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.
Their play went beautifully. Dan remembered all his parts—Puck, Bottom, and the three Fairies—and Una never forgot a word of Titania—not even the difficult piece where she tells the Fairies how to feed Bottom with 'apricocks, green figs, and dewberries', and all the lines end in 'ies'. They were both so pleased that they acted it three times over from beginning to end before they sat down in the unthistly centre of the Ring to eat eggs and Bath Olivers. This was when they heard a whistle among the alders on the bank, and they jumped.
The bushes parted. In the very spot where Dan had stood as Puck they saw a small, brown,
