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Fables and tales

The Wind in the Willows: spring cleaning

Kenneth Grahame published 1908 498 characters easy

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.

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About this text

Kenneth Grahame worked at the Bank of England and rose to be its Secretary before he retired in 1908, the year this book appeared. The story grew out of bedtime tales and letters Grahame wrote for his son Alastair. Spring cleaning drives Mole out of his hole in the first paragraphs. President Theodore Roosevelt read it so often that he wrote to Grahame about the animals as if he knew them.

Where this text comes fromThe book opens with housework. Before any river, any boat or any conversation, there is an animal doing a tedious domestic job badly and getting steadily more irritated, and the escape that follows only means anything because the drudgery came first. The passage lists the tools in order, brooms and brushes and whitewash, in the accumulating way that makes the reader tired on the character’s behalf.

What you might not noticeThe compound spring-cleaning is hyphenated here, fifteen characters in a single unit, and it functions as a verb rather than a noun: the Mole is spring-cleaning, not doing the spring cleaning. Source

What it trainsAt 498 characters this is one of the longest fragments here, ninety-one words across three sentences with six commas and two semicolons. The semicolons separate stages of the same job rather than different ideas, so the passage accumulates rather than turning. One hyphenated compound runs fifteen characters. Four capitals, only one of them inside a sentence, which is a light Shift load for a passage of this length.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg

An oil sketch of a low riverbank with yellow trees, a small house and tall white clouds, Low Tide, Shirehampton, by Philip Wilson Steer.
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Public domain status: the author died in 1932, so copyright has expired. public domain, Project Gutenberg

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