Rudyard Kipling

Puck of Pook's Hill Rudyard Kipling

The Theatre lay in a meadow called the Long Slip. A little mill-stream, carrying water to amill two or three fields away, bent round one corner of it, and in the middle of the bend lay alarge old Fairy Ring of darkened grass, which was the stage. The millstream banks, overgrownwith willow, hazel, and guelder-rose, made convenient places to wait in till your turn came; anda grown-up who had seen it said that Shakespeare himself could not have imagined a moresuitable setting for his play. They were not, of course, allowed to act on Midsummer Night itself, but they went down after tea on Midsummer Eve, when the shadows were growing, and theytook their supper-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 hearall down the meadow; and the noise of the Mill at work sounded like bare feet running on hardground. A cuckoo sat on a gate-post singing his broken June tune, 'cuckoo-cuck', while a busykingfisher 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