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 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 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 forever 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 wings.

Now, except by flying, no one can reach the island in the Serpentine,
for the boats of humans are forbidden to land there, and there are