Peter Pan & Other Magical Adventures For Children - 10 Classic Fantasy Books in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). J. M. Barrie

what would happen if they were caught, and are even a little undecided about which is the better life, is obvious to every student of them. Thus, if you leave your empty perambulator under the trees and watch from a distance, you will see the birds boarding it and hopping about from pillow to blanket in a twitter of excitement; they are trying to find out how babyhood would suit them.

      Quite the prettiest sight in the Gardens is when the babies stray from the tree where the nurse is sitting and are seen feeding the birds, not a grownup near them. It is first a bit to me and then a bit to you, and all the time such a jabbering and laughing from both sides of the railing. They are comparing notes and inquiring for old friends, and so on; but what they say I cannot determine, for when I approach they all fly away.

      The first time I ever saw David was on the sward behind the Baby’s Walk. He was a missel-thrush, attracted thither that hot day by a hose which lay on the ground sending forth a gay trickle of water, and David was on his back in the water, kicking up his legs. He used to enjoy being told of this, having forgotten all about it, and gradually it all came back to him, with a number of other incidents that had escaped my memory, though I remember that he was eventually caught by the leg with a long string and a cunning arrangement of twigs near the Round Pond. He never tires of this story, but I notice that it is now he who tells it to me rather than I to him, and when we come to the string he rubs his little leg as if it still smarted.

      So when David saw his chance of being a missel-thrush again he called out to me quickly: “Don’t drop the letter!” and there were tree-tops in his eyes.

      “Think of your mother,” I said severely.

      He said he would often fly in to see her. The first thing he would do would be to hug her. No, he would alight on the water-jug first, and have a drink.

      “Tell her, father,” he said with horrid heartlessness, “always to have plenty of water in it, ‘cos if I had to lean down too far I might fall in and be drownded.”

      “Am I not to drop the letter, David? Think of your poor mother without her boy!”

      It affected him, but he bore up. When she was asleep, he said, he would hop on to the frilly things of her night-gown and peck at her mouth.

      “And then she would wake up, David, and find that she had only a bird instead of a boy.”

      This shock to Mary was more than he could endure. “You can drop it,” he said with a sigh. So I dropped the letter, as I think I have already mentioned; and that is how it all began.