The Tale of Hill Top Farm Read Online Free PDF Page A

suggested—” Her sentence was interrupted by the piercing shriek of a steam whistle, as the ferryboat, an open wooden-hulled scow loaded with horses, a carriage, and a half-dozen passengers, approached the landing, belching black coal smoke.
    “I’ll see you in Sawrey,” she mouthed over the noise, and went back to the charabanc.

    Miss Potter also went back to her coach, where Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s wicker hamper, Josey’s and Mopsy’s box, and Tom Thumb’s traveling cage were all safely stowed on the back, along with her trunk and portmanteau and a large box of drawing supplies.
    “I don’t fancy ocean passages,” squeaked Tom Thumb, a small gray mouse. He was a recent widower (his wife, Hunca Munca, had fallen off a chandelier the previous July), and inclined to be a twittery traveler. “I wish we’d stayed in London.”
    “It isn’t an ocean,” Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle replied haughtily. “It’s only a lake, and a narrow one, at that.” Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Miss Potter’s hedgehog, was a seasoned traveler and inclined to look down on those who had not had her experiences. “Traveling is educational,” she was often heard to say. “I am glad I don’t live in a muddy bank, with no one for company but a few ignorant moles and a stupid rat. What kind of pleasure is there in that?”
    “I certainly hope there’s a garden where we’re going,” Josey Rabbit put in, twitching her nose. “I am thoroughly sick of leftover salad with oil-and-vinegar dressing on it. Fresh greens—that’s what I need. A bit of parsley, a few carrots, some fresh cabbage.” Josey’s life had begun in the wild and had nearly ended in a gardener’s trap, where she had been rescued by Miss Potter. She still hankered after the old days, when she was free to go anywhere she liked, although she had to admit that it was rather nice to be indoors during the winter—so long, of course, as she had fresh greens.
    “Don’t talk about food, please,” Mopsy Rabbit moaned. She settled back in a corner of the cage she shared with Josey and closed her eyes. Mopsy, who had a flighty disposition and a nervous stomach, found travel unsettling. If she could choose, she’d never leave Number Two Bolton Gardens in South Kensington, where she lived with Miss Potter.
    It may seem strange that a grown woman would travel with a collection of animals, especially since there wasn’t a cat or dog—the usual choices in animal companions—among them. But animals had always been an important part of Beatrix Potter’s rather lonely life. Left to inattentive nannies and nursery maids in the large London mansion where they were born, Beatrix and her brother Bertram, five years younger, consoled themselves by bringing an immense number of mice, rabbits, bats, snakes, frogs, birds, and insects into the nursery on the top floor of the house, where their parents seldom ventured, not even for tea. Both of the children were keen naturalists, and their animals were not only pleasant companions of hearth and heart, but a scientific challenge, as well. They had been known to boil the flesh from the bones of certain dead specimens they had collected, so they could study the skeletons.
    Bertram gave up most of his pets when he went away to school. But for Beatrix, who stayed behind with a series of governesses in the third-floor schoolroom, animal companions—furred, feathered, scaled, and gilled—took the place of her brother and the friends and schoolmates she would never have. She drew them, of course—and when her parents remarked nervously about the latest acquisition, it was easy to say that she needed this or that animal model for her sketches. But the truth was that she loved them. She loved even the unlovely and unlikely ones, like Judy (a lizard) and Punch (a green frog), and loved them deeply, in the way that a desperately lonely person loves a little creature who seems to return that love without condition. Like many other solitary people, Beatrix