Rewards & Fairies. Book

Borrow trouble for yourself if that’s your nature, but don’t lend it to your neighbours.


This is another collection of stories about the children Una and Dan and their semi-adventures with Puck. Most of the stories involve Puck bringing some historical—or even prehistorical—figure to tell them about some adventure in their lives.

I don’t normally read ebooks at home—I have a large pile of books to read—so I only read ebooks when I’m out of the house. Since I haven’t been out of the house for a long time, there was a long break between “The Conversion of St. Wilfrid” and “A Doctor of Medicine”.

So it was a strange surprise to open the Books app on my iPad last Sunday and get a story about a plague in Sussex. The historical figure in this story is Nicholas Culpeper, and it’s a fascinating look at an astrologer (he calls himself a Physician-Astrologer) who, frustrated that his “science” is providing no help to the village, engages in proto-scientific inquiry to determine an effective means of combating the plague.


‘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.’


Many of the stories are about the long rise to civilization, whether it’s the aforementioned transition from astrology to science, or the primal struggle between man and nature.


It is not right that The Beast should master man.


Specifically, about England’s long rise to civilization; Kipling deliberately, like Tolkien after him, wrote to provide or expand on his fellow countrymen’s myths. I’m pretty sure only “Brother Square-Toes” even took place outside of England, mainly in Philadelphia and a little on the Channel in Boulogne.

The stories are true faerie stories in modern garb; Puck himself is, of course, a faerie, and the children travel between the real world and the faerie world without knowing it and without fully comprehending the difference.


The air trembled a little as though it could not make up its mind whether to slide into the Pit or move across the open. But it seemed easiest to go downhill, and the children felt one soft puff after another slip and sidle down the slope in fragrant breaths that baffed on their eyelids. The little whisper of the sea by the cliffs joined with the whisper of the wind over the grass, the hum of insects in the thyme, the ruffle and rustle of the flock below, and a thickish mutter deep in the very chalk beneath them.