«It was a cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky
overhead, when he slipped out of the warm parlour
into the open air. The country lay bare and entirely
leafless around him, and he thought that he had never
seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things
as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her
annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes
off.[...] He was glad that he liked the country
undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had
got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine
and strong and simple.» —The Wind in the Willows,
Kennet Grahame
