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Summary
Summary
Since its first publication in 1908, generations of adults and children have cherished Kenneth Grahame's classic, The Wind in the Willows."" For in this entrancing, lyrical world of gurgling rivers and whispering reeds live four of the wisest, wittiest, noblest, and most lovable creatures in all literature--Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad of Toad Hall. Like true adventurers, they glory in life's simplest pleasures and natural wonders. But it is Toad, cocky and irrepressible in his goggles and overcoat, whose passion for motorcars represents the free and fearless spirit in all of us; just as it's Toad's downfall that inspires the others to test Grahame's most precious theme--the miracle of loyalty and friendship.
Author Notes
Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh on March 3, 1859. When he was five years old, his mother died of scarlet fever and he nearly died himself, of the same disease. His father became an alcoholic and sent the children to Berkshire to live with relatives. They were later reunited with their father, but after a failed year, the children never heard from him again. Sometime later, one of his brothers died at the age of fifteen. He attended St. Edward's School as a child and intended to go on to Oxford University, but his relatives wanted him to go into banking.
He worked in his uncle's office, in Westminster, for two years then went to work at the Bank of England as a clerk in 1879. He spent nearly thirty years there and became the Secretary of the Bank at the age of thirty-nine. He retired from the bank right before The Wind in the Willows was published in 1908.
He wrote essays on topics that included smoking, walking and idleness. Many of the essays were published as the book Pagan Papers (1893) and the five orphan characters featured in the papers were developed into the books The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898). The Wind in the Willows (1908) was based on bedtime stories and letters to his son and it is where the characters Rat, Badger, Mole and Toad were created. In 1930, Milne's stage version was brought to another audience in Toad of Toad Hall. Grahame died on July 6, 1932.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Michael Hague illustrates three collections of time-proven tales. Originally published in 1910, Old Mother West Wind by Thornton W. Burgess introduces a group of enchanting woodland creatures, the Merry Little Breezes, Reddy Fox and Tommy Trout among them, to a new generation of readers. Michael Hague's Favorite Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales offers nine classic stories including The Snow Queen, Thumbelina and The Little Mermaid, all adapted by Jane Woodward. And lastly, Hague portrays the lush habitat of Toad, Mole, Rat and Badger in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. The handsomely designed oversize volumes present Hague's artwork in framed spreads and spot illustrations, just right for lap reading. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
Although these picture-book adaptations manage to provide choppy summaries of the plots, they pare down the stories to such a great extent that little of the charm of the originals remains. [cf2]Little Women[cf1] is the least successful adaptation, due to the largely episodic structure of Alcott's story. Adequate illustrations accompany the texts. From HORN BOOK Fall 2001, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Gr. 4-6. In spirit, in style, and in technique, Benson's illustrations for The Wind in the Willows are first cousins to the book's original ink drawings by Ernest H. Shepard, which many consider so nearly perfect any new artwork is superfluous. However, from the endpaper maps to the quiet scenes of woods and riverbanks to the comical pictures of Toad's adventures, Benson's sensitive cross-hatched drawings offer excellent interpretations of characters and events. The best choice for any library would be to add this to the collection and let children choose the version that suits them. If they come across the other editions later, it will be like looking through a cousin's photos of a long-ago family reunion: so familiar and so full of beloved characters, yet seen from a slightly different perspective. Any way you look at it, this new edition will be treasured. (Reviewed Feb. 1, 1996)0312136242Carolyn Phelan
Choice Review
A century ago, an Edwardian banker told his son stories that eventually became a beloved children's book--The Wind in the Willows, which tells of Rat and Mole, Toad and Badger, and their pastoral idylls. Now Lerer (Univ. of California, San Diego) provides fresh ways of understanding this classic. In an extended introduction, he locates The Wind in the Willows in the trajectory of Grahame's other literary works and in the context of the novel's late Victorian social setting. Lerer's compelling, beautifully written annotations (on virtually each page) provide the "backstory" of words like "piebald" and "antimacassar"; information on the tradition of animal fables; and details about Charles Darwin, Victorian homes and furniture, British law, birds, plants, boating terminology, myths, fairy tales, and much more. Lerer also traces intertextual allusions to the Romantic poets, John Ruskin, Shakespeare, and Gilbert and Sullivan. And in his afterword he illuminates the way in which illustrations of the text over the past century serve as "forms of response: critical, interpretive acts that reframe a literary work into a particular time, place, and sensibility." This lavish edition, with its bamboo endpapers and 37 illustrations (23 in color), will delight bibliophiles and indeed everyone who encounters it. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. E. R. Baer Gustavus Adolphus College
School Library Journal Review
Gr 1-4-Grahame's early-20th-century classic is enhanced by lovely watercolor illustrations that provide a contemporary and packed-with-charisma accompaniment. The anthropomorphized characters, all fashionably turned out in Edwardian costume, are vivified with expressive facial features and twinkling eyes. Detailed settings range from Ratty's cozy and colorfully decorated waterside home to the elegant grandeur of Toad Hall to Mole's understated tunnel-shaped abode. The beautifully composed outdoor scenes sparkle with season-appropriate hues: a springtime rowing jaunt down a sunlit river is framed by trailing willow trees, and a wintertime excursion into the Wild Wood is evoked with lavender skies, intertwined tree barks in swirling grays, and an overlay of heavy white snowflakes. In addition to the geometric drawings that embellish each chapter title, designs made from bold shapes and bright constrasting colors appear throughout, adding an Art Deco flair. Ranging from small vignettes to full-bleed double pages, the artwork embellishes almost every spread, engaging independent readers and reeling in younger listeners with entertaining antics, gentle humor, and genial affection.-Joy Fleishhacker, School Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
If the Edwardian age is not remembered as a decade of social discontent and growing international tension when the cracks in the British empire began to show, but as an idyllic last summer bathed in golden sunshine, the reason is largely to be found in children's literature. It was the age, if not of innocence, then of Jemima Puddleduck, Peter Pan and Mr Toad. Most of what became the canon of English writing for children appeared in a mere nine years. The Tale of Peter Rabbit , the first of the stories that Beatrix Potter modestly referred to as her "little books", came out in 1902 and was rapidly followed by six more. Peter Pan was first staged in 1904, E Nesbit's The Railway Children was published two years later, and then, in 1908, came Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows , soon to become one of the best loved of them all. The riverbank adventures of Mole, Ratty and Badger have now taken their place among the earliest memories of four generations and seem timeless, while the impossible, irrepressible Mr Toad got his own stage show, written by AA Milne, as early as 1929 and is still going strong. Yet Grahame's story and indeed the whole Edwardian renaissance of books for and about children were peculiarly the products of their own uneasy time. If The Wind in the Willows inspires nostalgia now, that is because it is itself saturated in longing for other times and other places. A year older than JM Barrie and a year younger than E Nesbit, Grahame was, like them, middle-aged when he produced his most enduring work. He was 49 when the book appeared, and described himself, accurately, as a "mid-Victorian". His was the generation that had known no other monarch than Victoria and that felt with her death in 1901 that they had lost "a sustaining symbol", as Henry James put it, adding, "the wild waters are upon us now". The Wild Wood and the Wide World are the twin menaces that loom over The Wind in the Willows . The sensible Water Rat wants nothing to do with either; it is only the Mole's naivety and Toad's hubris that force him to encounter them from time to time. The Mole soon learns his lesson. He is a creature, as he comes to understand, of the "frequented pasture" and the garden plot. "Nature in the rough" is not for him. The life of the riverbank, of messing about in boats, of ample picnics and long rambles, is essentially the life of suburbia, a rapidly growing but not entirely benign sign of the Edwardian times. The railway, which facilitates Toad's daring escape from prison, had by now brought the branch lines deep into the shires, but with them came the commuters and the red-brick villas that Grahame so disliked. His typically English ambivalence towards suburban life runs like the river through the book. On the one hand, there's the love of comfort and security, on the other, the chafing at its limitations and the sense that the pursuit of rural bliss may destroy the very thing that it desires. Grahame was himself part of the phenomenon. Having spent the happiest years of his childhood at Cookham Dene in Berkshire, he returned, shortly before he started work on The Wind in the Willows , with his family and took a house there, grumbling, like Ratty, about incomers and over-crowding. In the episode where Toad's caravan is overturned by a speeding motor car, the new Norton edition tells us that Grahame's original version had Ratty shouting after it: "Stockbrokers!" Grahame changed it later to "road hogs". As a recently retired secretary of the Bank of England he may have felt he was on thin ice. Other social nuances of home-counties life in the early 20th century are reflected along the river bank. Toad Hall, with its secret passages and Tudor mullions, was given up some time ago by the original family and sold to a Victorian magnate. It is now in the hands, like Britain itself, of a spendthrift, headstrong eldest son who indulges one fad after another and is treated with the respect his pretensions deserve by the older tenantry. Rat points out to Mole the place where they will moor their boat at Toad Hall, next to "That creek on the left, where the notice-board says, 'Private. No landing allowed'". Toad blithely sees his non-ancestral home as a desirable commercial property. He describes it as it might be advertised in the new magazine, Country Life, founded in 1897 in London to cater largely to the aspirations of the stockbroking classes: "an eligible self-contained gentleman's residence . . . dating in part from the 14th century but replete with every modern convenience . . . Five minutes from church, post-office, and golf-links." Like Beatrix Potter, Grahame was a keen observer of his characters' domestic arrangements. The opulence of Toad Hall contrasts with Mole End, where the humble collection of prints and popular plaster busts, the outdated Gothic lettering on the house sign and the peculiar garden ornament made of cockle shells, mark Mole out as the Mr Pooter of the riverbank. Badger's arts and crafts interior, complete with English oak settles and plain brick floor, shows a more cultivated taste. Indeed his home, with its central hall surrounded by "stout oaken comfortable-looking doors", is in the old English style of suburban country-house design pioneered by architects such as Norman Shaw and admired by connoisseurs at home and abroad. The trouble with Edwardian suburbia was that it was, as Grahame knew, an optical illusion. With its need for the golf club and the water closet as well as nature and history, it could best be found in the pages of Country Life where Gertrude Jekyll's artfully planned landscapes dissolved the garden boundaries, while Edwin Lutyens's houses turned newspaper magnates and mill-owners into county gentry. Great gusts of longing for something wilder and wider, whatever the risk, blow through The Wind in the Willows , as they stirred among many of Grahame's contemporaries. The fantasy of the "open road", which troubles Toad and even sometimes Ratty, found expression in a fashion, which Grahame followed, for long cross-country walks. "Tramping", as it was sometimes called, suggested a possible temporary change of class as well as scene. The poet WH Davies's The Autobiography of a Supertramp was published in the same year as The Wind in the Willows and was also a great success. It told of Davies's travels across thousands of miles of America, living rough and doing menial jobs, as he later recollected them in the tranquillity of Sevenoaks. For the riverbankers, however, there is no such possibility. Their caravan trip ends abruptly when they collide, literally, with modernity in the form of the car. Later, when Ratty is tempted by the sea rat to yield to the call of the Mediterranean, Mole rapidly talks him out of it. England itself in the early 20th century was suffering from a similar timidity or failure of nerve - what Hermann Muthesius, the shrewd German observer of English life and architecture, called in 1904 "a certain hardening of the arteries". The 1890s had been very different. Then it was possible briefly to belong to both suburbia and bohemia, and Grahame had. While rising smoothly through the ranks at the Bank of England to become its youngest ever secretary, he was also part of the literary set surrounding Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. He had written regularly for The Yellow Book, a magazine devoted to modern decadence in the persons of Max Beerbohm, Walter Sickert and WB Yeats. It was in its second issue that he published the story that made his name, "The Roman Road", a narrative cast as a conversation between a child and an adult, its message that only the artist and the child are imaginatively free. Reviewing Grahame's collection of stories The Golden Age , which was about, but not for, children, the arch-aesthete Algernon Swinburne found it "too praiseworthy for praise" in its lack of sentimentality about its subject. Then came the arrest of Oscar Wilde, the demise of The Yellow Book and a change of mood. Grahame's Dream Days , another collection of stories published in 1899, was followed by nine years of silence before The Wind in the Willows, which, when it appeared, disconcerted some critics who had admired his earlier work and were not expecting a children's book. The editors of the latest editions are not the first to detect a comic echo of Wilde's tragedy in the rise and fall of Mr Toad. Grahame's Berkshire home was not far from Reading Gaol, George Gilbert Scott's turreted Gothic revival prison, where Wilde was incarcerated. Reading is undoubtedly where Toad is taken from court, loaded with chains, having been sentenced to 20 years for being rude to a policeman. "Across the hollow-sounding drawbridge, below the spiky portcullis, under the frowning archway" Toad recedes. He is disappearing, though, not only into prison but into the Victorian fiction of the past that Reading Gaol represents. As he passes them, the prison warders sprout medieval halberds, there is a rack-chamber and a thumbscrew-room, and the police sergeant suddenly starts to talk in impenetrable Walter Scott Gothic: "Oddsbodikins . . . and a murrain on both of them!" Toad finds he is immured in the darkest dungeon in "the stoutest castle in all the length and breadth of Merry England". Merry England, Grahame knew, was a fiction, and it was finished. It could no longer offer a resort for the imagination as it had to the writers of the early 19th century who sought respite from their own times in the pious middle ages. The Edwardians knew much more about history and they were much less sure about God. Those of them who went on searching for the divine often found it enveloped in clouds of pantheism and neo-paganism, spiritualism and theosophy, the faiths of the doubtful. It is this diffuse but potent supernaturalism that appears in The Wind in the Willows in one strange, unsettling chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn". It is a section that abridgers of the book have always been quick to drop, though Grahame himself thought it essential. In it, Rat and Mole, searching for the Otter's lost child, are granted a vision of the great god Pan, a muscular, horned god, "the Friend and Helper", before whom the animals, "crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship". Whether it is the latent homo-eroticism of the vision or simply the sudden change of tone that makes the scene so uncomfortable, it is certainly a failure. But while artistically it is the weakest part of the book, it is at the same time the key to it. Pan's parting gift to Rat and Mole is "forgetfulness". They will not remember the pure happiness of their vision because if they did the memory would grow until it overshadowed and spoiled the rest of their lives with the knowledge that it could never be regained. The "little animals" would never be "happy and light-hearted" again. At Edward VII's coronation in 1901 Kipling's great fin-de-siecle poem, "Recessional", was read with its tolling refrain "Lest we forget - lest we forget". But for Grahame and his contemporaries the problem was that they couldn't forget. The enemy without, the stoats and the weasels from the Wild Wood, might be driven from Toad Hall with sticks, but memory, the foe within, haunted them along with all that they had lost or might be about to lose. And so they turned aside, as one view of history has it, from modernism and went back to the nursery. What they found there, though, was not so much a second childhood as the first, the ideal one, which they preserved forever for their readers - childhood as we may all remember it and as it never was. To order The Annotated Wind in the Willows , by Kenneth Grahame (Norton, pounds 28) for pounds 26 or The Wind in the Willows , edited by Seth Lerer (Harvard, pounds 25.95) for pounds 23.95, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. Caption: article-willows.1 The Wild Wood and the Wide World are the twin menaces that loom over The Wind in the Willows . The sensible Water Rat wants nothing to do with either; it is only the Mole's naivety and Toad's hubris that force him to encounter them from time to time. The Mole soon learns his lesson. He is a creature, as he comes to understand, of the "frequented pasture" and the garden plot. "Nature in the rough" is not for him. The life of the riverbank, of messing about in boats, of ample picnics and long rambles, is essentially the life of suburbia, a rapidly growing but not entirely benign sign of the Edwardian times. The railway, which facilitates [Toad]'s daring escape from prison, had by now brought the branch lines deep into the shires, but with them came the commuters and the red-brick villas that [Kenneth Grahame] so disliked. His typically English ambivalence towards suburban life runs like the river through the book. On the one hand, there's the love of comfort and security, on the other, the chafing at its limitations and the sense that the pursuit of rural bliss may destroy the very thing that it desires. Grahame was himself part of the phenomenon. Having spent the happiest years of his childhood at Cookham Dene in Berkshire, he returned, shortly before he started work on The Wind in the Willows , with his family and took a house there, grumbling, like Ratty, about incomers and over-crowding. In the episode where Toad's caravan is overturned by a speeding motor car, the new Norton edition tells us that Grahame's original version had Ratty shouting after it: "Stockbrokers!" Grahame changed it later to "road hogs". As a recently retired secretary of the Bank of England he may have felt he was on thin ice. Those of them who went on searching for the divine often found it enveloped in clouds of pantheism and neo-paganism, spiritualism and theosophy, the faiths of the doubtful. It is this diffuse but potent supernaturalism that appears in The Wind in the Willows in one strange, unsettling chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn". It is a section that abridgers of the book have always been quick to drop, though Grahame himself thought it essential. In it, Rat and Mole, searching for the Otter's lost child, are granted a vision of the great god Pan, a muscular, horned god, "the Friend and Helper", before whom the animals, "crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship". - Rosemary Hill.
Kirkus Review
Many famous artists have interpreted the antics and adventures of Mole, Ratty, Toad and Badger. Roberts takes a decidedly modern approach in this gift edition sure to appeal to another generation of readers. From the glimmer of silver-foiled lettering on the front cover to the full-color illustrations liberally dispersed throughout, readers of all ages can fully immerse themselves in Grahame's settings. Images executed in watercolor, ink, pen and pencil perfectly convey the postures of a distraught Mole or a momentarily contrite Toad, while the backgrounds impress with a range of seasons and circumstances. Washes of a dominant color are given fine details and highlights with touches of contrasting color, as when cool, frosty blues give way to a circle of white that glows around a young mouse choir, all snuggled in their vibrant orange-red scarves, as they sing carols. Humor abounds. Giggles will erupt at the picture of Toad alarmed and upside down, with the birds at the bottom of the page and the grassy bank slanting at the top. The variety of full-page, double-page and spot illustrations keeps the experience lively. Although purists may quibble at the omission of the chapter "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," those new to the book will not miss it (but may inquire who the mischievous boy--the Greek god Pan--is that appears on a few pages). All told, an elegantly designed volume ready to take its rightful place on any child's bookshelf. (Fantasy. All ages)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter I The River Bank The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said, "Bother!" and "O blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go!" till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow. "This is fine!" he said to himself. "This is better than whitewashing!" The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side. "Hold up!" said an elderly rabbit at the gap. "Sixpence for the privilege of passing by the private road!" He was bowled over in an instant by the impatient and contemptuous Mole, who trotted along the side of the hedge chaffing the other rabbits as they peeped hurriedly from their holes to see what the row was about. "Onion-sauce! Onion-sauce!" he remarked jeeringly, and was gone before they could think of a thoroughly satisfactory reply. Then they all started grumbling at each other. "How stupid you are! Why didn't you tell him--" "Well, why didn't you say--" "You might have reminded him--" and so on, in the usual way; but, of course, it was then much too late, as is always the case. It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting--everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering "whitewash!" he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working. He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before--this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver--glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea. As he sat on the grass and looked across the river, a dark hole in the bank opposite, just above the water's edge, caught his eye, and dreamily he fell to considering what a nice, snug dwelling-place it would make for an animal with few wants and fond of a bijou riverside residence, above flood level and remote from noise and dust. As he gazed, something bright and small seemed to twinkle down in the heart of it, vanished, then twinkled once more like a tiny star. But it could hardly be a star in such an unlikely situation; and it was too glittering and small for a glow-worm. Then, as he looked, it winked at him, and so declared itself to be an eye; and a small face began gradually to grow up round it, like a frame round a picture. A brown little face, with whiskers. A grave round face, with the same twinkle in its eye that had first attracted his notice. Small neat ears and thick silky hair. It was the Water Rat! Then the two animals stood and regarded each other cautiously. "Hullo, Mole!" said the Water Rat. "Hullo, Rat!" said the Mole. "Would you like to come over?" enquired the Rat presently. "Oh, it's all very well to talk," said the Mole rather pettishly, he being new to a river and riverside life and its ways. The Rat said nothing, but stooped and unfastened a rope and hauled on it; then lightly stepped into a little boat which the Mole had not observed. It was painted blue outside and white within, and was just the size for two animals; and the Mole's whole heart went out to it at once, even though he did not yet fully understand its uses. The Rat sculled smartly across and made fast. Then he held up his forepaw as the Mole stepped gingerly down. "Lean on that!" he said. "Now then, step lively!" and the Mole to his surprise and rapture found himself actually seated in the stern of a real boat. "This has been a wonderful day!" said he, as the Rat shoved off and took to the sculls again. "Do you know, I've never been in a boat before in all my life." "What?" cried the Rat, open-mouthed: "Never been in a--you never--well I--what have you been doing, then?" "Is it so nice as all that?" asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leant back in his seat and surveyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks, and all the fascinating fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him. "Nice? It's the only thing," said the Water Rat solemnly as he leant forward for his stroke. "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing--absolutely nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing," he went on dreamily: "messing--about--in--boats; messing--" "Look ahead, Rat!" cried the Mole suddenly. It was too late. The boat struck the bank full tilt. The dreamer, the joyous oarsman, lay on his back at the bottom of the boat, his heels in the air. "--about in boats--or with boats," the Rat went on composedly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. "In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not. Look here! If you've really nothing else on hand this morning, supposing we drop down the river together, and have a long day of it?" The Mole waggled his toes from sheer happiness, spread his chest with a sigh of full contentment, and leant back blissfully into the soft cushions. "What a day I'm having!" he said. "Let us start at once!" "Hold hard a minute, then!" said the Rat. He looped the painter through a ring in his landing-stage, climbed up into his hole above, and after a short interval reappeared staggering under a fat wicker luncheon-basket. "Shove that under your feet," he observed to the Mole, as he passed it down into the boat. Then he untied the painter and took the sculls again. "What's inside it?" asked the Mole, wriggling with curiosity. "There's cold chicken inside it," replied the Rat briefly: "cold tonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssand wichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater--" "O stop, stop!" cried the Mole in ecstasies. "This is too much!" "Do you really think so?" enquired the Rat seriously. "It's only what I always take on these little excursions; and the other animals are always telling me that I'm a mean beast and cut it very fine!" The Mole never heard a word he was saying. Absorbed in the new life he was entering upon, intoxicated with the sparkle, the ripple, the scents and the sounds and the sunlight, he trailed a paw in the water and dreamed long waking dreams. The Water Rat, like the good little fellow he was, sculled steadily on and forbore to disturb him. "I like your clothes awfully, old chap," he remarked after some half an hour or so had passed. "I'm going to get a black velvet smoking-suit myself some day, as soon as I can afford it." "I beg your pardon," said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. "You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me. So--this--is--a--River!" "The River," corrected the Rat. "And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!" "By it and with it and on it and in it," said the Rat. "It's brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we've had together! Whether in winter or summer, spring or autumn, it's always got its fun and its excitements. When the floods are on in February, and my cellars and basement are brimming with drink that's no good to me, and the brown water runs by my best bedroom window; or again when it all drops away and shows patches of mud that smells like plum-cake, and the rushes and weed clog the channels, and I can potter about dry shod over most of the bed of it and find fresh food to eat, and things careless people have dropped out of boats!" "But isn't it a bit dull at times?" the Mole ventured to ask. "Just you and the river, and no one else to pass a word with?" "No one else to--well, I mustn't be hard on you," said the Rat with forbearance. "You're new to it, and of course you don't know. The bank is so crowded nowadays that many people are moving away altogether. O no, it isn't what it used to be, at all. Otters, kingfishers, dabchicks, moorhens, all of them about all day long and always wanting you to do something--as if a fellow had no business of his own to attend to!" "What lies over there?" asked the Mole, waving a paw towards a background of woodland that darkly framed the water-meadows on one side of the river. "That? O, that's just the Wild Wood," said the Rat shortly. "We don't go there very much, we river-bankers." "Aren't they--aren't they very nice people in there?" said the Mole a trifle nervously. "W-e-ll," replied the Rat, "let me see. The squirrels are all right. And the rabbits--some of 'em, but rabbits are a mixed lot. And then there's Badger, of course. He lives right in the heart of it; wouldn't live anywhere else, either, if you paid him to do it. Dear old Badger! Nobody interferes with him. They'd better not," he added significantly. "Why, who should interfere with him?" asked the Mole. "Well, of course--there--are others," explained the Rat in a hesitating sort of way. "Weasels--and stoats--and foxes--and so on. They're all right in a way--I'm very good friends with them--pass the time of day when we meet, and all that--but they break out sometimes, there's no denying it, and then--well, you can't really trust them, and that's the fact." The Mole knew well that it is quite against animal-etiquette to dwell on possible trouble ahead, or even to allude to it; so he dropped the subject. "And beyond the Wild Wood again?" he asked; "where it's all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn't, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud-drift?" "Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World," said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all. Don't ever refer to it again, please. Now then! Here's our backwater at last, where we're going to lunch." Leaving the main stream, they now passed into what seemed at first sight like a little landlocked lake. Green turf sloped down to either edge, brown snaky tree-roots gleamed below the surface of the quiet water, while ahead of them the silvery shoulder and foamy tumble of a weir, arm-in-arm with a restless dripping millwheel, that held up in its turn a grey-gabled mill-house, filled the air with a soothing murmur of sound, dull and smothery, yet with little clear voices speaking up cheerfully out of it at intervals. It was so very beautiful that the Mole could only hold up both forepaws and gasp: "O my! O my! O my!" The Rat brought the boat alongside the bank, made her fast, helped the still awkward Mole safely ashore, and swung out the luncheon-basket. The Mole begged as a favour to be allowed to unpack it all by himself; and the Rat was very pleased to indulge him, and to sprawl at full length on the grass and rest, while his excited friend shook out the table-cloth and spread it, took out all the mysterious packets one by one and arranged their contents in due order, still gasping: "O my! O my!" at each fresh revelation. When all was ready, the Rat said, "Now, pitch in, old fellow!" and the Mole was indeed very glad to obey, for he had started his spring-cleaning at a very early hour that morning, as people will do, and had not paused for bite or sup; and he had been through a very great deal since that distant time which now seemed so many days ago. Excerpted from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Chapter 1 The River Bank | p. 1 |
| Chapter 2 The Open Road | p. 23 |
| Chapter 3 The Wild Wood | p. 43 |
| Chapter 4 Mr. Badger | p. 62 |
| Chapter 5 Dulce Domum | p. 82 |
| Chapter 6 Mr. Toad | p. 104 |
| Chapter 7 The Piper at the Gates of Dawn | p. 126 |
| Chapter 8 Toad's Adventures | p. 142 |
| Chapter 9 Wayfarers All | p. 164 |
| Chapter 10 The Further Adventures of Toad | p. 189 |
| Chapter 11 'Like Summer Tempests Came His Tears' | p. 213 |
| Chapter 12 The Return of Ulysses | p. 239 |
