The Story

Deep in a sandbank beneath the roots of a great fir tree live four young rabbits, raised by their widowed mother, Mrs. Rabbit, since their father's death. Three of them are gentle and obedient. The fourth, small and quick-eyed, is Peter, who has never once resisted temptation in his short, adventurous life.

Mrs. Rabbit gathers Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter close and warns them, gravely, never to set one paw inside Mr. McGregor's garden. Their father, she tells them, had an accident there once. He was caught by the gardener, and put into a pie, by the gardener's own wife, Mrs. McGregor.

'Now run along, and don't get into mischief. I am going out,' Mrs. Rabbit tells them, as Beatrix Potter wrote, before setting off down the lane toward the baker's with her basket on her arm. Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail obey at once, trotting off together to gather blackberries along the sunny hedgerow.

Peter, naughty and bold as ever, turns the other way entirely, straight toward Mr. McGregor's forbidden garden. He squeezes his small body under the wooden gate, slipping through a narrow gap his obedient sisters would never even think to try, so eager is he for what waits inside the fence.

Inside, Peter feasts without restraint, first on lettuces, then French beans, then plump radishes, eating far more than any sensible young rabbit ever should. His stomach begins to turn uncomfortably. Feeling rather sick, he goes looking for a sprig of parsley to settle it, and rounds a corner straight into trouble.

Mr. McGregor, down on his knees planting out young cabbages, springs up at once and waves his rake high in the air. 'Stop thief!' he shouts, as Beatrix Potter wrote, and gives chase across the freshly turned beds, faster than Peter ever expects a grown, heavy man could possibly move.

Peter panics completely and forgets the way back to the gate entirely. Racing blindly between the rows in sheer terror, he loses one shoe among the cabbages, then the other among the potatoes, and runs on faster still, now on all four bare paws, gasping hard for every single breath.

But running alone is not quite enough. The large brass buttons on his new blue jacket, the very jacket his own mother made him herself, catch fast in the strings of a gooseberry net, and Peter is trapped there, struggling and helpless, in the wide open middle of the garden beds.

Peter gives himself up for lost and cries great big tears of despair, certain his whole small adventure is over at last. But some friendly sparrows overhear his crying and flutter down close, imploring him to exert himself with all his remaining strength, and it is their urging that finally saves him.

Peter wriggles free of the net just as Mr. McGregor arrives with a sieve, meaning to trap him snugly underneath it once and for all. He escapes by mere inches, leaving his blue jacket tangled hopelessly behind him in the netting, gone for good, and dashes on without it, unclothed but noticeably quicker now.

With Mr. McGregor still close behind him, Peter darts desperately into a tool-shed and, seeing nowhere else left to hide from the approaching footsteps, leaps straight into a large tin can, only to discover, too late, that it is filled almost to the very brim with cold, dark water.

The water is icy cold, and crouched down and shivering inside it, Peter cannot stop a great loud sneeze from suddenly escaping him. Mr. McGregor hears it instantly, comes stamping heavily across the shed straight toward the can, and very nearly manages to pin poor Peter beneath his great heavy boot.

Just in time, Peter leaps clean out of the tool-shed window, upsetting three flower pots noisily as he goes crashing straight through them. The window itself is far too small for a grown man to follow, and Mr. McGregor, tired out at last, gives up the chase entirely and returns to his planting.

Mr. McGregor goes calmly back to his hoeing, and Peter, damp clean through and trembling all over, sits down at last to rest in the shade of a large rhubarb leaf. But he no longer has the faintest idea which direction leads home, and the whole garden suddenly feels enormous and unfamiliar.

Wandering on, Peter finds a locked door set into a garden wall, far too low for him to squeeze beneath. He asks an old mouse, hurrying by with her arms full, to point him the way home, but her mouth is stuffed with one great pea, and she can only shake her head sadly.

Still lost, Peter comes at last to a pond where a large white cat sits perfectly still, watching some goldfish drift below the surface. Remembering something his cousin Benjamin Bunny once told him about cats, Peter thinks better of speaking to her at all, and creeps quietly on past the water.

The steady scritch-scratch of a hoe reaches Peter's ears from somewhere near the tool-shed, and, taking no chances at all this time, he scuttles low beneath a row of thick bushes, holding very still, listening hard for which direction the sound is coming from before he dares to move again.

Peter spots an old wheelbarrow standing nearby and climbs carefully up onto its rim to look around the wide garden. From that small height he sees Mr. McGregor at last, hoeing onions with his back turned, and beyond him, past the black-currant bushes, the gate that leads to safety.

Peter climbs quietly back down from the wheelbarrow and runs, as fast as his small legs will possibly carry him, straight along the path behind the row of black-currant bushes, not stopping, not looking back even once, heading straight for the distant gate with everything he has left in him.

Mr. McGregor catches sight of him at the corner of the path and shouts once more, but this time Peter does not care in the least. He slips neatly under the gate and is safe at last, standing free and breathless in the quiet wood outside the garden wall.

Back in the quiet garden, Mr. McGregor calmly gathers up Peter's abandoned little jacket and his two lost shoes and hangs them together on a wooden stick among the vegetables, a small makeshift scarecrow, meant to frighten off the blackbirds that trouble his cabbages every single growing season of the year.

At home in the burrow, Mrs. Rabbit takes one look at Peter, finds him far too poorly for supper, and puts him straight to bed with a dose of chamomile tea. Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail, good and obedient all afternoon long, enjoy a supper of bread, milk, and ripe blackberries together.

What it means

Peter's whole adventure turns on one simple truth: freedom seized through disobedience carries a price, a jacket, a pair of shoes, an evening spent trembling in bed instead of sharing blackberries with his sisters. Beatrix Potter never scolds outright. She simply lets the consequence teach, gently, the way a good bedtime story always should end.

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