with him and with their mother till they could say it by heart. They
began when Nick Bottom the weaver comes out of the bushes with a
donkey's head on his shoulders, and finds Titania, Queen of the Fairies,
asleep. Then they skipped to the part where Bottom asks three little
fairies to scratch his head and bring him honey, and they ended where he
falls asleep in Titania's arms. Dan was Puck and Nick Bottom, as well as
all three Fairies. He wore a pointy-eared cloth cap for Puck, and a
paper donkey's head out of a Christmas cracker--but it tore if you were
not careful--for Bottom. Una was Titania, with a wreath of columbines
and a foxglove wand.

The Theatre lay in a meadow called the Long Slip. A little mill-stream,
carrying water to a mill two or three fields away, bent round one corner
of it, and in the middle of the bend lay a large old Fairy Ring of
darkened grass, which was the stage. The millstream banks, overgrown
with willow, hazel, and guelder-rose, made convenient places to wait in
till your turn came; and a grown-up who had seen it said that
Shakespeare himself could not have imagined a more suitable 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 they took 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 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 gate-post 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.