Lucie has lost her pocket-handkerchiefs, and where they ve vanished into the hill country around Little-town, she cannot imagine. But one morning she climbs higher than she has ever climbed before, past the stone walls and the grazing sheep, and there in the bracken she finds a tiny door set into the hillside. She knocks. A small, round, very tidy washerwoman answers, with prickles showing beneath her cap and eyes as bright as buttons. This is Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, who does all the washing and ironing for every creature in the neighborhood: the rabbits, the ducks, the lambs, even the squirrels. Lucie spends a perfect day folding linen and delivering clean clothes to the woods and meadows, drinking tea with buttered toast, learning the names of every owner of every garment. It is only at the very end, as she waves goodbye from the hilltop, that she realizes what Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle truly is. The revelation arrives like a small miracle, gentle and perfectly strange. Potter based this 1905 tale on her own pet hedgehog and a Scottish washerwoman she adored; the result is one of her most joyful books, a hymn to small kindnesses, to the dignity of labor, and to the secret lives that hide just beyond the hedgerow.
