is
home, was due to start in half-an-hour. "More luck!" said Toad, his
spirits rising rapidly, and went off to the booking-office to buy his
ticket.

He gave the name of the station that he knew to be nearest to the
village of which Toad Hall was the principal feature, and mechanically
put his fingers, in search of the necessary money, where his waistcoat
pocket should have been. But here the cotton gown, which had nobly stood
by him so far, and which he had basely forgotten, intervened, and
frustrated his efforts. In a sort of nightmare he struggled with the
strange uncanny thing that seemed to hold his hands, turn all muscular
strivings to water, and laugh at him all the time; while other
travellers, forming up in a line behind, waited with impatience, making
suggestions of more or less value and comments of more or less
stringency and point. At last--somehow--he never rightly understood
how--he burst the barriers, attained the goal, arrived at where all
waistcoat pockets are eternally situated, and found--not only no money,
but no pocket to hold it, and no waistcoat to hold the pocket!

To his horror he recollected that he had left both coat and waistcoat
behind him in his cell, and with them his pocket-book, money, keys,
watch, matches, pencil-case--all that makes life worth living, all
that distinguishes the many-pocketed animal, the lord of creation,
from the inferior one-pocketed or no-pocketed productions that hop or
trip about permissively, unequipped for the real contest.

In his misery he made one desperate effort to carry the thing off,
and, with a return to his fine old manner--a blend of the Squire and
the College Don--he said, "Look here! I find I've left my purse
behind. Just give me that ticket, will you, and I'll send the money on
to-morrow? I'm well-known in these parts."

The clerk stared at him and the rusty black bonnet a moment, and then
laughed. "I should think you were pretty well known in these parts,"
he said, "if you've tried this game on often. Here, stand away from
the window, please, madam; you're obstructing the other passengers!"

An old gentleman who had been prodding him in the back for some
moments here thrust him away, and, what was worse, addressed him as
his good woman, which angered Toad more than anything that had
occurred that evening.

Baffled and full of despair, he wandered blindly down the platform
where the train was standing, and tears trickled down each side of
hi