Rewards and Fairies - Penn State University

‘Think it over as you stand
For I tell you without fail,
If you haven’t got into Fairyland
You’re not in Lewes Gaol.’
All night long they thought of it,
And, come the dawn, they saw
They’d tumbled into a great old pit,
At the bottom of Minepit Shaw.
And the keepers’ hound had followed ‘em close
And broke her neck in the fall;
So they picked up their knives and their cross-bows
And buried the dog. That’s all.
But whether the man was a poacher too
Or a Pharisee so bold—
I reckon there’s more things told than are true,
And more things true than are told.
Rudyard Kipling
181
The Tree of Justice
IT WAS A WARM, dark winter day with the Sou’-West wind
singing through Dallington Forest, and the woods below the
Beacon. The children set out after dinner to find old Hobden,
who had a three months’ job in the Rough at the back of
Pound’s Wood. He had promised to get them a dormouse in
its nest. The bright leaf Still clung to the beech coppice; the
long chestnut leaves lay orange on the ground, and the rides
were speckled with scarlet-lipped sprouting acorns. They
worked their way by their own short cuts to the edge of
Pound’s Wood, and heard a horse’s feet just as they came to
the beech where Ridley the keeper hangs up the vermin. The
poor little fluffy bodies dangled from the branches—some
perfectly good, but most of them dried to twisted strips.
‘Three more owls,’ said Dan, counting. ‘Two stoats, four
jays, and a kestrel. That’s ten since last week. Ridley’s a beast.’
‘In my time this sort of tree bore heavier fruit.’ Sir Richard
Dalyngridge reined up his grey horse, Swallow, in the ride
behind them. [This is the Norman knight they met the year
before in Puck of Pook’s Hill. See ‘Young Men at the Manor,’