Two children acting A Midsummer Night's Dream in a Sussex meadow raise Puck himself, who brings them men out of England's past - a Norman knight, a centurion on the Wall, a Jewish moneylender who had a hand in Magna Carta. Kipling wrote it in the house and on the ground he had bought at Burwash, and each story is fixed to a field he could see. The poems between the tales include "A Smuggler's Song" and "Cities and Thrones and Powers". Thirty-eight plates of English landscape and sea painting, from Constable to Clausen, set the fields, lanes and shore of Kipling's Sussex beside the tales.