Solomon had kept his promise and taught him many of the bird
ways. To be easily pleased, for instance, and always to be really doing
something, and to think that whatever he was doing was a thing of vast
importance. Peter became very clever at helping the birds to build their
nests; soon he could build better than a wood-pigeon, and nearly as well
as a blackbird, though never did he satisfy the finches, and he made
nice little water-troughs near the nests and dug up worms for the young
ones with his fingers. He also became very learned in bird-lore, and
knew an east-wind from a west-wind by its smell, and he could see the
grass growing and hear the insects walking about inside the tree-trunks.
But the best thing Solomon had done was to teach him to have a glad
heart. All birds have glad hearts unless you rob their nests, and so as
they were the only kind of heart Solomon knew about, it was easy to him
to teach Peter how to have one.

Peter's heart was so glad that he felt he must sing all day long,
just as the birds sing for joy, but, being partly human, he needed in
instrument, so he made a pipe of reeds, and he used to sit by the shore
of the island of an evening, practising the sough of the wind and the
ripple of the water, and catching handfuls of the shine of the moon, and
he put them all in his pipe and played them so beautifully that even the
birds were deceived, and they would say to each other, "Was that a fish
leaping in the water or was it Peter playing leaping fish on his pipe?"
and sometimes he played the birth of birds, and then the mothers would
turn round in their nests to see whether they had laid an egg. If you
are a child of the Gardens you must know the chestnut-tree near the
bridge, which comes out in flower first of all the chestnuts, but
perhaps you have not heard why this tree leads the way. It is because
Peter wearies for summer and plays that it has come, and the chestnut
being so near, hears him and is cheated.

But as Peter sat by the shore tootling divinely on his pipe he sometimes
fell into sad thoughts and then the music became sad also, and the
reason of all this sadness was that he could not reach the Gardens,
though he could see them through the arch of the bridge. He knew he
could never be a real human again, and scarcely wanted to be one, but
oh, how he longed to play as other children play, and of course there
is no such lovely place to play in as the Gardens. The birds brought him