After leaving his deep home, the mole arrives to a river he has never seen before. Toad is wealthy, merry, amiable, and kindhearted, but he is also haughty and has a quick temper. He frequently becomes fixated on popular trends before dumping them out of the blue. Toad's passion for caravan travel is supplanted with a fixation with motorcars after a passing automobile scares his horse into a ditch.
In an effort to meet the moral and wise Badger, Mole and Rat travel to the Wild Wood to find him. They discover that Toad has been in seven automobile accidents, has visited the hospital three times, and has racked up significant penalties. When the moment is perfect, Badger and Mole decide to come up with a strategy to keep Toad from harming himself. The three of them place Toad under house imprisonment with themselves serving as guards as spring approaches, but Toad connives Ratty into leaving so he may escape.
Badger, Rat, Mole, and Toad attack the partying Wild-Wooders who are unaware that they are being ambushed in Toad Hall. The book includes a number of standalone short stories starring Rat and Mole, including one in which they come across the untamed god Pan while looking for Otter's son Portly. The majority of these come in between the chapters that detail Toad's exploits.
Scottish-born Edinburgh native Kenneth Grahame was a British author who lived from 8 March 1859 to 6 July 1932. His most well-known works were The Reluctant Dragon and The Wind in the Willows (1908), both classics of children's literature. His mother died from scarlet fever when he was five years old, and his father was a sheriff's replacement. It is believed that the author was influenced by the setting of The Wind in the Willows. In 1879, Grahame received a job assignment at the Bank of England. He advanced through the ranks until taking a medical retirement as its Secretary in 1908. Three bullets were fired at Grahame, but none of them hit him. He was driven into retirement, reportedly for health reasons. In 1899, Grahame wed Elspeth Thomson, a woman who was Robert William Thomson's daughter. Alastair (also known as "Mouse"), the couple's only child, was born blind in one eye and had other medical issues. In 1920, Grahame's son took his own life on a railway line. When author Kenneth Grahame died in 1932, he left behind a legacy that would forever make childhood and literature more blessed. At Holywell Cemetery in Oxford, he was buried next to his son Alastair in the same cemetery as his wife Elspeth.
