Produced by Malcolm Farmer Transcriber's note: This text was based on the 1996 plain ASCII text created by Jo Churcher, Scarborough, Ontario (jchurche@io.org), then proofread against a 1911 reprint of a 1906 edition (Macmillan & Co. Ltd., London). The illustrations by H.R. Millar have been omitted from this text-only version. --------------------------------------------------------------------- PUCK OF POOK'S HILL by RUDYARD KIPLING CONTENTS Weland's Sword Young Men at the Manor The Knights of the Joyous Venture Old Men at Pevensey A Centurion of the Thirtieth On the Great Wall The Winged Hats Hal o' the Draft 'Dymchurch Flit' The Treasure and the Law 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-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.