are
reputed to know a good deal.

There were two of them strolling along the Baby Walk, with their arms
round each other's waists, and he hopped down to address them. The
fairies have their tiffs with the birds, but they usually give a civil
answer to a civil question, and he was quite angry when these two ran
away the moment they saw him. Another was lolling on a garden chair,
reading a postage-stamp which some human had let fall, and when he
heard Peter's voice he popped in alarm behind a tulip.

[Illustration: _When he heard Peter's voice he popped in alarm behind a
tulip._]

To Peter's bewilderment he discovered that every fairy he met fled from
him. A band of workmen, who were sawing down a toadstool, rushed away,
leaving their tools behind them. A milkmaid turned her pail upside
down and hid in it. Soon the Gardens were in an uproar. Crowds of
fairies were running this way and that, asking each other stoutly who
was afraid; lights were extinguished, doors barricaded, and from the
grounds of Queen Mab's palace came the rub-a-dub of drums, showing that
the royal guard had been called out. A regiment of Lancers came
charging down the Broad Walk, armed with holly-leaves, with which they
jag the enemy horribly in passing. Peter heard the little people
crying everywhere that there was a human in the Gardens after Lock-out
Time, but he never thought for a moment that he was the human. He was
feeling stuffier and stuffier, and more and more wistful to learn what
he wanted done to his nose, but he pursued them with the vital question
in vain; the timid creatures ran from him, and even the Lancers, when
he approached them up the Hump, turned swiftly into a side-walk, on the
pretence that they saw him there.

Despairing of the fairies, he resolved to consult the birds, but now he
remembered, as an odd thing, that all the birds on the weeping-beech
had flown away when he alighted on it, and though this had not troubled
him at the time, he saw its meaning now. Every living thing was
shunning him. Poor little Peter Pan! he sat down and cried, and even
then he did not know that, for a bird, he was sitting on his wrong
part. It is a blessing that he did not know, for otherwise he would
have lost faith in his power to fly, and the moment you doubt whether
you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it. The reason birds
can fly and we can't is simply that they have perfect faith, for to
have faith is to have