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  Humphrey looked narrowly at his uncle, who merely blinked and gazed at the ceiling with wide, innocent eyes. Just at that moment, the butler announced the arrival of Mole, Ratty, and Otter.

  “Ah!” said Toad. “The very chums I’d hoped to see. You remember my nephew, Humphrey. He’s simply dotty about lawn tennis but can’t find anyone to play. Isn’t that right, Humphrey?”

  “But I—” began Humphrey.

  “’Course he is. Simply mad for it.”

  “But I’ve nev—”

  “Now, run along, the lot of you,” said Toad. “The gardener will find you some rackets.”

  Toad pushed them out the door. Then he hurried up the stone stairs, giggling and glancing about to make sure he was not being followed. He closed himself in Humphrey’s room and locked the door behind him. There, arrayed in the gloom, just as they’d left them, were all the necessary items to build an array of impressive fireworks: the string fuses, the paper tubes, the tin of powder.

  He’d helped Humphrey assemble dozens of them. How hard could it be? Any half-wit could do it. You simply took a dash of this, added a pinch of that, and voilà! Your very own rocket!

  What a snap. Any half-wit could do it.

  But first he needed more light. The mullioned window admitted little of the late afternoon sunshine, and the room was frightfully dim. So dim, really, that it was probably more dangerous trying to work without additional light. Toad considered the advice that Humphrey had tried to knock into his head a scant half hour before.

  A careful boy, mused Toad, a conscientious boy. Always has his uncle’s best interests at heart. But, he went on, if you consider the boy’s essential constitution, he’s such a nitpicker. Always nattering on about safety. You’d think he doesn’t trust me. Me! His very own uncle! That’s real cheek, if you think about it. Safety measures are all well and good, of course, but I don’t see how a small candle could cause any harm. And the work would go so much faster if I could see all the explosives lying about.

  Toad searched the room for a stub of candle or a lantern, but Humphrey, in a fit of caution, had removed them all.

  “No candles,” he said. “He did warn me about that. But surely a match, with its tiny flame, would do no harm. Let’s see,” he said, patting his waistcoat. “Have I got any matches?” He explored his various pockets and came across not only a packet of matches but his silver cigar case. “Isn’t it a fact,” he ruminated, “that pyrotechnics require a steady hand? Surely the calming influence of a few cigars would only boost one’s overall safety, would it not?25 On the other hand, Humphrey says that there are times when one must sacrifice personal comfort for safety. I suppose he’s right, which means I should only have one cigar to quiet my nerves while working with explosives. I am, after all, an extremely cautious toad.”

  He took out a cigar and a wooden match, pleased with his own sober forbearance and self-denial. He closed the packet.

  “Meticulous safety is what I’m all about. Why, it’s practically my middle name. Or”—he giggled—“two of my middle names, if you want to get all technical about it.”

  He struck the match, which immediately shattered into a handful of splinters. “Drat,” he said. He opened up the packet and took out another. He struck the second match, which fizzled damply.

  “Oh, bother,” he said. “What terrible cut-rate matches. I really must talk to the butler about it. A first-rate Toad such as I deserves first-rate matches. Never mind,” he said, striking the last one. “Third time’s luck—”

  Out on the tennis court, Mole was about to take his second serve, when there was a sudden deafening explosion, a tragic shattering of ancient glass, a sizzling eruption of rainbow-colored light. The animals turned to see the unforgettable sight of an airborne Toad rocketing past them up into the sky, up and up, as if propelled by a celestial tennis racket, rising higher and higher, emitting a hair-raising yell that grew fainter as he rose into the heavens.26 And then … and then … Ah, yes, we come—as we must—to the inevitable “and then.” Having reached the top of his most impressive arc, Toad, sadly, was compelled to surrender himself to that most insistent of physical laws, the Law of Gravity, which suddenly demanded that he trade his astonishing upward course for an equally astonishing downward course. He began his return to earth, tumbling end over end in a fascinating display of gymnastics, still emitting an unearthly cry that now grew louder as he approached the observers on the lawn below.27 He narrowly missed the sundial, with the certain maiming and mangling that alighting there would have entailed, and came to earth in the relative safety of the delphinium bed, which, in a stroke of great good fortune, the gardener had mulched the day before. His gaping friends, who had observed this wondrous spectacle frozen in shock, shook off their paralysis and rushed to his aid with cries of alarm, fearing the worst. To their amazement, Toad sat up and looked around him, singed and lightly smoking. Ratty and Mole batted out the glowing embers still clinging to his charred lapels. A disagreeable odor of burnt tweed lingered in the air.

  “Oh, Uncle Toad,” cried Humphrey, fighting back tears. “You’ve blown yourself up.”

  Toad looked at his nephew and friends. Behind them, the servants were setting up a hue and cry and charging about with water buckets to extinguish the fire licking at the priceless tapestries.

  “My goodness, what a wild ride!” Toad said. “I must have reached terminal velocity quite quickly. It was positively ballistic!”

  “Uncle,” said Humphrey in wonder, “are you all right?”

  “Never better,” remarked Toad cheerily. “Although, come to think of it, I do have something of a headache. Must have hit my head. Humphrey, my boy, you did warn me. You did tell me in the strictest of terms not to trigger a detonation wave in the powder, although it’s more than just a simple shock wave, what with explosive combustion and all. But did I heed you? Not a bit! What a muddled old Toad I am! Shall we go in to dinner?”

  He toddled off happily enough, leaving the others trailing in his wake, staring with wide eyes. Dinner was briefly delayed while the servants ensured that every last spark had been extinguished. When the butler finally came in to serve, frowsy and dusted with soot, his facial expression was pursed, as if he’d been sucking lemons.

  Toad took no notice. He appeared to be absorbed in thought. During the soup course, he said, apropos of nothing, “In any right-angled triangle bounded by three squares, the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares whose sides are the other two legs. Did you know that, Humphrey?”

  Humphrey and the others gaped at him as he blithely spooned up his mock-turtle soup.

  “Pardon me, Uncle Toad,” stammered Humphrey. “What was that you said?”

  “Oh, just a small quote from our friend Pythagoras, the Father of Numbers.”28

  Ratty and Mole and Otter looked at one another in confusion.

  During the fish course, Toad stated, “The smallest prime numbers are, as I’m sure you know, two, three, five, seven, and eleven. There is no largest prime number, according to Euclid.29 I say, this fish is p’tickly good. Humphrey, do have another piece of fish. It’s brain food, you know. And,” he added kindly, “although I’m reluctant to say it about any relation of mine, you strike me as a bit slow for your age. So eat up—there’s a good boy.”

  During the meat course, Toad said, “Archimedes was right, as I’m sure you know. The total weight of displaced water in the bath equals the weight of a floating object.30 What marvelous roast beef! Cook has certainly outdone herself tonight.”

  During pudding, Toad said, “An object dropped in free fall accelerates at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared.”

  By the time the port was passed, Humphrey had regained his powers of speech and was able to say, “Uncle Toad, I fear that you have suffered some kind of injury.” He studied his uncle in amazement.

  “Nonsense, my boy,” said Toad. “Never felt better in my life. Does anyone care to
join me in the library to work on Fermat’s Last Theorem? That’s always such rousing fun. Or perhaps a game of three-dimensional chess? Anyone?”

  Mole said, “Toad, are you absolutely sure you’re all right?”

  Ratty said in concern, “I think he’s lost his mind.”

  Humphrey shouted, “Eureka!31 He may in fact have lost his mind, but he’s found a much, much better one!” The other animals regarded him, stupefied.

  “I believe, Uncle Toad,” he went on, “that you are suffering from Poffenbarger’s Syndrome, a rare form of genius caused by a sharp blow to the head. Yes, that must be it! You have sudden-onset, trauma-induced massive intelligence. Good heavens!” Humphrey turned excitedly to the others. “I’ve read about this. There are only three verified cases in all the medical literature. Uncle Toad, this is smashing! Do you mind if I write a paper about you? I could submit it to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Oh, it’s going to be the grandest summer ever!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Toad the Genius

  In which Toad’s enormous brainpower solves a great mystery of the universe.

  Toad resurrected a large blackboard from the nursery and had it wheeled into the library, where he spent his time pondering life’s Great Big Questions (as Humphrey called them).

  One morning, while still in his pajamas, Toad solved the thorny chicken-or-egg dilemma which had confounded deep thinkers for centuries. Over luncheon, he irrefutably calculated the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin. During afternoon tea, he incisively proved the sound of one hand clapping.32

  The next morning, he memorized the entire works of Shakespeare. That afternoon, he recited all of Hamlet by heart for a rapt audience of his friends, playing each of the parts, even poor, mad Ophelia, moving the Mole to tears with his spot-on interpretation of her floating down the river on her back like an otter, singing aquatic laments until the water soaked her brocade skirts and dragged her to a muddy end. That evening, he devised a surefire defense to the counter-Vronsky gambit in chess, which heretofore had been considered unbeatable. Just before bed, he indulged in the soothing mental exercise of memorizing the value of pi to seven hundred decimal places.

  There seemed to be no intellectual area in which he did not excel. Humphrey attempted to measure his IQ, but the various tests wouldn’t go that high. The best estimate he could come up with was “really, really whopping.”

  “Is there nothing he cannot do?” mused the Mole as he and the Rat trudged wearily home after another long evening of being assailed with endless lectures on the obscure theories, paradigms, and conjectures tumbling out of Toad’s fevered brain.

  “Apparently not,” yawned the Rat. “There’s no doubt that a good deal of sense has been biffed into him, but perhaps too much, if you ask me. I, for one, am getting tired of feeling thick as a brick in his company. Whatever happened to our flannel-brained, boneheaded friend? Toady, of the simplest of simple minds. I do miss him.”

  “I’ve asked Humphrey about it on the sly,” confessed Mole, “but he isn’t sure if this condition, this Puffin thingummy, is permanent or not. The first, er, victim, got so sick of being pestered about it that he ran away to live as a hermit in the Carpathian Mountains. Humphrey doesn’t know what happened to the others.”

  “Probably run out of town by their friends after driving them all batty,” said Rat. “Why, even his poetry is better than mine—although I can’t bear to admit it—and he isn’t half trying! It’s just too much.”

  Mole felt that he ought to reassure his friend on this score, since the Rat’s ditties were close to his heart. But in truth, even Mole (who had something of a tin ear when it came to verse) could tell that the Poffenbargered Toad’s poetry was of a much higher quality than the Rat’s. Being a wise and kind soul, however, Mole made no comment.

  Word of Toad’s prodigious brainpower spread throughout the land. Letters of invitation from the great universities arrived, begging a visit from the erudite Mr. Toad. Cambridge, Oxford, Yale—how the clamor went up for the learned toad. Bushels of mail came daily, taxing the temper of the local postmouse no end.

  * * *

  Just after sunrise one morning, as Humphrey was rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he glanced out the window to see his uncle standing on the east lawn, holding what appeared to be a stopwatch and a plate of chocolate biscuits, speaking emphatically to a small rodent, an American woodchuck. Humphrey noticed a big pile of sticks between the two. Then the woodchuck, whom Toad had hired as his laboratory assistant for the day, began throwing—or “chucking”—sticks across the lawn as quickly as his tiny arms permitted, while Toad timed him with the stopwatch. The resulting paper, later published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Intense Philosophical Rumination and Exhaustive Cogitation, was a triumph. Humphrey, wide-eyed with admiration, read the rough manuscript pages as Toad scribbled them at breakfast and slid them down the long dining table:

  HOW MUCH WOOD WOULD A WOODCHUCK CHUCK?

  HARD DATA AT LAST

  By A. Toad, Esq.

  Since the dawn of time, the world’s deepest thinkers have struggled with the Woodchuck Chucking Dilemma (hereafter, WCD). I intend to settle the question once and for all; namely, can a woodchuck actually chuck wood and, if so, how much? The question calls for a Scientist with a thorough understanding of forestry, aerodynamics, and zoology. Members of the Royal Society, I stand before you as just such a Scientist.

  Let us begin by setting one thing straight: not all wood can be chucked. An adult woodchuck, Marmota monax, weighs approximately 8 pounds and can hardly be expected to lift an average log, weighing 10 pounds, much less chuck it any significant distance. In addition, the typical Marmota, although of sturdy build, has comparatively short arms relative to his torso, making hurling activities that much more difficult. Perhaps this is why the WCD ends with the wistful caveat “if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”

  Therefore, the first issue is to turn the typical log into smaller segments, i.e., kindling, of a size that the subject can grasp and throw. Once this is accomplished, the next obstacle turns out to be, quite unexpectedly, one of psychological motivation. If you simply ask the rodent to chuck kindling, even politely, you will get nothing but a few cheeky remarks for your trouble. However, offer the greedy blighter as many chocolate biscuits as he can eat, and you will get a markedly different result.

  The details of this study are exceedingly complex and unbearably technical. Therefore, to avoid overtaxing the brains of millions of innocent readers, I proceed directly to the results.…33

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Toad made a surprise announcement at breakfast. “Well, it’s all decided,” he said, champing his kippers.34 “Based on my breakthrough Marmota paper, Cambridge University has offered me the Lumbago Endowed Chair of Extremely Abstruse Knowledge, a position that has been in existence for five hundred years. I’m to be Professor Toad, the Lumbagian Scholar of Trinity College! When I think of the role of the many great men who have held the chair before me, extending back into the mists of history, a mighty unbroken chain of sheer intellectual power … and when I realize that I, Toad, have been called to stand upon the shoulders of these giants, to share in their legacy, or even transcend it (for I am a toad without peer) … I’m overcome just thinking about it.”

  He dabbed his eyes and said to Humphrey, “I’ve asked Mole and Ratty to keep an eye on you while I’m gone. And, of course, there’s the butler and Cook. And you have your experiments to keep you busy. But, for the moment, the tailor’s coming this afternoon to fit me with my cap and gown. The Lumbagian Scholar must have all the proper accoutrements of his office: a mortarboard, an ermine hood, a black gown lined with crimson silk.35 Quite the dashing rig, if I do say so myself. Most appropriate for a learned scholar of my preeminence.”

  There followed a week of much busy preparation and packing of bags and trunks, and Ratty managed to talk his friend into taking the train, severely reminding him of t
he past scrapes he’d found himself in when he’d allowed himself close proximity to motor-cars. Toad—the new, improved, more sensible Toad—wisely agreed.

  The big day came. The friends assembled at the station under a cloudless sky to bid adieu to Mr. Toad—now Professor Toad—togged out in his new gown, with his mortarboard tipped at a rakish angle. A new pair of tortoiseshell glasses added the final scholarly touch.

  There was much fussing over the mountain of baggage, and double-checking of tickets, and triple-checking of tags, all the anxious dithering details that occupy the traveler while he waits for his train. Toad dispensed shillings to the youngsters in the crowd and pressed half crowns into the paws of the hard-working porters. A gaggle of juvenile stoats (who, for want of something better to do, slouched insolently against the station wall in the way adolescents will insist on doing) watched the proceedings, sneering when they thought no one was looking, and muttering rubbishy remarks when they thought no one was listening.

  One of them had the audacity to mumble, “Where’s your big fat balloon now, Mr. Toad?” Another, egged on by the cheek of his comrade, added the scathing comment, “Yah!”

  Fortunately, Toad did not hear these remarks. But the Mole, with his acute sense of hearing, heard them very well. He sent the louts packing with an indignant quiver of his whiskers and the threat of physical correction.

  It was time for Professor Toad to bid them farewell and board the train. Hands were solemnly shaken, and shoulders were heartily clapped. More than one lip was noted to tremble during the sincere exchanges of bon voyage and good luck and promises to write weekly.

  Toad boarded the train and leaned out his compartment window. “My dear friends,” he said, “my very dear friends. I shall miss you all most dreadfully, but a higher duty calls, to say nothing of fame and glory. I’m off to my rendezvous with Destiny! Humphrey, be a good boy and mind your elders.”