The Wind in the Willows: on the river

The Water Rat and the Mole meet on the river in the first chapter, and the river stays the center of the book. Grahame knew the Thames from his childhood. He grew up at Cookham Dean in Berkshire and came back to the river as an adult. The 1908 edition had no pictures; the drawings people remember came from Ernest Shepard in 1931. Shepard visited the aging Grahame, who asked him to be kind to his animals.

Where this text comes fromThe Mole is not listening. Someone is talking to him throughout this passage and he hears none of it, because he has just met moving water for the first time and the narration stays inside his distraction rather than reporting the conversation. That choice is why the scene works: the reader is put in the same state as the character, aware that speech is happening and unable to attend to it.

What you might not noticeSomeone is speaking to the Mole through the whole of this passage and not one word of what he says is reported. The narration stays with the animal who is not listening. Source

What it trainsEight commas and two double quotation marks in 431 characters, across four sentences averaging twenty words. This edition sets its quotes as the plain vertical kind rather than the curly pairs most older texts here use, so the mark you press is the mark that appears, which is rarer on this site than you would expect. Seven capitals, three of them inside sentences. The longest word, intoxicated, is eleven letters and sits in the middle of the longest clause, at the point where the sentence has already changed subject once and the eye is working to keep up.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg