The Tailor of Gloucester

A tailor in Gloucester is making the mayor's waistcoat for Christmas morning. He falls ill before he can finish — he has run out of cherry-coloured twist. While he sleeps, the mice in his shop, who he had once rescued from his cat, take up the needles and finish the work. All but one buttonhole. They have run out of thread.

The story is true. Beatrix heard it from her cousin Caroline Hutton during a visit to Gloucestershire. The real tailor, Mr. Prichard, was at his wits' end one Saturday with a special waistcoat half-finished. His two assistants slipped in with skeleton keys, finished it overnight, and pinned a note that said "no more twist." The tailor never knew. Beatrix changed the assistants into mice — and kept everything else.

The book was Beatrix's own favourite. She had written it by hand at Christmas 1901 as a present for Freda Moore, a small girl who had been ill — "Because you are fond of fairy-tales and have been ill, I have made you a story all for yourself." The trade edition, two years later, kept every rhyme and old word she had woven in.