The Wind in the Willows has been able to break through some barriers, some kinds of objections from readers not born to its original milieu, that have managed to confine and specialize the audience of other books. It is very British upper bourgeois, pre-World War I, safe and snug. It is snobbish enough to long for a leisured class that excludes upstarts like stoats and weasels, and sexist enough to long for a world that excludes women. Also, Grahame can easily fall into "pretty" and breathless writing--see the opening of "The Wild Wood" and "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn"--which many find unpleasant: "Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant tangledlocks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it." Not only does no one write like that now, but no one wrote like that ever without trying to be indulgently showy with words. ...

Since its first publication in 1908, generations of adults and children have cherished Kenneth Grahame's classic, The Wind in the Willows. For in this entrancing, lyrical world of gurgling rivers and whispering reeds live four of the wisest, wittiest, noblest, and most lovable creatures in all literature--Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad of Toad Hall. Like true adventurers, they glory in life's simplest pleasures and natural wonders. But it is Toad, cockv and irrepressible in his goggles and overcoat, whose passion for motorcars represents the free and fearless spirit in all of us; just as it's Toad's downfall that inspires the others to test Grahame's most precious theme--the miracle of loyalty and friendship.

Introduction

1. THE RIVER BANK

2. THE OPEN ROAD

3. THE WILD WOOD

4. MR. BADGER

5. DULCE DOMUM

6. MR. TOAD

7. THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN

8. TOAD'S ADVENTURES

9. WAYFARERS ALL

10. THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF TOAD

11. "LIKE SLIMMER TEMPESTS CAME HIS TEARS"

12. THE RETURN OF ULYSSES