plots. In Mr. Tod she offered her fans two villainous characters – Mr. Tod and Tommy Brock, a fox and a badger. The Tale of Mr. Tod and the book to follow in 1913, The Tale of Pigling Bland, were her last completely original works. Her marriage to William Heelis in October 1913 effectively put an end to her career as a children's author and illustrator, but she continued to produce sporadically over the following years at the demand of fans and publisher, though relying upon decades-old ideas and sketches rather than new concepts and illustrations. Composition and publication Influenced in part by the Uncle Remus stories, Mr. Tod is longer than Potter's earlier tales, and set in the Sawrey countryside at Bull Banks and Oatmeal Crag, two fields Potter acquired with Castle Farm in 1909. Pen and ink sketches outnumber the watercolors. Potter's publisher Harold Warne received the text of Mr. Tod in November 1911, though Potter had written the tale some time in the past. Warne had doubts about the name 'tod' for a fox, but Potter responded:"Tod" is surely a very common name for a fox? It is probably Saxon, it was the word in ordinary use in Scotland a few years ago, probably is still amongst the country people. In the same way "brock" or "gray" is the country name for a badger. I should call them "brocks" – both names are used in Westmoreland. "Brockholes", "Graythwaite" are examples of place names; also Broxbourne and Brockhampton [...] "Hey quoth the Tod/it's a braw bright night!/The wind's in the west/and the moon shines bright"—Mean to say you never heard that?" The tale is about undesirable elements of society. Warne objected to Potter's opening paragraph: "I am quite tired of making goody goody books about nice people. I will make a book about two disagreeable people, called Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod." He altered the text to read, "I have made many books about well-behaved people." Potter responded:If it were not impertinent to lecture one's publisher—you are a great deal too much afraid of the public, for whom I have never cared one tuppenny-button. [...] I have always thought the opening paragraph distinctly good, because it gets away from "once upon a time". She teased him about the name Bull Banks and his sensitivity to less than genteel expressions: "One thinks nothing of bulls and tups in the