"'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 blessèd 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