er--hard-boiled eggs, Bath Oliver biscuits, and salt in
an envelope--with them. Three Cows had been milked and were grazing
steadily with a tearing noise that one could hear all down the meadow; and
the noise of the mill at work sounded like bare feet running on hard
ground. A cuckoo sat on a gatepost singing his broken June tune,
'cuckoo-cuk,' while a busy kingfisher crossed from the mill-stream to the
brook which ran on the other side of the meadow. Everything else was a
sort of thick, sleepy stillness smelling of meadow-sweet and dry grass.

Their play went beautifully. Dan remembered all his parts--Puck, Bottom,
and the three Fairies--and Una never forgot a word of Titania--not even the
difficult piece where she tells the Fairies how to feed Bottom with
'apricocks, ripe 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.

[Illustration: In the very spot where Dan had stood as Puck they now
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.]

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 our 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 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