Years before he wrote The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame published a very different sort of book: Pagan Papers, a wry, witty, wide-ranging collection of eighteen irresistible essays.

Strolling, loafing, smoking, collecting books and pondering, the author muses on the human condition. What to do about relatives who are in the way? What is the proper punishment for a bookbinder who takes too long at his job? Are free libraries an unmixed blessing?

More seriously: Can nothing make it worth our while not to quarrel with our fellows? Which is more desirable: memory or forgetfulness? Are we irrevocably cut off from the natural world, or might there still be a way back to it?