The Little White Bird by J. M. Barrie

Author:J. M. Barrie
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Peter Pan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction, Fairies -- Fiction, Kensington (London, Adventure stories, England) -- Fiction, Kensington Gardens (London
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2018-06-01T20:15:20+00:00

XVI Lockout Time

It is fright­fully dif­fi­cult to know much about the fair­ies, and al­most the only thing known for cer­tain is that there are fair­ies wherever there are chil­dren. Long ago chil­dren were for­bid­den the Gar­dens, and at that time there was not a fairy in the place; then the chil­dren were ad­mit­ted, and the fair­ies came troop­ing in that very even­ing. They can’t res­ist fol­low­ing the chil­dren, but you sel­dom see them, partly be­cause they live in the day­time be­hind the rail­ings, where you are not al­lowed to go, and also partly be­cause they are so cun­ning. They are not a bit cun­ning after Lock­out, but un­til Lock­out, my word!

When you were a bird you knew the fair­ies pretty well, and you re­mem­ber a good deal about them in your baby­hood, which it is a great pity you can’t write down, for gradu­ally you for­get, and I have heard of chil­dren who de­clared that they had never once seen a fairy. Very likely if they said this in the Kens­ing­ton Gar­dens, they were stand­ing look­ing at a fairy all the time. The reason they were cheated was that she pre­ten­ded to be some­thing else. This is one of their best tricks. They usu­ally pre­tend to be flowers, be­cause the court sits in the Fair­ies’ Basin, and there are so many flowers there, and all along the Baby Walk, that a flower is the thing least likely to at­tract at­ten­tion. They dress ex­actly like flowers, and change with the sea­sons, put­ting on white when lilies are in and blue for blue­bells, and so on. They like cro­cus and hy­acinth time best of all, as they are par­tial to a bit of col­our, but tulips (ex­cept white ones, which are the fairy-cradles) they con­sider gar­ish, and they some­times put off dress­ing like tulips for days, so that the be­gin­ning of the tulip weeks is al­most the best time to catch them.

When they think you are not look­ing they skip along pretty lively, but if you look and they fear there is no time to hide, they stand quite still, pre­tend­ing to be flowers. Then, after you have passed without know­ing that they were fair­ies, they rush home and tell their moth­ers they have had such an ad­ven­ture. The Fairy Basin, you re­mem­ber, is all covered with ground-ivy (from which they make their castor-oil), with flowers grow­ing in it here and there. Most of them really are flowers, but some of them are fair­ies. You never can be sure of them, but a good plan is to walk by look­ing the other way, and then turn round sharply. Another good plan, which David and I some­times fol­low, is to stare them down. After a long time they can’t help wink­ing, and then you know for cer­tain that they are fair­ies.

There are also num­bers of them along the Baby Walk, which is a fam­ous gentle place, as spots fre­quen­ted by fair­ies are called. Once twenty-four of them had an ex­traordin­ary ad­ven­ture. They were

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