“The question of lions came up, but Charlotte wanted none of it. "No, thank you," she said, firmly; "you'll be chained up till I'm quite close to you, and then you'll be loose, and you'll tear me in pieces. I know you lions!"

From the ingenious author of "The Wind in the Willows," return to the simple fantasy of childhood dreams, with little children off doing their own (mischievous) things in a quieter, gentler world.

In Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age, the children are orphans being raised by aunts and uncles (“Olympians,” one of the children, our narrator, calls them).

The stories follow the same group of children through their various adventures, so there is a common thread that runs through all the tales.

The children live in a rural area being raised by aunts and uncles. This allows them an enormous amount of freedom to wander and imagine as they see fit.

They hunt dragons, they peer into the lives of the adults, they play lovely made-up games with each other and all in all confound the adults around them.

KENNETH GRAHAME (1859-1932) was an English writer, most famous for The Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the classics of children's literature. He also wrote The Reluctant Dragon; both books were later adapted into Disney films, which are The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and The Reluctant Dragon.

"One of the few books which are well-nigh too praiseworthy for praise."

-Charles Swinburne