Alder [In the Woods]’s Reviews > The Wind in the Willows > Status Update

Poor toad 😭

Silly mole

“The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought that he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumbers and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. “

“He learnt to swim and to row, and he 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.”

“ The voice was still in his ears, but the turf wherein he had sprawled was clearly vacant. Not an Otter to be seen, as far as the distant horizon.
But again there was a streak of bubbles on the surface of the river. The rat hummed a tune, and the Mole recollected that animal-etiquette forbade any sort of comment on the sudden disappearance of one’s friend at any moment, for any reason or no reason whatever.”

“”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.”