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 sho
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