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--Puck's Hill--Puck's Hill--Pook's
Hill! It's as plain as the nose on my face.'

He pointed to the bare, fern-covered slope of Pook's Hill that runs up
from the far side of the mill-stream to a dark wood. Beyond that wood
the ground rises and rises for five hundred feet, till at last you
climb out on the bare top of Beacon Hill, to look over the Pevensey
Levels and the Channel and half the naked South Downs.

'By Oak, Ash, and Thorn!' he cried, still laughing. 'If this had
happened a few hundred years ago you'd have had all the People of the
Hills out like bees in June!'

'We didn't know it was wrong,' said Dan.

'Wrong!