Badger welcomes Rat and Mole to his large and cozy underground home, providing them with hot food, dry clothes, and reassuring conversation. Attempting to find their way home, Mole barks his shin on the boot scraper on Badger's doorscraper. Rat finds him as snow begins to fall in earnest. He gets lost in the woods, succumbs to fright, and hides among the sheltering roots of a tree. On a snowy winter's day, Mole goes to the Wild Wood, hoping to meet the elusive but virtuous and wise Badger. When a passing car scares his horse and causes the caravan to overturn into a ditch, Toad's craze for caravan travel is immediately replaced by an obsession with motorcars. His current craze is his horse-drawn caravan.

Toad is rich, jovial, friendly and kindhearted, but arrogant and rash he regularly becomes obsessed with current fads, only to abandon them abruptly. One summer day, Rat and Mole disembark near the grand Toad Hall and pay a visit to Toad. They get along well and spend many more days boating, with “Ratty” teaching Mole the ways of the river, with the two friends living together in Ratty's riverside home. Here he meets Rat, a water vole, who takes Mole for a ride in his rowing boat. He has fled his underground home and ends up at the river, which he has never seen before. With the arrival of spring and fine weather outside, the good-natured Mole loses patience with spring cleaning. There, he used the bedtime stories he had told Alastair as a basis for the manuscript of The Wind in the Willows.

He moved with his wife and son to an old farmhouse in Blewbury, Berkshire. In 1908, Grahame took early retirement from his position as secretary of the Bank of England. When Alastair was about four years old, Grahame would tell him bedtime stories, some of which were about a toad, and on his frequent boating holidays without his family he would write further tales of Toad, Mole, Ratty and Badger in letters to Alastair. He was born premature, blind in one eye, and was plagued by health problems throughout his life. The next year they had their only child, a boy named Alastair (nicknamed 'Mouse'). Kenneth Grahame married Elspeth Thomson, the daughter of Robert William Thomson in 1899, when he was 40.

The wind in the willows story