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Prose

The Wind in the Willows, through the meadows

Kenneth Grahame published 1908 398 characters hard

Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting—everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering “whitewash!” he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens.

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About this text

Kenneth Grahame published The Wind in the Willows in 1908, the year he left his post as Secretary of the Bank of England. The book grew out of bedtime stories and letters written for his son Alastair. This walk comes from the first chapter, once the Mole has abandoned his spring cleaning. Project Gutenberg carries the full text.

Where this text comes fromAlmost every word in this passage is a verb of movement. The Mole rambles, thrusts, crosses and finds, and the sentence keeps accumulating actions without pausing to say what any of them feel like, because the character has been underground and is now doing all of it at once. Grahame is describing an animal let loose rather than a person on a walk, and the prose behaves accordingly: it does not settle anywhere long enough to describe a single field properly.

What you might not noticeThe passage contains a piece of quoted speech with an exclamation mark inside the quotation marks, and it arrives without a speaker being named anywhere in the sentence. Source

What it trainsSeven commas in two sentences of sixty words, so the clauses come in quick succession and none of them is complete on its own. The awkward moment is a long dash used inside a word pair with no spaces, joining thrusting to the word after it as one twenty-character run. An opening and a closing quotation mark appear as well, and both arrive as the straight double quote, so Shift and the quote key come round twice. Only two capital letters appear in 398 characters, both at the start of sentences.

From our blogHow to Learn Touch Typing Without Bad Habits

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg

A man in a dark, broad-brimmed hat and jacket painted in thick strokes against a shadowed wall, The Juvenile Lead, Walter Sickert, 1908.
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Public domain status: the author died in 1932, so copyright has expired. public domain, Project Gutenberg

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