as everybody knows, what seems a warm night to a bird
is a cold night to a boy in a nightgown. Peter also felt strangely
uncomfortable, as if his head was stuffy, he heard loud noises that made
him look round sharply, though they were really himself sneezing. There
was something he wanted very much, but, though he knew he wanted it, he
could not think what it was. What he wanted so much was his mother to
blow his nose, but that never struck him, so he decided to appeal to the
fairies for enlightenment. They 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.

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 away 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 rubadub 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 jog 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 that had not troubled him
at the time, he saw its meaning now. Every living thing was shunning
him. Poor