PUCK OF POOK'S HILL

CONTENTS

Weland's Sword
Puck's Song
A Tree Song

Young Men at the Manor
Sir Richard's Song

The Knights of the Joyous Venture
Harp Song of the Dane Women
Thorkild's Song

Old Men at Pevensey
The Runes on Weland's Sword

A Centurion of the Thirtieth
'Cities and Thrones and Powers'
A British-Roman Song

On the Great Wall
A Song to Mithras

The Winged Hats
A Pict Song

Hal o' the Draft
'Prophets have honour all over the Earth'
A Smugglers' Song

'Dymchurch Flit'
The Bee Boy's Song
A Three-Part Song

The Treasure and the Law
Song of the Fifth River
The Children's Song

WELAND'S SWORD

Puck's Song

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.

PUCK OF POOK'S HILL