One of the first things Peter did next day was to measure Wendy and John and Michael for hollow trees, doorways to the home under the ground. Unless your tree fitted you perfectly it was difficult to go up and down, and no two of the boys (even the twins) were quite the same size. Once you fitted, you breathed out your breath at the top, and down you slid, while to ascend you drew in and let out alternately, and so wriggled up. Of course, when you have mastered the action you are able to do these things without thinking of them, and nothing can be more simple.

But one simply must fit, and Peter measures you for your tree as carefully as for a suit of fine clothes: the only difference being that clothes are usually made to fit you, while you have to be made to fit a tree. Usually it is done quite simply, by wearing more or less garments, but if you are bumpy in awkward places or the only available tree is an odd shape, Peter does some things to you, and after that you fit. Once you fit, great care must be taken to go on fitting, and this, as Wendy was to discover, keeps everyone in perfect condition.

Wendy and Michael fitted their trees at the first try, but John had to be altered a little with borrowed fairy enchantments. He was rather brave about it, and indeed enjoyed the extra inch or two of height that stretched him a little about the legs. Wendy secretly wished she had not fit so well, as having one’s younger brother suddenly an inch closer to one’s own height was not fair at all.

While this was happening, Nibs and Curly found the body of the pirate Skylights lying where Hook had slain him for a careless brush against his lace. Flies had found him with the dawn, and crawled in glistening patterns across his face and into his mouth. Of course, all the children then had to look, and prod with sticks, or pretend that they had made the blow themselves, and pranced about with make-believe swords and hooks.

Peter was the grandest, and they fell silent in awe as he dived and dodged about the pirate with his knife; luckily for Skylights he was already dead, for fighting Peter would have been as difficult as swatting an angry wasp out of the air. Eventually he tired of the game, and ordered them to leave the body for the bears. Then he dragged the Darling children back to practice moving up and down their trees and into the home under the ground.

After a few days’ practice they could go up and down as gaily as buckets in a well. The lost boys’ home consisted of one large room, as all houses should do, with a floor in which you could dig for bait if you wanted to go fishing. Out of the floor grew stout mushrooms, which they used as stools. A Never tree tried hard to grow in the centre of the room, but every morning they sawed the trunk through, level with the floor. By teatime it was always about two feet high, and then they put a door on top of it, the whole thus becoming a table; as soon as they had cleared away, they sawed off the trunk again, making both firewood and space to play. There was an enormous fireplace which was in almost any part of the room where you cared to light it, and across this Wendy stretched strings, made of fibre, from which they suspended fish to smoke and preserve. The bed was tilted against the wall by day, and let down at night, when it filled nearly half the room; all the boys slept in it, lying like sardines in a tin. There was a strict rule against turning round until one gave the signal, when all turned at once. Michael should have shared the bed also, but he was the littlest; no one wished to squash in one inch further, and the short and long of it is that he was hung up in a basket. Wendy slept in a hammock suspended from the ceiling, and would press one hand against the wall to rock herself to sleep, as though in a ship upon the ocean.

It was a rough and simple dwelling, and not unlike what baby bears would have made of an underground house, if little ursines were capable of lighting fires. But there was one recess in the wall, no larger than a birdcage, which was the private apartment of Tinker Bell. It could be shut off from the rest of the house by a tiny curtain, which Tink, who was most private, always kept drawn. No one could have had a more exquisite boudoir and bed-chamber combined, for she was very vain, and had taken care to purchase, borrow or steal the very finest in fairy craftsmanship. There was a miniature chandelier of dewdrops hanging from the ceiling for the look of the thing, but of course she lit the residence herself. Tink was very contemptuous of the rest of the home under the ground, as indeed was perhaps inevitable, but her chamber, though beautiful, looked rather conceited, and more than a little out of place.

You never exactly knew whether there would be a real meal or just a make-believe, it all depended upon Peter’s whim: he could eat, really eat, if it was part of a game, but he could not stuff himself just to feel stodgy, which is what most children like better than anything else; the next best thing being to talk about it. Make-believe was so real to him that during a meal of it one could see him getting rounder. Of course it was trying, but the children simply had to follow his lead, and if they could prove to him that they were getting loose for their trees he let them feast like gluttons.

Wendy made it her business to obtain some leggings and a shirt of soft suede in trade from the Haida, and had soon added to this a vest of shadowy rabbits fur and boots of the same. Aside of her delightfully messy hair and girlish voice, it was often impossible to tell her from the boys with whom she played.

Tootles, after their initially disastrous introduction, was her staunch ally in all things, even those which might displease Peter, such as sneaking away from his games to hunt deer through the twisting forest. They rarely caught one, for the fun was all in the chase, and the stag would pause for them with twinkling eyes at the end of some particularly long pursuit, before leaping nimbly into a brook and swimming away, their arrows skating uselessly off the water around it, while he laid his horns back in the water and flared his nostrils in laughter. As time wore on, did Wendy think much about the beloved parents she had left behind her? This is a difficult question, because it is quite impossible to say how time works in Neverland, where it is calculated by moons and suns, and there are ever so many more of them than in the adult world, while at the same time, nothing ever changes. But I am afraid that Wendy did not really worry about her father and mother; she was absolutely content in Neverland, where there were no rules other than those that Peter made, and which must be obeyed (most of the time) for fear of banishment. John only remembered his parents vaguely, as people he had once known, which disturbed him at times, while Michael was quite willing to believe that he really had no mother. He was rather convinced that he had been born from an apple tree, and had hatched, as it were, from the red-streaked fruit.

Sometimes they would play at remembering everyday questions – which was taller, Mother or Father? What was the colour of Mother’s eyes? Describe the Kennel and its Inmate. The other boys thought this awfully interesting, and insisted on joining. Peter did not compete in this game, for he despised all parental figures. He was above all that sort of thing.

By the way, the questions were all asked in the past tense. What was the colour of Mother’s eyes, and so on. Everyone, you see, had been forgetting.

Adventures, of course, as we shall see, were of daily occurrence; but about this time Peter invented, with John’s help, a new game that fascinated him enormously, until he suddenly had no more interest in it. This tended to happen to all of his games, once the initial passionate interest waned. It consisted of pretending to be a normal child, and not having adventures at all. Rather, Peter was vastly entertained in doing the sort of thing John and Michael had been doing all their lives, sitting on stools flinging balls in the air, pushing each other, going out for walks – actual walks, without any flying – and coming back without having killed so much as a grizzly. To see Peter doing nothing on a stool was a great sight; he could not help looking solemn at such times, for sitting still seemed such a comic thing for him to do. He boasted that he had gone walking for the good of his health, sounding, in his pomposity, disturbingly like Mr. Darling. For several days these were the most novel of all his adventures; and Wendy and the lost boys had to pretend to be delighted in them also. Otherwise, Peter would have treated them severely.

He often went out to roam alone, eschewing the company of his troop, and when he came back one could never be absolutely certain whether he had had an adventure or not. He might have forgotten it so completely that he said nothing about it; and then when you went out the next day, you found a body; and then again, he might say a great deal about his exploits, and yet you could not find so much as a broken twig. Sometimes he came home with his head bandaged, and then Wendy, as resident surgeon, bathed it in lukewarm water and inspected the wound for dirt, while he told a dazzling tale. But she was never quite sure how much to believe. There were, however, many adventures which she knew to be true because she was in them herself, and there were still more that were at least partly true, for the other boys were in them and said they were entirely accurate.

To describe all their adventures would require a book as large as an English-Latin, Latin-English Dictionary, and the most we can do is to give a few as specimens of an average week on the island. The difficulty is which to choose. Should we take the brush with the Haida at Slightly Gulch? It was a sanguinary affair, and especially interesting as showing one of Peter’s peculiarities, which was that in the middle of a fight he would suddenly change sides. At the Gulch, when victory was still in the balance, sometimes leaning this way and sometimes that, he stopped and called out, “I’m Indian to-day; what are you, Tootles?” And Tootles answered, “Haida; what are you, Nibs?” and Nibs said, “Haida; what are you Twin?” and so on; and it was decided that they were all going to be the Haida, instead; of course this would have ended the fight had not the real Haida, bewildered by Peter’s madness, yet obedient to it, shrugged and agreed to be lost boys for that once, so that they all went at it again, more fiercely than ever.

The extraordinary upshot of this adventure was—but we have not decided yet that this is the adventure we are to narrate. Perhaps a better one would be the night attack by the Haida on the house under the ground, when several of them stuck in the hollow trees and had to be pulled out like corks, while the children waved lighted torches under their toes, singing the mukluks severely, and filling the room with the smell of burnt hair. When this happened, Wendy slipped outside, holding her breath, and climbed to the top of the tree until daybreak lured the stench away, and the Haida returned to their longhouses. Scar Faced Woman watched her from the ground unblinkingly, an arrow fitted to her bow in case the girl should make a threatening motion, until Wendy felt quite dizzy with the suspense and almost jumped down onto her from her high perch. No word passed between them, but Wendy felt a queer sort of connection to the woman forever after. Or we might tell how Wendy and Peter saved Scar Faced Woman’s life in the Mermaids’ Lagoon, and so made her their ally.

But to begin this tale, we need to... Oh, there are so many things to tell! So let us start with a shorter adventure, and quite as exciting as the rest. Let us start with Tinker Bell’s attempt, with the help of some street fairies, to have the sleeping Wendy floated out to sea and away into limbo. It will have to wait a moment, for we must check upon Professor Basil Rathbone’s safety, but I assure you it is worth the wait.