There was once
a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. He was fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be;
his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen.
On Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in the top of the Boy's stocking, with a sprig of holly between his
paws, the effect was charming.
There were other things in the stocking, nuts and oranges and a toy engine, and
chocolate almonds and a clockwork mouse, but the rabbit was quite the best of all. For at least two hours, the Boy
loved him, and then aunts and uncles came to dinner, and there was a great rustling of tissue paper and unwrapping
of parcels, and in the excitement of looking at all the new presents, the Velveteen Rabbit was forgotten.
For a long time he lived in the toy cupboard or on the nursery floor, and no one
thought very much about him. He was naturally shy, and being made of velveteen, some of the more expensive
toys quite snubbed him. The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon everyone else, they
were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real. The model boat, who had lived through two seasons and lost
most of his paint, caught the tone from them and never missed an opportunity of referring to his rigging, in technical terms.
The Rabbit could not claim to be a model of anything, for he didn't know that real rabbits existed; he thought they were
all stuffed with sawdust like himself, and he understood that sawdust was quite out-of-date and should never be mentioned in modern circles.
Even Timothy, the jointed wooden lion, who was made by the disabled soldiers and should have had broader
views, put on airs and pretended he was connected with Governement. Between them all the poor little rabbit was made to feel
himself very insignificant and commonplace, and the only person who was kind to him at all was the skin horse.
The skin horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat
was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hair in his tail had been pulled out to string bead
necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their
mainsprings and pass away, and he knew they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful
and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the skin horse understand all about it.
