Rewards and Fairies - Penn State University

A Doctor of Medicine
They were playing hide-and-seek with bicycle lamps after tea.
Dan had hung his lamp on the apple tree at the end of the
hellebore bed in the walled garden, and was crouched by the
gooseberry bushes ready to dash off when Una should spy
him. He saw her lamp come into the garden and disappear as
she hid it under her cloak. While he listened for her footsteps,
somebody (they both thought it was Phillips the gardener)
coughed in the corner of the herb-beds.
‘All right,’ Una shouted across the asparagus; ‘we aren’t hurting
your old beds, Phippsey!’
She flashed her lantern towards the spot, and in its circle of
light they saw a Guy Fawkes-looking man in a black cloak
and a steeple-crowned hat, walking down the path beside Puck.
They ran to meet him, and the man said something to them
about rooms in their head. After a time they understood he
was warning them not to catch colds.
‘You’ve a bit of a cold yourself, haven’t you?’ said Una, for
he ended all his sentences with a consequential cough. Puck
laughed.
Rudyard Kipling
149
‘Child,’ the man answered, ‘if it hath pleased Heaven to
afflict me with an infirmity—’
‘Nay, nay,’ Puck struck In, ‘the maid spoke out of kindness.
I know that half your cough is but a catch to trick the
vulgar; and that’s a pity. There’s honesty enough in you, Nick,
without rasping and hawking.’
‘Good people’ —the man shrugged his lean shoulders—
‘the vulgar crowd love not truth unadorned. Wherefore we
philosophers must needs dress her to catch their eye or—
ahem!—their ear.’
‘And what d’you think of that?’ said Puck solemnly to Dan.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘It sounds like lessons.’
‘Ah—well! There have been worse men than Nick Culpeper
to take lessons from. Now, where can we sit that’s not indoors?’
‘In the hay-mow, next to old Middenboro,’ Dan suggested.
‘He doesn’t mind.’
‘Eh?’ Mr Culpeper was stooping over the pale hellebore
blooms by the light of Una’s lamp. ‘Does Master Middenboro
need my poor services, then?’
‘Save him, no!’ said Puck. ‘He is but a horse—next door to