"'But where the deuce are the larch-poles, Cloke? I told you to have them down here ready.'
"'We'll get 'em down if you, say so,' Cloke answered, with a thrust of the underlip they both knew.
"'But I did say so. What on earth have you brought that timber-tug here for? We aren't building a railway bridge. Why, in America, half-a-dozen two-by-four bits would be ample.'
"'I don't know nothin' about that,' said Cloke. 'An' I've nothin' to say against larch—if you want to make a temp'ry job of it. I ain't 'ere to tell you what isn't so, sir; an' you can't say I ever come creepin' up on you, or tryin' to lead you farther in than you set out——'
"A year ago George would have danced with impatience. Now he scraped a little mud off his old gaiters with his spud, and waited.
"'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 never for its lovers be too small. We would know intimately each place where the Roman trod, where Weland came and went, where Saxon and Norman lost themselves in a common league.