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