A vivid evocation of boyhood heroic fantasies.  When the young boy is told off or otherwise put down by the grown ups, he often restores his faith in life by imagining outrageous victories, naval and otherwise, and dreaming of ridding the world of pirates and other evils and returning triumphant to the admiring and inevitably humbled relatives, to whom the boy then shows the most gracious magnanimity.
‘In spite of the deadly work of my grape-gorged carronade, our foe still outnumbered us, I reckoned, by three to one.’
Source: Kenneth Grahame, ‘Dies Irae’, Dream Days, illus. by Maxfield Parrish (Edin.: Paul Harris Publishing, 1983), p. 132
