1910 fantasy for children. The next summer, Dan and Una meet Puck
again.
It's the recipe as before… but not quite. Once more the children
are out doing something when they meet a stranger, and Puck, and the
stranger tells his story; once more Puck distracts them and muddles
their memories at the end, and I won't have that rant again except to
say that there's really no progress greater than the individual
stories. (I believe these stories were first published in this volume,
whereas the stories in Puck of Pook's Hill first came out in the
Strand Magazine.)
But Rewards is happy to indulge itself in forays to the blatantly
ahistorical; we have René Laennec inventing the stethoscope while a
prisoner of war in Sussex, a Neolithic shepherd buying his tribe's
first metal knife with his eye, Nicholas Culpeper fighting the plague
in the local village with astrology and visions, and of course Francis
Drake who was a Sussex man really.
While Kipling is of course still happy to show who is Good and who is
not (and never mind Kipling specifically, this was simply expected of
stories for children at the time), he shows it rather than saying it
explicitly, and he's not as doctrinaire about it as in Puck; his
Gloriana, in particular, is quite ambiguous. Una is clearly unhappy
with her exploitative use of her would-be courtiers. and nobody tells
Una she's wrong.
As with Puck, very fine.
Freely available from Project
Gutenberg.