Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows

10. THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF TOAD (continued)

    `The animals sat in the Ark and cried,
        Their tears in torrents flowed.
    Who was it said, "There's land ahead?"
        Encouraging Mr. Toad!

    `The army all saluted
        As they marched along the road.
    Was it the King? Or Kitchener?
        No. It was Mr. Toad.

    `The Queen and her Ladies-in-waiting
        Sat at the window and sewed.
    She cried, "Look! who's that HANDSOME man?"
        They answered, "Mr. Toad."'

There was a great deal more of the same sort, but too dreadfully conceited to be written down. These are some of the milder verses.

He sang as he walked, and he walked as he sang, and got more inflated every minute. But his pride was shortly to have a severe fall.

After some miles of country lanes he reached the high road, and as he turned into it and glanced along its white length, he saw approaching him a speck that turned into a dot and then into a blob, and then into something very familiar; and a double note of warning, only too well known, fell on his delighted ear.

`This is something like!' said the excited Toad. `This is real life again, this is once more the great world from which I have been missed so long! I will hail them, my brothers of the wheel, and pitch them a yarn, of the sort that has been so successful hitherto; and they will give me a lift, of course, and then I will talk to them some more; and, perhaps, with luck, it may even end in my driving up to Toad Hall in a motor-car! That will be one in the eye for Badger!'

He stepped confidently out into the road to hail the motor- car, which came along at an easy pace, slowing down as it neared the lane; when suddenly he became very pale, his heart turned to water, his knees shook and yielded under him, and he doubled up and collapsed with a sickening pain in his interior. And well he might, the unhappy animal; for the approaching car was the very one he had stolen out of the yard of the Red Lion Hotel on that fatal day when all his troubles began! And the people in it were the very same people he had sat and watched at luncheon in the coffee-room!