The Wind in the Willows

by Kenneth Grahame

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.

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.

'Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING—absolute nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

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.

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!'

The Rat hummed a tune, and the Mole recollected that animal-etiquette forbade any sort of comment on the sudden disappearance of one's friends at any moment, for any reason or no reason whatever.

Packing the basket was not quite such pleasant work as unpacking' the basket. It never is.

This day was only the first of many similar ones for the emancipated Mole, each of them longer and full of interest as the ripening summer moved onward. He learnt to swim and to row, and entered into the joy of running water; and with his ear to the reed-stems he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them.

'So simple, so good-natured, and so affectionate. Perhaps he's not very clever—we can't all be geniuses; and it may be that he is both boastful and conceited. But he has got some great qualities, has Toady.'

Here to-day, up and off to somewhere else to-morrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!

'I DON'T talk about my river,' replied the patient Rat. 'You KNOW I don't, Toad. But I THINK about it,' he added pathetically, in a lower tone: 'I think about it—all the time!'

Who ever heard of a door-mat TELLING anyone anything? They simply don't do it. They are not that sort at all. Door-mats know their place.'

And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back,

'First, we feel it stirring within us, a sweet unrest; then back come the recollections one by one, like homing pigeons. They flutter through our dreams at night, they fly with us in our wheelings and circlings by day. We hunger to inquire of each other, to compare notes and assure ourselves that it was all really true, as one by one the scents and sounds and names of long-forgotten places come gradually back and beckon to us.'

But to-day all that seems pale and thin and very far away. Just now our blood dances to other music.'