ose smiling lips curved up like military mustachios, and
wishing the lazy long hands would hurry. He saw himself stealing down
a long corridor to the door of a big room strewn with books and papers,
that through some baleful and mysterious spell could not be made to open
at all hours. When the hands pointed right, however, there was the "Open
Sesame"--his own secret knock, two fierce twin raps, with one little
lonesome one afterward--and this was unfailing. Safe inside, he saw
himself standing on a big, polar-bear-skin rug, the door tight-locked
against all comers, an expectant baby figure, with his little hand
clasped in his father's. The white rug was the magic entrance to the
Never-Never Country, known only to those two.

He could hear his own shrill treble:

"Wishing-House, Wishing-House, where are you?"

Then the deeper voice (quite unrecognizable as his father's) answering:

"Here I am, Master; here I am!"

And instantly the room vanished and they were in the Never-Never Land,
and before them reared the biggest house in the world, with a row of
white pillars across its front a mile high.

Valiant drew a deep breath. Some magic of time and place was repainting
that dead and dusty infancy in sudden delicate lights and filmy colors.
What had been but blurred under-exposures on the retina of his brain
became all at once elfin pictures, weird and specter-like as the
dissolving views of a camera obscura.

He and his father had lived alone in Wishing-House. No one else had
possessed the secret. Not his mother. Not even the more portentous
person whom he had thought must own the vast hotel in which they lived
(in such respect did she seem to be held by the servants), who wore
crackling black silk and a big bunch of keys for a sole ornament, and
who had called him her "lamb." No, in the Never-Never Land there had
been only his father and he!

Yet they were anything but lonely, for the country was inhabited by
good-natured friendly savages, as black as a lump of coal, most of them
with curly white hair. These talked a queer language, but of course his
father and he could understand them perfectly. These savages had many
curious and enthralling customs and strange cuddling songs that made one
sleepy, and all these his father knew by heart. They lived in little
square huts around Wishing-House, made of sticks, and had dozens and
dozens of children who wore no clothes and liked to dance in the sun and
eat cherries. Th