Mutabile Semper / Kenneth Grahame

She stood on the other side of the garden fence, and regarded me gravely as I came down the road. Then she said, "Hi--o!" and I responded, "Hullo!" and pulled up somewhat nervously.

To tell the truth, the encounter was not entirely unexpected on my part. The previous Sunday I had seen her in church, and after service it had transpired who she was, this new-comer, and what aunt she was staying with. That morning a volunteer had been called for, to take a note to the Parsonage, and rather to my own surprise I had found myself stepping forward with alacrity, while the others had become suddenly absorbed in various pursuits, or had sneaked unobtrusively out of view. Certainly I had not yet formed any deliberate plan of action; yet I suppose I recollected that the road to the Parsonage led past her aunt's garden.

Dies Irae / Kenneth Grahame

Those memorable days that move in procession, their heads just out of the mist of years long dead--the most of them are full-eyed as the dandelion that from dawn to shade has steeped itself in sunlight. Here and there in their ranks, however, moves a forlorn one who is blind--blind in the sense of the dulled window-pane on which the pelting raindrops have mingled and run down, obscuring sunshine and the circling birds, happy fields, and storied garden; blind with the spatter of a misery uncomprehended, unanalysed, only felt as something corporeal in its buffeting effects.

The Twenty-First of October / Kenneth Grahame

In the matter of general culture and attainments, we youngsters stood on pretty level ground. True, it was always happening that one of us would be singled out at any moment, freakishly, and without regard to his own preferences, to wrestle with the inflections of some idiotic language long rightly dead; while another, from some fancied artistic tendency which always failed to justify itself, might be told off without warning to hammer out scales and exercises, and to bedew the senseless keys with tears of weariness or of revolt. But in subjects common to either sex, and held to be necessary even for him whose ambition soared no higher than to crack a whip in a circus-ring--in geography, for instance, arithmetic, or the weary doings of kings and queens--each would have scorned to excel. And, indeed, whatever our individual gifts, a general dogged determination to shirk and to evade kept us all at much the same dead level,--a level of Ignorance tempered by insubordination.

Orion / Kenneth Grahame

The moonless night has a touch of frost, and is steely-clear. High and

dominant amidst the Populations of the Sky, the restless and the

steadfast alike, hangs the great Plough, lit with a hard radiance as

of the polished and shining share. And yonder, low on the horizon, but

half resurgent as yet, crouches the magnificent hunter: watchful,

seemingly, and expectant: with some hint of menace in his port.

The Lost Centaur / Kenneth Grahame

It is somewhere set down (or does the legend only exist in the great

volume of ought-to-be-writ?) that the young Achilles, nurtured from

babyhood by the wise and kindly Cheiron, accustomed to reverence an

ideal of human skill and wisdom blent with all that was best and

noblest of animal instinct, strength and swiftness, found poor

humanity sadly to miss, when at last the was sent forth among his

pottering little two-legged peers. Himself alone he had hitherto

fancied to be the maimed one, the incomplete; he looked to find the

lords of earth even such as these Centaurs; wise and magnanimous atop:

below, shod with the lightning, winged with the wind, terrible in the

potentiality of the armed heel.

Aboard the Galley / Kenneth Grahame

He was cruising in the Southern Seas (was the Ulysses who told me this

tale), when there bore down upon him a marvellous strange fleet, whose

like he had not before seen. For each little craft was a corpse,

stiffly ``marlined,'' or bound about with tarred rope, as mariners do

use to treat plug tobacco: also ballasted, and with a fair mast and

sail stepped through his midriff. These self-sufficing ships knew no

divided authority: no pilot ever took the helm from the captain's

hands; no mutines lay in bilboes, no passengers complained of the

provisions.