Skip to content

Prose

The Wind in the Willows, a frosty field

Kenneth Grahame published 1908 293 characters medium

The sheep ran huddling together against the hurdles, blowing out thin nostrils and stamping with delicate fore-feet, their heads thrown back and a light steam rising from the crowded sheep-pen into the frosty air, as the two animals hastened by in high spirits, with much chatter and laughter.

Or simply start typing.

Your record
Day streak
Time so far
0
Words per minute
0
Accuracy
100%

About this text

This winter field belongs to the chapter called Dulce Domum, in which the Mole and the Rat walk home across country. Dulce Domum is Latin for sweet home. The phrase comes from a school song. The book was read by Theodore Roosevelt and by generations of children since. Project Gutenberg carries the full text.

Where this text comes fromThe whole scene is observed from about knee height. Two small animals are crossing a winter field and the description keeps to what they can see from down there: legs, hurdles, breath in the cold, the movement of a flock from below rather than from a farmer’s eye. That low camera is consistent through the book and it is why the countryside in it feels much larger than it is. The chapter is the one about going home, and the field is the last thing between them and it.

What you might not noticeThe sheep are given delicate fore-feet, with the hyphen, and thin nostrils blowing out in the cold. The detail works because it is exactly what an animal at ground level would notice first about another animal. Source

What it trainsForty-eight words in a single sentence, four commas, two hyphens and one full stop at the very end. One capital letter appears in the whole of 293 characters, and that is not a record: five other passages here also need Shift exactly once, so call it a six-way tie for the lightest load on the little finger. What this passage does own is the absence of a landmark. Nothing stronger than a comma divides it, so the clauses stack up and the eye has nothing to aim at. The hyphenated fore-feet and sheep-pen are both written as single units where modern English would separate them, and the second arrives late, when the hand has stopped expecting one.

From our blogHow to Learn Touch Typing Without Bad Habits

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg

A stone arch bridge over a river below a hillside town with a church tower, The Bridge, Bridgnorth, Philip Wilson Steer, 1901.
Wikimedia Commons
Advertisement

Public domain status: the author died in 1932, so copyright has expired. public domain, Project Gutenberg

Advertisement

More texts in this category