Good evening and welcome to bedtime with Babbage. Tonight I'll be reading The

Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real, by Marjorie Williams.

There once was 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 satin.

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 in 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 only 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 that 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with sawdust like himself, and he understood that sawdust was quite out of date and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 the government.

...