INTRODUCTION
There are familiarities which we will allow only ourselves to take. Your hands and my hands are no cleaner than any body else's hands, yet the sort of well-thumbed bread-and-butter which we prefer is that on which we have placed our own thumbs. It may be that to turn Mr. Kenneth Grahame into a play is to leave unattractive finger marks all over him, but I love his books so much that I cannot bear to think of anybody else disfiguring them. That is why I accepted a suggestion, which I should have refused in the case of any other book as too difficult for me, that I should dramatize The Wind in the Willows.
There are two well-known ways in which to make a play out of a book. You may insist on being faithful to the author, which means that the scene in the airplane on page 673 must be got in somehow, however impossible dramatically; or with somebody else's idea in your pocket, you may insist on being faithful to yourself, which means that by the middle of Act III everybody will realize how right the original author was to have made a book of it. There may be a third way, in which case I have tried to follow it. If, as is more likely, there isn't, then I have not made a play of The Wind in the Willows. But I have, I hope, made some sort of entertainment, with enough of Kenneth Grahame in it to appease his many admirers, and enough of me in it to justify my name upon the title-page.
Of course I have left out all the best parts of the book; and for that, if he has any knowledge of the theater, Mr. Grahame will thank me. With a Rat and Mole from the Green
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