"'All I say is that you can put up larch and make a temp'ry job of it; and by the time the young master's married it'll have to be done again. Now, I've brought down a couple of as sweet six-by-eight oak timbers as we've ever drawed. You put 'em in an' it's off your mind for good an' all. T'other way--I don't say it ain't right, I'm only just sayin' what I think--but t'other way, he'll no sooner be married than we'll 'ave it _all_ to do again. You've no call to regard my words, but you can't get out of _that_.' "'No,' said George, after a pause; 'I've been realising that for some time. Make it oak then; we can't get out of it.'" This story is the real beginning of Puck--to whom Mr Kipling's latest volumes are addressed. In _Puck of Pook's Hill_ Mr Kipling takes seisin of England in all times--more particularly of that trodden nook of England about Pevensey. This book is less a book of children and fairies than an English chronicle. Dan and Una are the least living of Mr Kipling's children--they are as shadowy as the little ghost who dropped a kiss upon the palm of the visitor in the mansion of _They_. The men, too, who come and go, are shadows. It is the land which abides and is real. We hum continually a variation of Shakespeare's song: "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England." _Puck of Pook's Hill_ is a final answer to those who think of the Imperial idea as loose and vast, without roots in any dear, particular soil. _Puck of Pool's Hill_ suggests in every page that England could never for its lovers be too small. We would know intimately each place where the Roman trod, where Weland came and went, where Saxon and Norman lost themselves in a common league.