. It was Weland himself. I was so astonished that I
jumped out and said: "What on Human Earth are you doing here, Weland?"'
'Poor Weland!' sighed Una.
'He pushed the long hair back from his forehead (he didn't recognize me
at first). Then he said: "You ought to know. You foretold it, Old
Thing. I'm shoeing horses for hire. I'm not even Weland now," he
said. "They call me Wayland-Smith."'
'Poor chap!' said Dan. 'What did you say?'
'What could I say? He looked up, with the horse's foot on his lap, and
he said, smiling, "I remember the time when I wouldn't have accepted
this old bag of bones as a sacrifice, and now I'm glad enough to shoe
him for a penny."
"'Isn't there any way for you to get back to Valhalla, or wherever you
come from?" I said.
"'I'm afraid not," he said, rasping away at the hoof. He had a
wonderful touch with horses. The old beast was whinnying on his
shoulder. "You may remember that I was not a gentle God in my Day and
my Time and my Power. I shall never be released till some human being
truly wishes me well."
"'Surely," said I, "the farmer can't do less than that. You're shoeing
the horse all round for him."
"'Yes," said he, "and my nails will hold a shoe from one full moon to
the next. But farmers and Weald clay," said he, "are both uncommon
cold and sour."
'Would you believe it, that when that farmer woke and found his horse
shod he rode away without one word of thanks? I was so angry that I
wheeled his horse right round and walked him back three miles to the
Beacon, just to teach the old sinner politeness.'
'Were you invisible?' said Una. Puck nodded, gravely.
'The Beacon was always laid in those days ready to light, in case the
French landed at Pevensey; and I walked the horse about and about it
that lee-long summer night. The farmer thought he was bewitched--well,
he was, of course--and began to pray and shout. I didn't care! I was
as good a Christian as he any fair-day in the County, and about four
o'clock in the morning a young novice came along from the monastery
that used to stand on the top of Beacon Hill.'
'What's a novice?' said Dan.
'It really means a man who is beginning to be a monk, but in those days
people sent their sons to a monastery just the same as a school. This
young fellow had been to a monastery in France for a few months every
year, and he was finishing his studies in the monastery close to his
home here. Hugh was his name, and he had got up to go fishing
hereabouts. His people owned all this valley. Hugh heard the farmer
shouting, and asked him what in the world he meant. The old man spun
him a wonderful tale about fairies and goblins and witches; and I know
he hadn't seen a thing except rabbits and red deer all that night.
(The People of the Hills are like otters--they don't show except when
they choose.) But the novice wasn't a fool. He looked down at the
horse's feet, and saw the new shoes fastened as only Weland knew how to
fasten 'em. (Weland had a way of turning down the nails that folks
called the Smith's Clinch.)
"'H'm!" said the novice. "Where did you get your horse shod?"
'The farmer wouldn't tell him at first, because the priests never liked
their people to have any dealings with the Old Things. At last he
confessed that the Smith had done it. "What did you pay him?" said the
novice. "Penny," said the farmer, very sulkily. "That's less than a
Christian would have charged," said the novice. "I hope you threw a
'thank you' into the bargain." "No," said the farmer; "Wayland-Smith's
a heathen." "Heathen or no heathen," said the novice, "you took his
help, and where you get help there you must give thanks." "What?" said
the farmer--he was in a furious temper because I was walking the old
horse in circles all this time--"What, you young jackanapes?" said he.
"Then by your reasoning I ought to say 'Thank you' to Satan if he
helped me?" "Don't roll about up there splitting reasons with me,"
said the novice. "Come back to the Ford and thank the Smith, or you'll
be sorry."
'Back the farmer had to go. I led the horse, though no one saw me, and
the novice walked beside us, his gown swishing through the shiny dew
and his fishing-rod across his shoulders, spear-wise. When we reached
the Ford again--it was five o'clock and misty still under the oaks--the
farmer simply wouldn't say "Thank you." He said he'd tell the Abbot
that the novice wanted him to worship heathen Gods. Then Hugh the
novice lost his temper. He just cried, "Out!" put his arm under the
farmer's fat leg, and heaved him from his saddle on to the turf, and
before he could rise he caught him by the back of the neck and shook
him like a rat till the farmer growled, "Thank you, Wayland-Smith."'
'Did Weland see all this?' said Dan.
'Oh yes, and he shouted his old war-cry when the farmer thudded on to
the ground. He was delighted. Then the novice turned to the oak tree
and said, "Ho, Smith of the Gods! I am ashamed of this rude farmer;
but for all you have done in kindness and charity to him and to others
of our people, I thank you and wish you well." Then he picked up his
fishing-rod--it looked more like a tall spear than ever--and tramped
off down your valley.'
'And what did poor Weland do?' said Una.
'He laughed and he cried with joy, because he had been released at
last, and could go away. But he was an honest Old Thing. He had
worked for his living and he paid his debts before he left. "I shall
give that novice a gift," said Weland. "A gift that shall do him good
the wide world over and Old England after him. Blow up my fire, Old
Thing, while I get the iron for my last task." Then he made a sword--a
dark-grey, wavy-lined sword--and I blew the fire while he hammered. By
Oak, Ash and Thorn, I tell you, Weland was a Smith of the Gods! He
cooled that sword in running water twice, and the third time he cooled
it in the evening dew, and he laid it out in the moonlight and said
Runes (that's charms) over it, and he carved Runes of Prophecy on the
blade. "Old Thing," he said to me, wiping his forehead, "this is the
best blade that Weland ever made. Even the user will never know how
good it is. Come to the monastery."
'We went to the dormitory where the monks slept, we saw the novice fast
asleep in his cot, and Weland put the sword into his hand, and I
remember the young fellow gripped it in his sleep. Then Weland strode
as far as he dared into the Chapel and threw down all his
shoeing-tools--his hammers and pincers and rasps--to show that he had
done with them for ever. It sounded like suits of armour falling, and
the sleepy monks ran in, for they thought the monastery had been
attacked by the French. The novice came first of all, waving his new
sword and shouting Saxon battle-cries. When they saw the shoeing-tools
they were very bewildered, till the novice asked leave to speak, and
told what he had done to the farmer, and what he had said to
Wayland-Smith, and how, though the dormitory light was burning, he had
found the wonderful Rune-carved sword in his cot.
'The Abbot shook his head at first, and then he laughed and said to the
novice: "Son Hugh, it needed no sign from a heathen God to show me
that you will never be a monk. Take your sword, and keep your sword,
and go with your sword, and be as gentle as you are strong and
courteous. We will hang up the Smith's tools before the Altar," he
said, "because, whatever the Smith of the Gods may have been, in the
old days, we know that he worked honestly for his living and made gifts
to Mother Church." Then they went to bed again, all except the novice,
and he sat up in the garth playing with his sword. Then Weland said to
me by the stables: "Farewell, Old Thing; you had the right of it. You
saw me come to England, and you see me go. Farewell!"
'With that he strode down the hill to the corner of the Great
Woods--Woods Corner, you call it now--to the very place where he had
first landed--and I heard him moving through the thickets towards
Horsebridge for a little, and then he was gone. That was how it
happened. I saw it.'
Both children drew a long breath.
'But what happened to Hugh the novice?' said Una.
'And the sword?' said Dan.
Puck looked down the meadow that lay all quiet and cool in the shadow
of Pook's Hill. A corncrake jarred in a hay-field near by, and the
small trouts of the brook began to jump. A big white moth flew
unsteadily from the alders and flapped round the children's heads, and
the least little haze of water-mist rose from the brook. 'Do you really
want to know?' Puck said.
'We do,' cried the children. 'Awfully!'
'Very good. I promised you that you shall see What you shall see, and
you shall hear What you shall hear, though It shall have happened three
thousand year; but just now it seems to me that, unless you go back to
the house, people will be looking for you. I'll walk with you as far
as the gate.'
'Will you be here when we come again?' they asked.
'Surely, sure-ly,' said Puck. 'I've been here some time already. One
minute first, please.'
He gave them each three leaves--one of Oak, one of Ash and one of Thorn.
'Bite these,' said he. 'Otherwise you might be talking at home of what
you've seen and heard, and--if I know human beings--they'd send for the
doctor. Bite!'
They bit hard, and found themselves walking side by side to the lower
gate. Their father was leaning over it.
'And how did your play go?' he asked.
'Oh, splendidly,' said Dan. 'Only afterwards, I think, we went to
sleep. It was very hot and quiet. Don't you remember, Una?'
Una shook her head and said nothing.
'I see,' said her father.
'Late--late in the evening Kilmeny came home,
For Kilmeny had been she could not tell where,
And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare.
But why are you chewing leaves at your time of life, daughter? For
fun?'
'No. It was for something, but I can't exactly remember,' said Una.