e are the germ in the blood!
We are the thorn in the foot!

Mistletoe killing an oak--
Rats gnawing cables in two--
Moths making holes in a cloak--
How they must love what they do!
Yes--and we Little Folk too,
We are as busy as they--
Working our works out of view--
Watch, and you'll see it some day!

No indeed! We are not strong,
But we know Peoples that are.
Yes, and we'll guide them along,
To smash and destroy you in War!
We shall be slaves just the same?
Yes, we have always been slaves,
But you--you will die of the shame,
And then we shall dance on your graves!

We are the Little Folk, we, etc.

HAL O' THE DRAFT

Prophets have honour all over the Earth,
Except in the village where they were born,
Where such as knew them boys from birth
Nature-ally hold 'em in scorn.

When Prophets are naughty and young and vain,
They make a won'erful grievance of it;
(You can see by their writings how they complain),
But Oh, 'tis won'erful good for the Prophet!

There's nothing Nineveh Town can give
(Nor being swallowed by whales between),
Makes up for the place where a man's folk live,
That don't care nothing what he has been.
He might ha' been that, or he might ha' been this,
But they love and they hate him for what he is.

A rainy afternoon drove Dan and Una over to play pirates in the Little
Mill. If you don't mind rats on the rafters and oats in your shoes, the
mill-attic, with its trap-doors and inscriptions on beams about floods
and sweethearts, is a splendid place. It is lighted by a foot-square
window, called Duck Window, that looks across to Little Lindens Farm,
and the spot where Jack Cade was killed.

When they had climbed the attic ladder (they called it 'the mainmast
tree', out of the ballad of Sir Andrew Barton, and Dan 'swarved it with
might and main', as the ballad says) they saw a man sitting on Duck
Window-sill. He was dressed in a plum-coloured doublet and tight
plum-coloured hose, and he drew busily in a red-edged book.

'Sit ye! Sit ye!' Puck cried from a rafter overhead. 'See what it is to
be beautiful! Sir Harry Dawe--pardon, Hal--says I am the very image of a
head for a gargoyle.'

The man laughed and raised his dark velvet cap to the children, and his
grizzled hair bristled out in a stormy fringe. He was old--forty at
least--but his eyes were young, with funny little wrinkles all round
them. A satchel of embroidered leather hung from his bro