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 do n'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 -LSB- simple boat -RSB- . 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 , XXXXX . ''
chairs child children course distances mind minds mother person regret