nurse. How thorough she was at bath-time, and up at any moment of
the night if one of her charges made the slightest cry. Of course
her kennel was in the nursery. She had a genius for knowing when a
cough is a thing to have no patience with and when it needs stocking
round your throat. She believed to her last day in old-fashioned
remedies like rhubarb leaf, and made sounds of contempt over all
this new-fangled talk about germs, and so on. It was a lesson in
propriety to see her escorting the children to school, walking
sedately by their side when they were well behaved, and butting them
back into line if they strayed. On John's footer days she never once
forgot his sweater, and she usually carried an umbrella in her mouth
in case of rain. There is a room in the basement of Miss Fulsom's
school where the nurses wait. They sat on forms, while Nana lay on the
floor, but that was the only difference. They affected to ignore her
as of an inferior social status to themselves, and she despised
their light talk. She resented visits to the nursery from Mrs.
Darling's friends, but if they did come she first whipped off
Michael's pinafore and put him into the one with blue braiding, and
smoothed out Wendy and made a dash at John's hair.

  No nursery could possibly have been conducted more correctly, and
Mr. Darling knew it, yet he sometimes wondered uneasily whether the
neighbours talked.

  He had his position in the city to consider.

  Nana also troubled him in another way. He had sometimes a feeling
that she did not admire him. "I know she admires you tremendously,
George," Mrs. Darling would assure him, and then she would sign to the
children to be specially nice to father. Lovely dances followed, in
which the only other servant, Liza, was sometimes allowed to join.
Such a midget she looked in her long skirt and maid's cap, though
she had sworn, when engaged, that she would never see ten again. The
gaiety of those romps! And gayest of all was Mrs. Darling, who would
pirouette so wildly that all you could see of her was the kiss, and
then if you had dashed at her you might have got it. There never was a
simpler happier family until the coming of Peter Pan.

  Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her
children's minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother
after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things
straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many
articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake
(but of course you can't) you would see your own mother doing this,
and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite
like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect,
lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on
earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not
so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a
kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in
the morning, the naughtinesses and evil passions with which you went
to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your
mind, and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your
prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

  I don't know whether you have ever seen a map of a person's mind.
Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map
can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a
map of a child's mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going
round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your
temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for
the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing
splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and
rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs,
and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river
runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to
decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be
an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school,
religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings,
verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into
braces, say ninety-nine, threepence for pulling out your tooth
yourself, and so on, and either are part of the island or they are
another map showing through, it is all rather confusing, especially as
nothing will stand still.

  Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John's for instance,
had a lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was
shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with
lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the
sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn
together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had
a pet wolf forsaken by its parents. But on the whole the Neverlands
have a family resemblance, and if they stood still in a row you
could say of them that they have each other's nose, and so forth. On
these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their
coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the
surf, though we shall land no more.

  Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the suggest and most
compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances
between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play
at it by day with the chairs and tablecloth, it is not in the least
alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes
very nearly real. That is why there are night-lights.

  Occasionally in her travels through her children's minds Mrs.
Darling found things she could not understand, and of these quite
the most perplexing was the word Peter. She knew of no Peter, and
yet he was here and there in John and Michael's minds, while Wendy's
began to be scrawled all over with him. The name stood out in bolder