Ch. 1: Weland's Sword - Page 2

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 -