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 Cæsar 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-eared 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-cuk', 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 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.