ay so,' Cloke answered, with a thrust
of the underlip they both knew.

"'But I did say so. What on earth have you brought that timber-tug
here for? We aren't building a railway bridge. Why, in America,
half-a-dozen two-by-four bits would be ample.'

"'I don't know nothin' about that,' said Cloke. 'An' I've nothin' to
say against larch--_if_ you want to make a temp'ry job of it. I ain't
'ere to tell you what isn't so, sir; an' you can't say I ever come
creepin' up on you, or tryin' to lead you farther in than you set
out----'

"A year ago George would have danced with impatience. Now he scraped a
little mud off his old gaiters with his spud, and waited.

"'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.

From this England, fluttered with memories and the most an