Puck of Pook's Hill

by Rudyard Kipling

All people can be wise by reading of books.' 'But are the books true?' Sir Richard frowned. 'I like not all this reading and writing.'

'Is the tale meet for children, think you?' He looked at Puck; but 'Tell us! Tell us!' cried Dan and Una together.

'Have patience. Link by link is chain-mail made. I will tell all in its place.

he should have bidden the Barons give up their lands and lordships in Normandy if they would be English lords. Now they are all but princes both in England and Normandy—trencher-fed hounds, with a foot in one trough and both eyes on the other!

"Pest on him!" said De Aquila. "I have more to do than to shiver in the Great Hall for every gadling the King sends.

he said that if an old dog could not learn new tricks it was time to sweep out the kennel."

statelily.

'Thou knowest that evil man's true name,' he replied, 'but I have chosen to call him Fulke because I promised him I would not tell the story of his wickedness so that any man might guess it. I have changed all the names in my tale. His children's children may be still alive.' 'True—true,' said Puck, smiling softly. 'It is knightly to keep faith—even after a thousand years.'

carried those new-fashioned beads for counting of prayers. They were large brown nuts or seeds, and hanging from his girdle with his pen and inkhorn they clashed when he walked.

"Let him never know thou canst tell one letter from its fellow,

'It isn't what you say so much. It's what you mean when you say it.

'"He hath done this day by day before our very face?" said De Aquila. '"Nay, hour by hour,"

"What avail is honour or a sword against a pen?

Give me a horse!" '"Give thee a toy and a rattle,"

Dead men make dumb witnesses.

The King will not wake up a hornets' nest in the South till he has smoked out the bees in the North.

'"We wait," said De Aquila. "I am old, but still I find that the most grievous work I know."

He was cased all in that newfangled armour which we call lizard-mail. Not rings like my hauberk here'—Sir Richard tapped his chest—but little pieces of dagger-proof steel overlapping on stout leather.

Fulke had no name for mercy to his men. Plunder he gave them, but pity, none.

the hall rushes in his hair, all slubbered with sleep. "My father! My father! I dreamed of treachery," he cried, and babbled thickly.

Only lack of this yellow stuff has made me so unlucky in my dealings."

The Sou'-West wind (there is always a wind by Volaterrae) blew from the bare ridge where Cherry Clack Windmill stands.

'A sling on a forked stick. I understand!' he cried, and pulled at the elastic. 'But what wonderful beast yields this stretching leather?' 'It's laccy—elastic. You put the bullet into that loop, and then you pull hard.' The man pulled, and hit himself square on his thumb-nail.

he imitated the cry of the cock-pheasant so perfectly that a bird answered out of the wood.

Gods be good to her! A dear, fat, brown thing with a tongue like a cowbell. She was a free woman. By the way, are you free, maiden?' 'Oh, quite,' said Una. 'At least, till tea-time; and in summer our governess doesn't say much if we're late.'

'Dan said the plural of "dominus" was "dominoes", and when Miss Blake said it wasn't he said he supposed it was "backgammon", and so he had to write it out twice—for cheek, you know.'

Hadrian's Wall. I'll tell you about it later. It was built long ago, across North Britain, to keep out the Painted People—Picts, you call them.

'Pevensey isn't young—even compared to me!'

'A man never forgets his first march.

'Cur mundus militat sub vana gloria Cujus prosperitas est transitoria? Tam cito labitur ejus potentia Quam vasa figuli quæ sunt fragilia.'

'Quo Cæsar abiit celsus imperio? Vel Dives splendidus totus in prandio? Dic ubi Tullius——'

Where've you been?' 'In Volaterrae—waiting for you.' 'Sorry,' said Dan. 'It was all that beastly Latin.'

And I've lost Britain, and I've lost Gaul,' (the voice seemed very cheerful about it),

It's one of the tunes that are always being born somewhere in the Empire. They run like a pestilence for six months or a year, till another one pleases the Legions, and then they march to that.'

'Fetch it? Where from?' said Una. 'From that newly invented water-mill below the Forge.' 'That's Forge Mill—our Mill!' Una looked at Puck. 'Yes; yours,' Puck put in. 'How old did you think it was?'

Parnesius held up his broad shield with its three X's like letters on a beer-cask.

'"Oh, you'll soon outgrow that sort of nonsense," he answered. "But don't let me interfere with your hopes.

Remember this: among the officers was scarcely one, except myself (and I thought I had lost the favour of Maximus, my General), scarcely one who had not done something of wrong or folly. Either he had killed a man, or taken money, or insulted the magistrates, or blasphemed the Gods, and so had been sent to the Wall as a hiding-place from shame or fear.

the Wall was manned by every breed and race in the Empire. No two towers spoke the same tongue, or worshipped the same Gods.

there is no gift like friendship.

if you try to make yourself a decent chap when you're young, you'll make rather decent friends when you grow up. If you're a beast, you'll have beastly friends.

'Going out hunting in the Pict country with a tame Pict. You are quite safe so long as you are his guest, and wear a sprig of heather where it can be seen. If you went alone you would surely be killed, if you were not smothered first in the bogs. Only the Picts know their way about those black and hidden bogs.

those great red deer with horns like Jewish candlesticks.

'a boy is safe from all things that really harm when he is astride a pony or after a deer.

"When you are Captain of the Wall, my child, you won't be able to do this any more!" 'I might as well have been made Prefect of Lower Gaul,

We're finished men—thumbs down against both of us. Only men without hope would risk their necks on your ponies."

'Just then (you know how near the brutes creep when one is eating?) a great dog-wolf jumped out behind us, and away our rested hounds tore after him,

'"I do not like lies on an empty stomach,"

He pointed to a smoke far off on a hill-top, ascending in what we call the Picts' Call:—Puff—double-puff: double-puff—puff! They make it by raising and dropping a wet hide on a fire.

"What is a handful of crushed oats to a Roman?" he said. Then he laughed his laugh that was not a laugh. "What would you do if you were a handful of oats being crushed between the upper and lower stones of a mill?"