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to whom let us recur for a moment before we follow his more elderly, maybe more poetical, inventions. A rat-hole in a river bank, or a rabbit-hole by the roots of a secular beech—“dull must he be of soul who could pass by” either of these as a child without peopling them in imagination.

A rat-hole by the river’s brim
Only a rat-hole was to him—

If such blindness ever afflicted boy or girl in my benighted generation, how can it in this, for which Mr. Kenneth Grahame has written The Wind in the Willows, a book all concerned with these fascinating lairs? (I remember a school-fellow nudging me once in church with a “Now then, shout!” when the choir reached the verse “The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and so are the stony rocks for the conies”; and still in mature years I

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