Dream Days

Dream Days
by Kenneth Grahame

Contents
THE TWENTY-FIRST OF OCTOBER
DIES IRAE
MUTABILE SEMPER
THE MAGIC RING
ITS WALLS WERE AS OF JASPER
A SAGA OF THE SEAS
THE RELUCTANT DRAGON
A DEPARTURE

THE TWENTY-FIRST OF OCTOBER
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.
Fortunately there existed a wide range of subjects, of healthier tone
than those already enumerated, in which we were free to choose for
ourselves, and which we would have scorned to consider education;
and in these we freely followed each his own particular line, often
attaining an amount of special knowledge which struck our ignorant
elders as simply uncanny. For Edward, the uniforms, accoutrements,
colours, and mottoes of the regiments composing the British Army had
a special glamour. In the matter of facings he was simply faultless;
among chevrons, badges, medals, and stars, he moved familiarly; he
even knew the names of most of the colonels in command; and he
would squander sunny hours prone on the lawn, heedless of challenge
from bird or beast, poring over a tattered Army List. My own
accomplishment was of another character --took, as it seemed to me, a
wider and a more untrammelled range. Dragoons might have
swaggered in Lincoln green, riflemen might have donned sporrans over
tartan trews, without exciting notice or comment from me. But did you
seek precise information as to the fauna of the American continent,
then you had come to the right shop. Where and why the bison
"wallowed"; how beaver were to be trapped and wild turkeys stalked;
the grizzly and how to handle him, and the pretty pressing ways of the
constrictor,--in fine, the haunts and the habits of all that burrowed,
strutted, roared, or wriggled between the Atlantic and the Pacific,--all
this knowledge I took for my province. By the others my equipment
was fully recognized. Supposing a book with a bear-hunt in it made its
way into the house, and the atmosphere was electric with excitement;
still, it was necessary that I should first decide whether the slot had
been properly described and properly followed up, ere the work could
be stamped with full approval. A writer might have won fame

throughout the civilized globe for his trappers and his realistic
backwoods, and all went for nothing. If his pemmican were not
properly compounded I damned his achievement, and it was heard no
more of.
Harold was hardly old enough to possess a special subject of his own.
He had his instincts, indeed, and at bird's-nesting they almost amounted
to prophecy. Where we others only suspected eggs, surmised possible
eggs, hinted doubtfully at eggs in the neighbourhood, Harold went
straight for the right bush, bough, or hole as if he carried a divining-rod.
But this faculty belonged to the class of mere gifts, and was not to be
ranked with Edward's lore regarding facings, and mine as to the habits
of prairie-dogs, both gained by painful study and extensive travel in
those "realms of gold," the Army List and Ballantyne.
Selina's subject, quite unaccountably, happened to be naval history.
There is no laying down rules as to subjects; you just possess them--or
rather, they possess you--and their genesis or protoplasm is rarely to be
tracked down. Selina had never so much as seen the sea; but for that
matter neither had I ever set foot on the American continent, the
by-ways of which I knew so intimately. And just as I, if set down
without warning in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, would have
been perfectly at home, so Selina, if a genie had dropped her suddenly
on Portsmouth Hard, could have given points to most of its frequenters.
From the days of Blake down to the death of Nelson (she never
condescended further) Selina had taken spiritual part in every notable
engagement of the British Navy; and even in the dark