# The Tale of Tom Kitten _Retold by Talerie (talerie.com) from The Tale of Tom Kitten, after Beatrix Potter_ · 4 min read · ages 3+ Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit dresses her kittens for a tea party, but on the garden wall Tom bursts his buttons and the Puddle-Ducks put on the clothes the kittens lose. Mrs. Tabitha sends the kittens upstairs and tells her friends they have the measles, and in a pond the clothes come off the ducks, who still look for them. --- Once upon a time there were three little kittens, and their names were Mittens, Tom Kitten, and Moppet. They had little fur coats of their own, and they tumbled about on the doorstep and played in the dust. But one day their mother, Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit, was expecting friends to tea. So she fetched the kittens indoors to wash them and dress them before the fine company arrived. First she scrubbed their faces. Then she brushed their fur. After that she combed their tails and whiskers. Tom was very naughty, and he scratched. Mrs. Tabitha dressed Moppet and Mittens in clean pinafores and tuckers. Then she took all sorts of elegant, uncomfortable clothes out of a chest of drawers to dress up her son Thomas. Tom Kitten was very fat, and he had grown, so several buttons burst off. His mother sewed them on again. When the three kittens were ready, Mrs. Tabitha made a mistake. She turned them out into the garden to keep them out of the way while she made hot buttered toast. “Now keep your frocks clean, children! You must walk on your hind legs. Keep away from the dirty ash pit, and from Sally Henny Penny, and from the pigsty and the Puddle-Ducks.” Moppet and Mittens wobbled down the garden path on their hind legs. Before long they stepped on their pinafores and fell flat on their noses. When they stood up, they had several green smears on them! “Let us climb up the rockery and sit on the garden wall,” said Moppet. They turned their pinafores back to front and went up with a skip and a jump. Moppet’s white tucker fell down into the road. On his hind legs and in trousers, Tom Kitten couldn’t jump at all. He came up the rockery a little at a time, breaking the ferns and shedding buttons right and left. By the time he reached the top of the wall, he was coming apart at the seams. Moppet and Mittens tried to pull him together. His hat fell off, and the rest of his buttons burst. While they were in this fix, along the road came the three Puddle-Ducks, marching one behind the other: pit pat paddle pat! pit pat waddle pat! They stopped, stood in a row, and stared up at the kittens. They had very small eyes, and they looked surprised. Then the two duck-birds, Rebeccah and Jemima Puddle-Duck, picked up the hat and the tucker and put them on. Mittens laughed so hard that she fell off the wall. Moppet and Tom climbed down after her, and on the way the pinafores came off, along with every last thing Tom had on. “Come, Mr. Drake Puddle-Duck!” said Moppet. “Come and help us dress him! Come and button up Tom!” Mr. Drake Puddle-Duck came forward slowly, sideways, and picked up the clothes one by one. But he put them on himself! They fit him even worse than they had fit Tom Kitten. “It’s a very fine morning!” said Mr. Drake Puddle-Duck. And he and Jemima and Rebeccah Puddle-Duck set off up the road, keeping step: pit pat paddle pat! pit pat waddle pat! Then Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit came down the garden and found her kittens on the wall with no clothes on. She pulled them off the wall, smacked them, and took them back to the house. “My friends will arrive in a minute, and you are not fit to be seen; I am affronted,” said Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit. She sent them upstairs, and I am sorry to say that she told her friends they were in bed with the measles. That was not true. Quite the opposite: they were not in bed, not in the least. Somehow there were very strange noises overhead, which disturbed the dignity and calm of the tea party. I think that someday I will have to write another, bigger book to tell you more about Tom Kitten! As for the Puddle-Ducks, they went into a pond. The clothes all came off at once, because there were no buttons. And Mr. Drake Puddle-Duck, and Jemima and Rebeccah, have been looking for them ever since. --- - Read online: https://talerie.com/en/tales/the-tale-of-tom-kitten - Characters: Mittens, Moppet, Tabitha Twitchit, Jemima Puddle-Duck - Author's country: United Kingdom (https://talerie.com/en/tales/country/united-kingdom) - Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4263682 - Source: The Tale of Tom Kitten, Beatrix Potter (Frederick Warne & Co., London, 1907; Project Gutenberg #14837) (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14837) - Public-domain basis: Talerie contemporary retelling (CC0 2026), based on: The Tale of Tom Kitten, Beatrix Potter (Frederick Warne & Co., London, 1907; Project Gutenberg #14837) — original: author died 1943 (+70 passed) - License: CC0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)