ou could not find the body. Sometimes he came
home with his head bandaged, and then Wendy cooed over him and bathed
it in lukewarm water, while he told a dazzling tale. But she was never
quite sure, you know. There were, however, many adventures which she
knew to be true because she was in them herself, and there were still
more that were at least partly true, for the other boys were in them and
said they were wholly true. To describe them all would require a book as
large as an English-Latin, Latin-English Dictionary, and the most we can
do is to give one as a specimen of an average hour on the island. The
difficulty is which one to choose. Should we take the brush with the
redskins at Slightly Gulch? It was a sanguinary [cheerful] affair, and
especially interesting as showing one of Peter's peculiarities, which
was that in the middle of a fight he would suddenly change sides. At the
Gulch, when victory was still in the balance, sometimes leaning this way
and sometimes that, he called out, "I'm redskin to-day; what are you,
Tootles?" And Tootles answered, "Redskin; what are you, Nibs?" and
Nibs said, "Redskin; what are you Twin?" and so on; and they were all
redskins; and of course this would have ended the fight had not the real
redskins fascinated by Peter's methods, agreed to be lost boys for that
once, and so at it they all went again, more fiercely than ever.

The extraordinary upshot of this adventure was--but we have not decided
yet that this is the adventure we are to narrate. Perhaps a better one
would be the night attack by the redskins on the house under the ground,
when several of them stuck in the hollow trees and had to be pulled out
like corks. Or we might tell how Peter saved Tiger Lily's life in the
Mermaids' Lagoon, and so made her his ally.

Or we could tell of that cake the pirates cooked so that the boys might
eat it and perish; and how they placed it in one cunning spot after
another; but always Wendy snatched it from the hands of her children, so
that in time it lost its succulence, and became as hard as a stone, and
was used as a missile, and Hook fell over it in the dark.

Or suppose we tell of the birds that were Peter's friends, particularly
of the Never bird that built in a tree overhanging the lagoon, and how
the nest fell into the water, and still the bird sat on her eggs, and
Peter gave orders that she was not to be disturbed. That is a pretty
story, and the end shows how grateful a bird