The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle

Little Lucie has lost three pocket-handkerchiefs and a pinafore. Following them up the hillside, she comes to a tiny door under the fern, and inside it she meets a small fat hedgehog washerwoman named Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, who irons the laundry of every animal in the dale. By the end of the day, Lucie has her clothes back. By the time she turns at the gate, the cottage and the washerwoman have disappeared.

The story has its real beginning in Scotland, decades earlier. From the age of five Beatrix had spent her summers at Dalguise on the river Tay, where the family washerwoman was an old Highland woman called Kitty MacDonald — "a comical, round little old woman, as brown as a berry," in Beatrix's Journal. Kitty was 83 when Beatrix last visited her in 1892. The hedgehog in the story is — quietly, lovingly — Kitty.

The cottage in the book is at Skelgill in Cumberland; the door under the fern is at Kelbarrow, Grasmere; the dedication is to "the real little Lucie of Newlands," the small daughter of the Vicar of Newlands, who often played with Beatrix's pet hedgehog. Norman Warne, Beatrix's editor and quiet companion, died before the book was published. He did not see the finished copy.