O that was a Legion 's camping-place , When Cæsar sailed from Gaul ! And see you marks that show and fade , Like shadows on the Downs ? O they are the lines the Flint Men made , To guard their wondrous towns ! Trackway and Camp and City lost , Salt Marsh where now is corn ; Old Wars , old Peace , old Arts that cease , And so was England born ! She is not any common Earth , Water or Wood or Air , But Merlin 's Isle of Gramarye , Where you and I will fare . The children were at the Theatre , acting to Three Cows as much as they could remember of Midsummer Night 's Dream . Their father had made them a small play out of the big Shakespeare one , and they had rehearsed it with him and with their mother till they could say it by heart . They began when Nick Bottom the weaver comes out of the bushes with a donkey 's head on his shoulders , and finds Titania , Queen of the Fairies , asleep . Then they skipped to the part where Bottom asks three little fairies to scratch his head and bring him honey , and they ended where he falls asleep in Titania 's arms . Dan was Puck and Nick Bottom , as well as all three Fairies . He wore a pointy-eared cloth cap for Puck , and a paper donkey 's head out of a Christmas cracker -- but it tore if you were not careful -- for Bottom . Una was Titania , with a wreath of columbines and a foxglove wand . The Theatre lay in a meadow called the Long Slip . A little mill-stream , carrying water to a mill two or three fields away , bent round one corner of it , and in the middle of the bend lay a large old Fairy Ring of darkened grass , which was the stage . The millstream banks , overgrown with willow , hazel , and guelder-rose , made convenient places to wait in till your turn came ; and a grown-up who had seen it said that Shakespeare himself could not have imagined a more suitable setting for his play . They were not , of course , allowed to act on Midsummer Night itself , but they went down after tea on Midsummer Eve , when the shadows were growing , and they took their supper -- hard-boiled eggs , Bath Oliver biscuits , and salt in an envelope -- with them . Three Cows had been milked and were grazing steadily with a tearing noise that one could hear all down the meadow ; and the noise of the Mill at work sounded like bare feet running on hard ground . A cuckoo sat on a gate-post singing his broken June tune , ` cuckoo-cuk ' , while a busy kingfisher crossed from the mill-stream , to the brook which ran on the other side of the meadow . Everything else was a sort of thick , sleepy stillness smelling of meadow-sweet and dry grass . Their play went beautifully .
Dan remembered all his parts -- Puck , Bottom , and the three Fairies -- and Una never forgot a word of XXXXX -- not even the difficult piece where she tells the Fairies how to feed Bottom with ` apricocks , green figs , and dewberries ' , and all the lines end in ` ies ' .
Bottom Cows Dan Earth Night Queen Titania foxglove guelder-rose kingfisher