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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.
By the side of the river he trotted as one trots,
“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—absolute nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
“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.
We others, who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal’s inter-communications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word “smell,” for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling.
“Mole, old chap, I’m ready to drop. Sleepy is simply not the word.
I’m a nuisance, I know.” “You are, indeed,” said the Rat. “But I tell you, I’d take any trouble on earth for you, if only you’d be a sensible animal.”
THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN
Sick Pink Floyd reference lol
Toad sat up slowly and dried his eyes. Secrets had an immense attraction for him, because he never could keep one, and he enjoyed the sort of unhallowed thrill he experienced when he went and told another animal, after having faithfully promised not to.
Indeed, much that he related belonged more properly to the category of what-might-have-happened-had-I-only-thought-of-it-in-time-instead-of-ten-minutes-afterwards. Those are always the best and the raciest adventures; and why should they not be truly ours, as much as the somewhat inadequate things that really come off?
Mole, black and grim, brandishing his stick and shouting his awful war-cry, “A Mole! A Mole!”
“Toad he went a-pleasuring!” he yelled. “I’ll pleasure ’em!”
When the Toad—came—home! There was smashing in of window and crashing in of door, There was chivvying of weasels that fainted on the floor, When the Toad—came—home!
