Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by John Constable, John Everett Millais and John Atkinson Grimshaw. A mole abandons his spring-cleaning, meets a water rat, and is drawn into a summer of boats, picnics and the disasters of a rich toad with a motor-car. Grahame invented these creatures in bedtime stories and letters to his son Alastair, and published the book in 1908, the year he retired from the Bank of England. Between the comedy sits a chapter about a piper on an island at dawn, which no child asks about twice and no adult forgets. Sixty plates of riverbanks, hayfields and working boats, from Constable and Millais, mirror the riverbank world Mole and Rat knew.
