The Wind in the Willows

One spring morning, a Mole grew so tired of spring-cleaning his underground home that he threw down his brush, cried “Bother spring-cleaning!” and dug his way straight up into the sunlight.He found himself in a great meadow, blinking in the warm sun, and felt he had never been so happy in his whole life.Wandering wherever he pleased, he brushed past a rude toll-collecting rabbit and rambled on through fields full of singing birds and budding flowers.

At last he came to the edge of a river — and since he had never seen one before in his life, he sat down on the bank, entirely bewitched by its sparkle and chatter.As he stared at a dark hole in the opposite bank, a small brown face with whiskers slowly appeared: it was the Water Rat.“Hullo, Mole!” called the Rat, and when Mole admitted he had never once been in a boat, the Rat looked utterly astonished.

The Rat rowed across in his little blue-and-white boat, helped Mole climb carefully aboard, and pushed off down the river.“Believe me,” the Rat said dreamily, “there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”He was still murmuring “messing about in boats” when the boat struck the bank and tipped him over backward, his heels waving in the air.

Picking himself up with a cheerful laugh, the Rat asked whether Mole had anything better to do than spend the whole day drifting down the river together.Mole, who could hardly believe his good fortune, begged him to start at once.The Rat fetched a fat picnic basket packed with more food than Mole could imagine — cold chicken, ham, sandwiches, and ginger beer — and they set off again.

Mole trailed a paw happily in the water, far too dazzled by the sunlight and the ripples to say a single word.“I like your clothes,” the Rat remarked after a while. “I’m going to buy myself a smart velvet suit one day, once I can afford it.”“And do you really live by the river?” Mole asked in wonder. “What a jolly life that must be!”

“By it, with it, on it, and in it,” the Rat answered proudly. “It’s brother and sister to me, and food and drink besides — I don’t want any other world.”When Mole pointed toward a dark stretch of trees across the water and asked what lay there, the Rat only said shortly, “That’s the Wild Wood — we river-bankers don’t go there very much,” and rowed steadily on.