oks have showed;
But never a name to go down to fame
Compared with that of Toad!

'The clever men at Oxford
Know all that there is to be knowed.
But they none of them know one half as much
As intelligent Mr. Toad!

'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-r