A guinea-pig joins a travelling circus of north-country beasts and tours the fells with a pony, a dog and a company that pitches where no human can see it. Beatrix Potter wrote it at sixty-three in her own Lakeland idiom, and would not have it published in England in her lifetime, thinking it too personal. It is her longest book and the only one written for herself. Eighteen plates of painting, from Constable to Millais, trace the same travelling life in open air the book gives its beasts, with coaches, lanes and moonlit roads.
