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. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, ‘Up we go! Up we go!’ till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow."
Okay, keep on reading! I know you want to! Click here.
P.S. Why not go all 'willowy', pour yourself a glass of red, sit back, put up your feet, close your eyes, and listen to it here and here and here?
P.P.S. Long before "The Wind in the Willows", it was "The Golden Age" and "Dream Days" that 'made' Kenneth Grahame's name. They are stories written for children, and yet the adult can read the very same pages and find something else again ... I suggest you start with "The Olympians", those adults who have wholly forgotten how it feels to be young, before for you, too, "somehow the sun does not seem to shine so brightly as it used to; the trackless meadows of old time have shrunk and dwindled away to a few poor acres".
