The Tale of the Faithful Dove

Mr. Tidler the pigeon and his wife Amabella live among the wallflowers on the Ypres Tower at Rye. While escaping from a peregrine falcon, Amabella becomes trapped in the chimney of an empty house. A small mouse befriends her. By the time she is rescued, she has a newborn son named Tobias. The story is gentler and more sentimental than anything else Beatrix wrote — "more like the Tailor — older and sentimental," she said herself.

She wrote two manuscripts at Hastings in February 1907. "Founded upon fact," she noted later, "but the incident occurred at another seaside town. I think Folkstone or Dover." The setting is Winchelsea and Rye — "a town of gates and walls, with steep cobbled streets that go up like the ribs of a crown."

The book was never published in her lifetime. "I have never been good at birds," she told Harold Warne, "and whatever you say — I cannot see them in clothes — the story is sentimental not comic." She thought it might be illustrated by Mr. Thorburn, a famous bird painter, but he was "too busy and too big." The manuscripts sat in a drawer at Hill Top for nearly half a century. The book finally appeared in 1956, posthumously.