"The Wind in the Willows"

[fiefoe]

My first introduction to Kenneth Grahame's deserved classic was via a neat tin pencil-box with two genial rodents in a boat on its cover. Being lyrical and episodic doesn't make the best of audiobooks, because the ear can't quite hold as much as the eye.

• ...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.
• At last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string-music had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet, debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin.
• the Wild Wood, which lay before him low and threatening, like a black reef in some still southern sea.
• The ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glances with each other; plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without distinction.
• (In the moonlight,) their old haunts greeted them again in other raiment, as if they had slipped away and put on this pure new apparel and come quietly back, smiling as they shyly waited to see if they would be recognised again under it.
• They fell a-twittering among themselves once more, and this time their intoxicating babble was of violet seas, tawny sands, and lizard-haunted walls.
• What seas lay beyond, green, leaping, and crested! What sun-bathed coasts, along which the white villas glittered against the olive woods! What quiet harbours, thronged with gallant shipping bound for purple islands of wine and spice, islands set low in languorous waters!
• classic seas whose every wave throbs with a deathless memory

<Animal society:>

• It was against animal-etiquette to dwell on possible trouble ahead, or even to allude to it.
• 'Proud, I'm sure,' said the Otter, and the two animals were friends forthwith.
• 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.
• No animal, according to the rules of animal-etiquette, is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter.
• 'He is indeed the best of animals,'  / 'I'm going to make an animal of you, my boy!'
• After a time he muttered gloomily, `I see it all now! What a pig I have been! A pig -- that's me! Just a pig -- a plain pig!'