If you think she was the only one who ever wanted to escape the world, it shows how completely you have forgotten your own young days.

Whenever children heard this story, first they were quite certain that they had never tried to escape. But I would tell them to think back hard, and when they did, hard, and even harder, they would distinctly remember a youthful desire to return to the tree-tops, and with that memory came others. Of being laid in bed, planning to escape as soon as their mothers were asleep, and how the grown ups may or may not have once caught them half-way up a chimney, or, say, on the balcony.

For having been birds before human, they are naturally a little wild during the first few weeks, and very itchy at the shoulders, where their wings used to be. So they tell me.

Well, the whole thing with Peter Pan was that he got out by the window, which had no bars. The moment he saw the trees far away while standing on the ledge, he entirely forgot he had become a little boy in a nightgown, and away, he flew, right over the houses towards the trees.

It was wonderful that he could fly without wings, but the place itched tremendously, and—and—perhaps we could all fly if we were as dead-confident-sure of our capacity to do it as was bold Peter Pan that evening.

However, this story is not of Peter Pan, for it had been told and retold too many times. This is a story of the trapped children who had not escaped. One could say that they were the resurrections of Peter Pan and little Wendy Darling, only Peter never flew out that window and Wendy was