It is empty.

There is a sink with paper towels just outside the door, but then you might bump into one of your colleagues with your pants dropped.

You don't really want to put them on and risk soiling your underwear to grab a few towels.

Should you take the risk of exposing yourself?

Also, the thicker paper towels might clog the toilet so you would need to flush a lot.

"There should be a warning about this", you think, "a remaining paper indication of some sort".

This is how you start your career as an entrepreneur.

Solve everyday problems for everyday people.

"What if I took a camera that continually monitors the toilet paper roll and checks if there is paper? If it detects white there is at least some. If beige the cone is empty."

Or should you use a sensor that knows the right distance from the core, and set a threshold for when it becomes dangerously low? A weight scale?

You start sketching out circuits and ordering components online.

Watch some movies about electronics on Youtube and read a few blog posts.

You need an LED that can switch colors from green to red.

Green when there is paper, red when it is running low.

Or won't that work for people with color blindness?

Maybe it should blink when it is running low instead?

"If I do this by night and get a prototype up and running, I might get my employer to install one and test it."

Should it have an app?

It could notify the janitor when it needs a refill.

Or there could be a screen outside the bathroom saying Toilet paper in stall 3 is almost empty.

"The possibilities are endless", you think. "Scaling this thing will be easy".

If you talk to Stian at Tingstad you can have him ship a batch of fresh rolls once it knows you are running low on your last order.

You tell your spouse. And a few friends.

"Cool", they say, but they're not as excited as you are.

"Can't people just look before they sit down?" asks a few of the naysayers.

"Or put up a sign that reminds people to check?"

To be continued..

Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit.

Celui-ci voudrait souffrir en face du poêle, et celui-là croit qu'il guérirait à côté de la fenêtre.

Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme.

"Dis-moi, mon âme, pauvre âme refroidie, que penserais-tu d'habiter Lisbonne? Il doit y faire chaud, et tu t'y ragaillardirais comme un lézard. Cette ville est au bord de l'eau; on dit qu'elle est bâtie en marbre, et que le peuple y a une telle haine du végétal, qu'il arrache tous les arbres. Voilà un paysage selon ton goût; un paysage fait avec la lumière et le minéral, et le liquide pour les réfléchir!"

Mon âme ne répond pas.

"Puisque tu aimes tant le repos, avec le spectacle du mouvement, veux-tu venir habiter la Hollande, cette terre béatifiante? Peut-être te divertiras-tu dans cette contrée dont tu as souvent admiré l'image dans les musées. Que penserais-tu de Rotterdam, toi qui aimes les forêts de mâts, et les navires amarrés au pied des maisons?"

Mon âme reste muette.

"Batavia te sourirait peut-être davantage? Nous y trouverions d'ailleurs l'esprit de l'Europe marié à la beauté tropicale."

Pas un mot. - Mon âme serait-elle morte?

"En es-tu donc venue à ce point d'engourdissement que tu ne te plaises que dans ton mal? S'il en est ainsi, fuyons vers les pays qui sont les analogies de la Mort.

- Je tiens notre affaire, pauvre âme! Nous ferons nos malles pour Tornéo. Allons plus loin encore, à l'extrême bout de la Baltique; encore plus loin de la vie, si c'est possible; installons-nous au pôle. Là le soleil ne frise qu'obliquement la terre, et les lentes alternatives de la lumière et de la nuit suppriment la variété et augmentent la monotonie, cette moitié du néant.

Là, nous pourrons prendre de longs bains de ténèbres, cependant que, pour nous divertir, les aurores boréales nous enverront de temps en temps leurs gerbes roses, comme des reflets d'un feu d'artifice de l'Enfer!"

Enfin, mon âme fait explosion, et sagement elle me crie:

"N'importe où! n'importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!"

Life is a hospital, in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed.

One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain that he would get well if he were by the window.

It seems to me that I should always be happy if I were somewhere else, and this question of moving house is one that I am continually talking over with my soul.

"Tell me, my soul, poor chilly soul, what do you say to living in Lisbon? It must be very warm there, and you would bask merrily, like a lizard. It is by the sea; they say that it is built of marble, and that the people have such a horror of vegetation that they tear up all the trees. There is a country after your own soul; a country made up of light and mineral, and with liquid to reflect them."

My soul makes no answer.

"Since you love rest, and to see moving things, will you come and live in that heavenly land, Holland? Perhaps you would be happy in a country which you have so often admired in pictures. What do you say to Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts, and ships anchored at the doors of houses?"

My soul remains silent.

"Or perhaps Java seems to you more attractive? Well, there we shall find the mind of Europe married to tropical beauty."

Not a word. Can my soul be dead?

"Have you sunk then into so deep a stupor that only your own pain gives you pleasure?

If that be so, let us go to the lands that are made in the likeness of Death.

I know exactly the place for us, poor soul!

We will book our passage to Torneo.

We will go still further, to the last limits of the Baltic; and, if it be possible, further still from life; we will make our abode at the Pole.

There the sun only grazes the earth, and the slow alternations of light and night put out variety and bring in the half of nothingness, monotony.

There we can take great baths of darkness, while, from time to time, for our pleasure, the Aurora Borealis shall scatter its rosy sheaves before us, like reflections of fireworks in hell!"

At last my soul bursts into speech, and wisely she cries to me:

"Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world!"

By A Foreigner

I like Canadians.

They are so unlike Americans.

They go home at night.

Their cigarettes don't smell bad.

Their hats fit.

They really believe that they won the war.

They don't believe in Literature.

They think Art has been exaggerated.

But they are wonderful on ice skates.

A few of them are very rich.

But when they are rich they buy more horses

Than motor cars.

Chicago calls Toronto a puritan town.

But both boxing and horse-racing are illegal

In Chicago.

Nobody works on Sunday.

Nobody.

That doesn't make me mad.

There is only one Woodbine.

But were you ever at Blue Bonnets?

If you kill somebody with a motor car in Ontario

You are liable to go to jail.

So it isn't done.

There have been over 500 people killed by motor cars

In Chicago

So far this year.

It is hard to get rich in Canada.

But it is easy to make money.

There are too many tea rooms.

But, then, there are no cabarets.

If you tip a waiter a quarter

He says "Thank you."

Instead of calling the bouncer.

They let women stand up in the street cars.

Even if they are good-looking.

They are all in a hurry to get home to supper

And their radio sets.

They are a fine people.

I like them.

It was a dark autumn night.

The old banker was pacing from corner to corner of his study, recalling to his mind the party he gave in the autumn fifteen years ago.

There were many clever people at the party and much interesting conversation.

They talked among other things of capital punishment.

The guests, among them not a few scholars and journalists, for the most part disapproved of capital punishment.

They found it obsolete as a means of punishment, unfitted to a Christian State and immoral.

Some of them thought that capital punishment should be replaced universally by life-imprisonment.

"I don't agree with you," said the host.

"I myself have experienced neither capital punishment nor life-imprisonment, but if one may judge a priori, then in my opinion capital punishment is more moral and more humane than imprisonment. Execution kills instantly, life-imprisonment kills by degrees. Who is the more humane executioner, one who kills you in a few seconds or one who draws the life out of you incessantly, for years?"

"They're both equally immoral," remarked one of the guests, "because their purpose is the same, to take away life. The State is not God. It has no right to take away that which it cannot give back, if it should so desire."

Among the company was a lawyer, a young man of about twenty-five. On being asked his opinion, he said:

"Capital punishment and life-imprisonment are equally immoral; but if I were offered the choice between them, I would certainly choose the second. It's better to live somehow than not to live at all."

There ensued a lively discussion.

The banker who was then younger and more nervous suddenly lost his temper, banged his fist on the table, and turning to the young lawyer, cried out:

"It's a lie. I bet you two millions you wouldn't stick in a cell even for five years."

"If that's serious," replied the lawyer, "then I bet I'll stay not five but fifteen."

"Fifteen! Done!" cried the banker. "Gentlemen, I stake two millions."

"Agreed. You stake two millions, I my freedom," said the lawyer.

So this wild, ridiculous bet came to pass.

The banker, who at that time had too many millions to count, spoiled and capricious, was beside himself with rapture.

During supper he said to the lawyer jokingly:

"Come to your senses, young man, before it's too late. Two millions are nothing to me, but you stand to lose three or four of the best years of your life. I say three or four, because you'll never stick it out any longer. Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary is much heavier than enforced imprisonment. The idea that you have the right to free yourself at any moment will poison the whole of your life in the cell. I pity you."

And now the banker pacing from corner to corner, recalled all this and asked himself:

"Why did I make this bet? What's the good? The lawyer loses fifteen years of his life and I throw away two millions. Will it convince people that capital punishment is worse or better than imprisonment for life. No, No! all stuff and rubbish. On my part, it was the caprice of a well-fed man; on the lawyer's, pure greed of gold."

He recollected further what happened after the evening party.

It was decided that the lawyer must undergo his imprisonment under the strictest observation, in a garden-wing of the banker's house.

It was agreed that during the period he would be deprived of the right to cross the threshold, to see living people, to hear human voices, and to receive letters and newspapers.

He was permitted to have a musical instrument, to read books, to write letters, to drink wine and smoke tobacco.

By the agreement he could communicate, but only in silence, with the outside world through a little window specially constructed for this purpose.

Everything necessary, books, music, wine, he could receive in any quantity by sending a note through the window.

The agreement provided for all the minutest details, which made the confinement strictly solitary, and it obliged the lawyer to remain exactly fifteen years from twelve o'clock of November 14th 1870 to twelve o'clock of November 14th 1885.

The least attempt on his part to violate the conditions, to escape if only for two minutes before the time freed the banker from the obligation to pay him the two millions.

During the first year of imprisonment, the lawyer, as far as it was possible to judge from his short notes, suffered terribly from loneliness and boredom.

From his wing day and night came the sound of the piano. He rejected wine and tobacco.

"Wine," he wrote, "excites desires, and desires are the chief foes of a prisoner; besides, nothing is more boring than to drink good wine alone, and tobacco spoils the air in his room."

During the first year the lawyer was sent books of a light character; novels with a complicated love interest, stories of crime and fantasy, comedies, and so on.

In the second year the piano was heard no longer and the lawyer asked only for classics.

In the fifth year, music was heard again, and the prisoner asked for wine.

Those who watched him said that during the whole of that year he was only eating, drinking, and lying on his bed.

He yawned often and talked angrily to himself.

Books he did not read.

Sometimes at nights he would sit down to write.

He would write for a long time and tear it all up in the morning.

More than once he was heard to weep.

In the second half of the sixth year, the prisoner began zealously to study languages, philosophy, and history.

He fell on these subjects so hungrily that the banker hardly had time to get books enough for him.

In the space of four years about six hundred volumes were bought at his request.

It was while that passion lasted that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner:

"My dear gaoler, I am writing these lines in six languages. Show them to experts. Let them read them. If they do not find one single mistake, I beg you to give orders to have a gun fired off in the garden. By the noise I shall know that my efforts have not been in vain. The geniuses of all ages and countries speak in different languages; but in them all burns the same flame. Oh, if you knew my heavenly happiness now that I can understand them!"

The prisoner's desire was fulfilled. Two shots were fired in the garden by the banker's order.

Later on, after the tenth year, the lawyer sat immovable before his table and read only the New Testament.

The banker found it strange that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred erudite volumes, should have spent nearly a year in reading one book, easy to understand and by no means thick.

The New Testament was then replaced by the history of religions and theology.

During the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an extraordinary amount, quite haphazard.

Now he would apply himself to the natural sciences, then would read Byron or Shakespeare.

Notes used to come from him in which he asked to be sent at the same time a book on chemistry, a text-book of medicine, a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology.

He read as though he were swimming in the sea among the broken pieces of wreckage, and in his desire to save his life was eagerly grasping one piece after another.

The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it.

Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end.

Over the hedge on one side we looked into a plowed field, and on the other we looked over a gate at our master's house, which stood by the roadside; at the top of the meadow was a grove of fir trees, and at the bottom a running brook overhung by a steep bank.

While I was young I lived upon my mother's milk, as I could not eat grass.

In the daytime I ran by her side, and at night I lay down close by her.

When it was hot we used to stand by the pond in the shade of the trees, and when it was cold we had a nice warm shed near the grove.

As soon as I was old enough to eat grass my mother used to go out to work in the daytime, and come back in the evening.

There were six young colts in the meadow besides me; they were older than I was; some were nearly as large as grown-up horses.

I used to run with them, and had great fun; we used to gallop all together round and round the field as hard as we could go.

Sometimes we had rather rough play, for they would frequently bite and kick as well as gallop.

One day, when there was a good deal of kicking, my mother whinnied to me to come to her, and then she said:

“I wish you to pay attention to what I am going to say to you. The colts who live here are very good colts, but they are cart-horse colts, and of course they have not learned manners.

You have been well-bred and well-born; your father has a great name in these parts, and your grandfather won the cup two years at the Newmarket races; your grandmother had the sweetest temper of any horse I ever knew, and I think you have never seen me kick or bite.

I hope you will grow up gentle and good, and never learn bad ways; do your work with a good will, lift your feet up well when you trot, and never bite or kick even in play.”

I have never forgotten my mother's advice; I knew she was a wise old horse, and our master thought a great deal of her.

Her name was Duchess, but he often called her Pet.

Our master was a good, kind man.

He gave us good food, good lodging, and kind words; he spoke as kindly to us as he did to his little children.

We were all fond of him, and my mother loved him very much.

When she saw him at the gate she would neigh with joy, and trot up to him.

He would pat and stroke her and say, “Well, old Pet, and how is your little Darkie?” I was a dull black, so he called me Darkie; then he would give me a piece of bread, which was very good, and sometimes he brought a carrot for my mother.

All the horses would come to him, but I think we were his favorites.

My mother always took him to the town on a market day in a light gig.

There was a plowboy, Dick, who sometimes came into our field to pluck blackberries from the hedge.

When he had eaten all he wanted he would have what he called fun with the colts, throwing stones and sticks at them to make them gallop.

We did not much mind him, for we could gallop off; but sometimes a stone would hit and hurt us.

One day he was at this game, and did not know that the master was in the next field; but he was there, watching what was going on; over the hedge he jumped in a snap, and catching Dick by the arm, he gave him such a box on the ear as made him roar with the pain and surprise.

As soon as we saw the master we trotted up nearer to see what went on.

“Bad boy!” he said, “bad boy! to chase the colts. This is not the first time, nor the second, but it shall be the last. There—take your money and go home; I shall not want you on my farm again.”

So we never saw Dick any more. Old Daniel, the man who looked after the horses, was just as gentle as our master, so we were well off.

All children, except one, grow up.

They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this.

One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother.

I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!”

This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up.

You always know after you are two.

Two is the beginning of the end.

Of course they lived at 14, and until Wendy came her mother was the chief one.

She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth.

Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.

The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her, and they all ran to her house to propose to her except Mr. Darling, who took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her.

He got all of her, except the innermost box and the kiss.

He never knew about the box, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss.

Wendy thought Napoleon could have got it, but I can picture him trying, and then going off in a passion, slamming the door.

Mr. Darling used to boast to Wendy that her mother not only loved him but respected him.

He was one of those deep ones who know about stocks and shares.

Of course no one really knows, but he quite seemed to know, and he often said stocks were up and shares were down in a way that would have made any woman respect him.

Mrs. Darling was married in white, and at first she kept the books perfectly, almost gleefully, as if it were a game, not so much as a Brussels sprout was missing; but by and by whole cauliflowers dropped out, and instead of them there were pictures of babies without faces.

She drew them when she should have been totting up.

They were Mrs. Darling’s guesses.

Wendy came first, then John, then Michael.

For a week or two after Wendy came it was doubtful whether they would be able to keep her, as she was another mouth to feed.

Mr. Darling was frightfully proud of her, but he was very honourable, and he sat on the edge of Mrs. Darling’s bed, holding her hand and calculating expenses, while she looked at him imploringly.

She wanted to risk it, come what might, but that was not his way; his way was with a pencil and a piece of paper, and if she confused him with suggestions he had to begin at the beginning again.

“Now don’t interrupt,” he would beg of her.

“I have one pound seventeen here, and two and six at the office; I can cut off my coffee at the office, say ten shillings, making two nine and six, with your eighteen and three makes three nine seven, with five naught naught in my cheque-book makes eight nine seven

—who is that moving?

—eight nine seven, dot and carry seven—don’t speak, my own—and the pound you lent to that man who came to the door—quiet, child—dot and carry child—there, you’ve done it!—did I say nine nine seven? yes, I said nine nine seven; the question is, can we try it for a year on nine nine seven?”

“Of course we can, George,” she cried. But she was prejudiced in Wendy’s favour, and he was really the grander character of the two.

“Remember mumps,” he warned her almost threateningly, and off he went again.

“Mumps one pound, that is what I have put down, but I daresay it will be more like thirty shillings—don’t speak—measles one five, German measles half a guinea, makes two fifteen six—don’t waggle your finger—whooping-cough, say fifteen shillings”

—and so on it went, and it added up differently each time; but at last Wendy just got through, with mumps reduced to twelve six, and the two kinds of measles treated as one.

There was the same excitement over John, and Michael had even a narrower squeak; but both were kept, and soon, you might have seen the three of them going in a row to Miss Fulsom’s Kindergarten school, accompanied by their nurse.

Mrs. Darling loved to have everything just so, and Mr. Darling had a passion for being exactly like his neighbours; so, of course, they had a nurse.

As they were poor, owing to the amount of milk the children drank, this nurse was a prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana, who had belonged to no one in particular until the Darlings engaged her.

She had always thought children important, however, and the Darlings had become acquainted with her in Kensington Gardens, where she spent most of her spare time peeping into perambulators, and was much hated by careless nursemaids, whom she followed to their homes and complained of to their mistresses.

She proved to be quite a treasure of a nurse.

How thorough she was at bath-time, and up at any moment of the night if one of her charges made the slightest cry.

Of course her kennel was in the nursery.

She had a genius for knowing when a cough is a thing to have no patience with and when it needs stocking around your throat.

She believed to her last day in old-fashioned remedies like rhubarb leaf, and made sounds of contempt over all this new-fangled talk about germs, and so on.

It was a lesson in propriety to see her escorting the children to school, walking sedately by their side when they were well behaved, and butting them back into line if they strayed.

On John’s footer days she never once forgot his sweater, and she usually carried an umbrella in her mouth in case of rain.

There is a room in the basement of Miss Fulsom’s school where the nurses wait.

They sat on forms, while Nana lay on the floor, but that was the only difference.

They affected to ignore her as of an inferior social status to themselves, and she despised their light talk.

She resented visits to the nursery from Mrs. Darling’s friends, but if they did come she first whipped off Michael’s pinafore and put him into the one with blue braiding, and smoothed out Wendy and made a dash at John’s hair.

No nursery could possibly have been conducted more correctly, and Mr. Darling knew it, yet he sometimes wondered uneasily whether the neighbours talked.

He had his position in the city to consider.

Nana also troubled him in another way.

He had sometimes a feeling that she did not admire him.

“I know she admires you tremendously, George,” Mrs. Darling would assure him, and then she would sign to the children to be specially nice to father.

Lovely dances followed, in which the only other servant, Liza, was sometimes allowed to join.

Such a midget she looked in her long skirt and maid’s cap, though she had sworn, when engaged, that she would never see ten again.

The gaiety of those romps!

And gayest of all was Mrs. Darling, who would pirouette so wildly that all you could see of her was the kiss, and then if you had dashed at her you might have got it.

There never was a simpler happier family until the coming of Peter Pan.

Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds.

It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day.

If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her.

It is quite like tidying up drawers.

You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight.

When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind.

Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time.

There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there,

and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.

It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.

Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal.

John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it.

John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together.

John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents, but on the whole the Neverlands have a family resemblance, and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have each other’s nose, and so forth.

On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles.

We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.

Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed.

When you play at it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very real.

That is why there are night-lights.

Occasionally in her travels through her children’s minds Mrs. Darling found things she could not understand, and of these quite the most perplexing was the word Peter.

She knew of no Peter, and yet he was here and there in John and Michael’s minds, while Wendy’s began to be scrawled all over with him.

The name stood out in bolder letters than any of the other words, and as Mrs. Darling gazed she felt that it had an oddly cocky appearance.

“Yes, he is rather cocky,” Wendy admitted with regret.

Her mother had been questioning her.

“But who is he, my pet?”

“He is Peter Pan, you know, mother.”

At first Mrs. Darling did not know, but after thinking back into her childhood she just remembered a Peter Pan who was said to live with the fairies.

There were odd stories about him, as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened.

She had believed in him at the time, but now that she was married and full of sense she quite doubted whether there was any such person.

“Besides,” she said to Wendy, “he would be grown up by this time.”

“Oh no, he isn’t grown up,” Wendy assured her confidently, “and he is just my size.”

She meant that he was her size in both mind and body; she didn’t know how she knew, she just knew it.

Mrs. Darling consulted Mr. Darling, but he smiled pooh-pooh. “Mark my words,” he said, “it is some nonsense Nana has been putting into their heads; just the sort of idea a dog would have. Leave it alone, and it will blow over.”

But it would not blow over and soon the troublesome boy gave Mrs. Darling quite a shock.

Children have the strangest adventures without being troubled by them.

For instance, they may remember to mention, a week after the event happened, that when they were in the wood they had met their dead father and had a game with him.

It was in this casual way that Wendy one morning made a disquieting revelation.

Some leaves of a tree had been found on the nursery floor, which certainly were not there when the children went to bed, and Mrs. Darling was puzzling over them when Wendy said with a tolerant smile:

“I do believe it is that Peter again!”

“Whatever do you mean, Wendy?”

“It is so naughty of him not to wipe his feet,” Wendy said, sighing.

She was a tidy child.

She explained in quite a matter-of-fact way that she thought Peter sometimes came to the nursery in the night and sat on the foot of her bed and played on his pipes to her.

Unfortunately she never woke, so she didn’t know how she knew, she just knew.

“What nonsense you talk, precious. No one can get into the house without knocking.”

“I think he comes in by the window,” she said.

“My love, it is three floors up.”

“Were not the leaves at the foot of the window, mother?”

It was quite true; the leaves had been found very near the window.

Mrs. Darling did not know what to think, for it all seemed so natural to Wendy that you could not dismiss it by saying she had been dreaming.

“My child,” the mother cried, “why did you not tell me of this before?”

“I forgot,” said Wendy lightly. She was in a hurry to get her breakfast.

Oh, surely she must have been dreaming.

But, on the other hand, there were the leaves.

Mrs. Darling examined them very carefully; they were skeleton leaves, but she was sure they did not come from any tree that grew in England.

She crawled about the floor, peering at it with a candle for marks of a strange foot.

She rattled the poker up the chimney and tapped the walls.

She let down a tape from the window to the pavement, and it was a sheer drop of thirty feet, without so much as a spout to climb up by.

Certainly Wendy had been dreaming.

But Wendy had not been dreaming, as the very next night showed, the night on which the extraordinary adventures of these children may be said to have begun.

On the night we speak of all the children were once more in bed.

It happened to be Nana’s evening off, and Mrs. Darling had bathed them and sung to them till one by one they had let go her hand and slid away into the land of sleep.

All were looking so safe and cosy that she smiled at her fears now and sat down tranquilly by the fire to sew.

It was something for Michael, who on his birthday was getting into shirts.

The fire was warm, however, and the nursery dimly lit by three night-lights, and presently the sewing lay on Mrs. Darling’s lap.

Then her head nodded, oh, so gracefully.

She was asleep.

Look at the four of them, Wendy and Michael over there, John here, and Mrs. Darling by the fire.

There should have been a fourth night-light.

While she slept she had a dream.

She dreamt that the Neverland had come too near and that a strange boy had broken through from it.

He did not alarm her, for she thought she had seen him before in the faces of many women who have no children.

Perhaps he is to be found in the faces of some mothers also.

But in her dream he had rent the film that obscures the Neverland, and she saw Wendy and John and Michael peeping through the gap.

The dream by itself would have been a trifle, but while she was dreaming the window of the nursery blew open, and a boy did drop on the floor.

He was accompanied by a strange light, no bigger than your fist, which darted about the room like a living thing and I think it must have been this light that wakened Mrs. Darling.

She started up with a cry, and saw the boy, and somehow she knew at once that he was Peter Pan.

If you or I or Wendy had been there we should have seen that he was very like Mrs. Darling’s kiss.

He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth.

When he saw she was a grown-up, he gnashed the little pearls at her.