For the sake of trying something different here at Bibliophila, Please, Thursday is now Thenadays.
Today is Kenneth Grahame's birthday. Many of you may be scratching your heads right now, but he is the author of The Wind in the Willows. Thanks to the Project Gutenberg, many old classics are available for free online. (You should seriously check them out.) In honor of his birthday, I am going to post The Reluctant Dragon from Dream Days for you to enjoy. It was adapted into a feature film by Walt Disney in 1941, and it is also one of my family's favorites.
The Reluctant Dragon
by Kenneth Grahame
Footprints in the snow have been unfailing provokers of sentiment ever since snow was first a white wonder in this drab-coloured world of ours. In a poetry-book presented to one of us by an aunt, there was a poem by one Wordsworth in which they stood out strongly—with a picture all to themselves, too—but we didn't think very highly either of the poem or the sentiment. Footprints in the sand, now, were quite another matter, and we grasped Crusoe's attitude of mind much more easily than Wordsworth's. Excitement and mystery, curiosity and suspense—these were the only sentiments that tracks, whether in sand or in snow, were able to arouse in us.