One day, just about Christmas time, I saw a new “Peter Rabbit” greeting card. It was Peter Rabbit himself, probably, and one of the Flopsy bunnies under a big green umbrella returning from the post office. It was snowing hard but they were tucked quite cosily under their umbrella and were reading a letter which they had just received. 

“O dear!” I thought, “what fun to be a bunny and to get a letter.”

Not very long afterward I did get a letter and it was from England. Wasn’t that a big surprise? It began:

“My dearest Alice-Heidi: —

I hope you will enjoy looking at these pictures (a beautifully made scrap-book came with the letter, but I’ll tell about that later). There has been a thick fog in London, and we have not been going out,” and then it ended up, “I should love to come over and see you in your little house some day.” How I should love it, too, and I should set out my best tea-set and fringed napkins and plate of cakes. The scrap-book is a lovely one with little colored pictures, one on a page, and all of English houses and gardens with big iron gates and masses of flowers. It is the nicest scrap-book I have ever seen, and if the little girl who made it wishes she could come and see me sometime, you can’t think how I wish I could go to England and see her; and perhaps she could come with me to call on some one I want to see even more than the Lord Mayor of London or Christopher Robin, and that is PETER RABBIT.

All the children who come into The Bookshop know just which shelf is the shelf where the Peter Rabbit books are kept, a long line of little grey green books, but not as long a line as they wish it were, for sometimes a child hunts and hunts to find one that has escaped him and will be all new. 

Peter Rabbit lives on Mr. MacGregor’s farm in the Lake Country and I am very sure that Tom Kitten and Jemima Puddleduck and the Flopsy bunnies and all the other nice animals live there, too. I think the picture in the front of “The Pie and the Patty Pan” must be Mr. MacGregor’s farm with trees and fields all around it and a mountain behind it.

I can’t write any more this time, but I’ll make a picture, although I can’t draw very well.

From the March 1926 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.