Two children stumble into the old England still breathing beneath the modern world. In a Sussex meadow, Dan and Una chance upon Puck, the trickster fairy who has guarded these islands since before Rome came, and he introduces them to ghosts: a Roman centurion who walked Hadrian's Wall, a Saxon smith with secrets from the age of kings, the men who signed Magna Carta. Each figure rises from the past to tell his story, and each tale carries the weight of centuries. The children listen, and England becomes a living thing again. Kipling wrote this at the height of empire, but there's no jingoism here, only wonder. The prose has that unmistakable Edwardian quality, where children still believe in magic and history feels close enough to touch. The poems that frame each story work like incantations, binding past to present. This is a book for anyone who has ever stood in an old place and felt the pull of what happened there.
