Fairy Tales for KidsRudyard Kipling – https://kidsfairytale.club/en Fairy Tales for Kids from Famous Authors Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:38:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://kidsfairytale.club/en/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cropped-icon_256-32x32.png Rudyard Kipling – Fairy Tales for Kids https://kidsfairytale.club/en 32 32 how the camel got his hump https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-camel-got-his-hump/ https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-camel-got-his-hump/#respond Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:38:00 +0000 https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-camel-got-his-hump/ Now this is the next tale, and it tells how the Camel got his big hump.
In the beginning of years, when the world was so new and all, and the Animals were just beginning to work for Man, there was a Camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work; and besides, he was a Howler himself. So he ate sticks and thorns and tamarisks and milkweed and prickles, most `scruciating idle; and when anybody spoke to him he said `Humph!` Just `Humph!` and no more.
Presently the Horse came to him

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Now this is the next tale, and it tells how the Camel got his big hump.
In the beginning of years, when the world was so new and all, and the Animals were just beginning to work for Man, there was a Camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work; and besides, he was a Howler himself. So he ate sticks and thorns and tamarisks and milkweed and prickles, most `scruciating idle; and when anybody spoke to him he said `Humph!` Just `Humph!` and no more.
Presently the Horse came to him on Monday morning, with a saddle on his back and a bit in his mouth, and said, `Camel, O Camel, come out and trot like the rest of us.`
`Humph!` said the Camel; and the Horse went away and told the Man.
Presently the Dog came to him, with a stick in his mouth, and said, `Camel, O Camel, come and fetch and carry like the rest of us.`
`Humph!` said the Camel; and the Dog went away and told the Man.
Presently the Ox came to him, with the yoke on his neck and said, `Camel, O Camel, come and plough like the rest of us.`
`Humph!` said the Camel; and the Ox went away and told the Man.
At the end of the day the Man called the Horse and the Dog and the Ox together, and said, `Three, O Three, I`m very sorry for you (with the world so new-and-all); but that Humph-thing in the Desert can`t work, or he would have been here by now, so I am going to leave him alone, and you must work double-time to make up for it.`
That made the Three very angry (with the world so new-and-all), and they held a palaver, and an indaba , and a punchayet , and a pow-wow on the edge of the Desert; and the Camel came chewing on milkweed most `scruciating idle, and laughed at them. Then he said `Humph!` and went away again.
Presently there came along the Djinn in charge of All Deserts, rolling in a cloud of dust (Djinns always travel that way because it is Magic), and he stopped to palaver and pow-pow with the Three.
`Djinn of All Deserts,` said the Horse, `is it right for any one to be idle, with the world so new-and-all?`
`Certainly not,` said the Djinn.
`Well,` said the Horse, `there`s a thing in the middle of your Howling Desert (and he`s a Howler himself) with a long neck and long legs, and he hasn`t done a stroke of work since Monday morning. He won`t trot.`
`Whew!` said the Djinn, whistling, `that`s my Camel, for all the gold in Arabia! What does he say about it?`
`He says “Humph!”` said the Dog; `and he won`t fetch and carry.`
`Does he say anything else?`
`Only “Humph!”; and he won`t plough,` said the Ox.
`Very good,` said the Djinn. `I`ll humph him if you will kindly wait a minute.`
The Djinn rolled himself up in his dust-cloak, and took a bearing across the desert, and found the Camel most `scruciatingly idle, looking at his own reflection in a pool of water.
`My long and bubbling friend,` said the Djinn, `what`s this I hear of your doing no work, with the world so new-and-all?`
`Humph!` said the Camel.
The Djinn sat down, with his chin in his hand, and began to think a Great Magic, while the Camel looked at his own reflection in the pool of water.
`You`ve given the Three extra work ever since Monday morning, all on account of your `scruciating idleness,` said the Djinn; and he went on thinking Magics, with his chin in his hand.
`Humph!` said the Camel.
`I shouldn`t say that again if I were you,` said the Djinn; you might say it once too often. Bubbles, I want you to work.`
And the Camel said `Humph!` again; but no sooner had he said it than he saw his back, that he was so proud of, puffing up and puffing up into a great big lolloping humph.
`Do you see that?` said the Djinn. `That`s your very own humph that you`ve brought upon your very own self by not working. To-day is Thursday, and you`ve done no work since Monday, when the work began. Now you are going to work.`
`How can I,` said the Camel, `with this humph on my back?`
`That`s made a-purpose,` said the Djinn, `all because you missed those three days. You will be able to work now for three days without eating, because you can live on your humph; and don`t you ever say I never did anything for you. Come out of the Desert and go to the Three, and behave. Humph yourself!`
And the Camel humphed himself, humph and all, and went away to join the Three. And from that day to this the Camel always wears a humph (we call it `hump` now, not to hurt his feelings); but he has never yet caught up with the three days that he missed at the beginning of the world, and he has never yet learned how to behave.

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how the first letter was written https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-first-letter-was-written/ https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-first-letter-was-written/#respond Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:38:00 +0000 https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-first-letter-was-written/ Once upon a most early time was a Neolithic man. He was not a Jute or an Angle, or even a Dravidian, which he might well have been, Best Beloved, but never mind why. He was a Primitive, and he lived cavily in a Cave, and he wore very few clothes, and he couldn`t read and he couldn`t write and he didn`t want to, and except when he was hungry he was quite happy. His name was Tegumai Bopsulai, and that means, `Man-who-does-not-put-his-foot- forward-in-a-hurry`; but we, O Best Beloved, will call him Tegumai, for short. And his wife`s name was

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Once upon a most early time was a Neolithic man. He was not a Jute or an Angle, or even a Dravidian, which he might well have been, Best Beloved, but never mind why. He was a Primitive, and he lived cavily in a Cave, and he wore very few clothes, and he couldn`t read and he couldn`t write and he didn`t want to, and except when he was hungry he was quite happy. His name was Tegumai Bopsulai, and that means, `Man-who-does-not-put-his-foot- forward-in-a-hurry`; but we, O Best Beloved, will call him Tegumai, for short. And his wife`s name was Teshumai Tewindrow, and that means, `Lady-who-asks-a-very-many-questions`; but we, O Best Beloved, will call her Teshumai, for short. And his little girl-daughter`s name was Taffimai Metallumai, and that means, `Small-person-without-any-manners-who-ought-to-be-spanked`; but I`m going to call her Taffy. And she was Tegumai Bopsulai`s Best Beloved and her own Mummy`s Best Beloved, and she was not spanked half as much as was good for her; and they were all three very happy. As soon as Taffy could run about she went everywhere with her Daddy Tegumai, and sometimes they would not come home to the Cave till they were hungry, and then Teshumai Tewindrow would say, `Where in the world have you two been to, to get so shocking dirty? Really, my Tegumai, you`re no better than my Taffy.`
Now attend and listen!
One day Tegumai Bopsulai went down through the beaver-swamp to the Wagai river to spear carp-fish for dinner, and Taffy went too. Tegumai`s spear was made of wood with shark`s teeth at the end, and before he had caught any fish at all he accidentally broke it clean across by jabbing it down too hard on the bottom of the river. They were miles and miles from home (of course they had their lunch with them in a little bag), and Tegumai had forgotten to bring any extra spears.
`Here`s a pretty kettle of fish!` said Tegumai. `It will take me half the day to mend this.`
`There`s your big black spear at home,` said Taffy. `Let me run back to the Cave and ask Mummy to give it me.`
`It`s too far for your little fat legs,` said Tegumai. `Besides, you might fall into the beaver-swamp and be drowned. We must make the best of a bad job.` He sat down and took out a little leather mendy-bag, full of reindeer-sinews and strips of leather, and lumps of bee`s-wax and resin, and began to mend the spear.
Taffy sat down too, with her toes in the water and her chin in her hand, and thought very hard. Then she said`I say, Daddy, it`s an awful nuisance that you and I don`t know how to write, isn`t it? If we did we could send a message for the new spear.`
`Taffy,` said Tegumai, `how often have I told you not to use slang? “Awful” isn`t a pretty word, but it could be a convenience, now you mention it, if we could write home.`
Just then a Stranger-man came along the river, but he belonged to a far tribe, the Tewaras, and he did not understand one word of Tegumai`s language. He stood on the bank and smiled at Taffy, because he had a little girl-daughter Of his own at home. Tegumai drew a hank of deer-sinews from his mendy-bag and began to mend his spear.
`Come here, said Taffy. `Do you know where my Mummy lives?` And the Stranger-man said `Um!` being, as you know, a Tewara.
`Silly!` said Taffy, and she stamped her foot, because she saw a shoal of very big carp going up the river just when her Daddy couldn`t use his spear.
`Don`t bother grown-ups,` said Tegumai, so busy with his spear-mending that he did not turn round.
`I aren`t, said Taffy. `I only want him to do what I want him to do, and he won`t understand.`
`Then don`t bother me, said Tegumai, and he went on pulling and straining at the deer-sinews with his mouth full of loose ends. The Stranger-mana genuine Tewara he wassat down on the grass, and Taffy showed him what her Daddy was doing. The Stranger-man thought, this is a very wonderful child. She stamps her foot at me and she makes faces. She must be the daughter of that noble Chief who is so great that he won`t take any notice of me.` So he smiled more politely than ever.
`Now,` said Taffy, `I want you to go to my Mummy, because your legs are longer than mine, and you won`t fall into the beaver-swamp, and ask for Daddy`s other spearthe one with the black handle that hangs over our fireplace.`
The Stranger-man (and he was a Tewara) thought, `This is a very, very wonderful child. She waves her arms and she shouts at me, but I don`t understand a word of what she says. But if I don`t do what she wants, I greatly fear that that haughty Chief, Man-who-turns-his-back-on-callers, will be angry.` He got up and twisted a big flat piece of bark off a birch-tree and gave it to Taffy. He did this, Best Beloved, to show that his heart was as white as the birch-bark and that he meant no harm; but Taffy didn`t quite understand.
`Oh!` said she. `Now I see! You want my Mummy`s living-address? Of course I can`t write, but I can draw pictures if I`ve anything sharp to scratch with. Please lend me the shark`s tooth off your necklace.`
The Stranger-man (and he was a Tewara) didn`t say anything, So Taffy put up her little hand and pulled at the beautiful bead and seed and shark-tooth necklace round his neck.
The Stranger-man (and he was a Tewara) thought, `This is a very, very, very wonderful child. The shark`s tooth on my necklace is a magic shark`s tooth, and I was always told that if anybody touched it without my leave they would immediately swell up or burst, but this child doesn`t swell up or burst, and that important Chief, Man-who-attends-strictly-to-his-business, who has not yet taken any notice of me at all, doesn`t seem to be afraid that she will swell up or burst. I had better be more polite.`
So he gave Taffy the shark`s tooth, and she lay down flat on her tummy with her legs in the air, like some people on the drawing-room floor when they want to draw pictures, and she said, `Now I`ll draw you some beautiful pictures! You can look over my shoulder, but you mustn`t joggle. First I`ll draw Daddy fishing. It isn`t very like him; but Mummy will know, because I`ve drawn his spear all broken. Well, now I`ll draw the other spear that he wants, the black-handled spear. It looks as if it was sticking in Daddy`s back, but that`s because the shark`s tooth slipped and this piece of bark isn`t big enough. That`s the spear I want you to fetch; so I`ll draw a picture of me myself `splaining to you. My hair doesn`t stand up like I`ve drawn, but it`s easier to draw that way. Now I`ll draw you. I think you`re very nice really, but I can`t make you pretty in the picture, so you mustn`t be `fended. Are you `fended?`
The Stranger-man (and he was a Tewara) smiled. He thought, `There must be a big battle going to be fought somewhere, and this extraordinary child, who takes my magic shark`s tooth but who does not swell up or burst, is telling me to call all the great Chief`s tribe to help him. He is a great Chief, or he would have noticed me.
`Look,` said Taffy, drawing very hard and rather scratchily, `now I`ve drawn you, and I`ve put the spear that Daddy wants into your hand, just to remind you that you`re to bring it. Now I`ll show you how to find my Mummy`s living-address. You go along till you come to two trees (those are trees), and then you go over a hill (that`s a hill), and then you come into a beaver-swamp all full of beavers. I haven`t put in all the beavers, because I can`t draw beavers, but I`ve drawn their heads, and that`s all you`ll see of them when you cross the swamp. Mind you don`t fall in! Then our Cave is just beyond the beaver-swamp. It isn`t as high as the hills really, but I can`t draw things very small. That`s my Mummy outside. She is beautiful. She is the most beautifullest Mummy there ever was, but she won`t be `fended when she sees I`ve drawn her so plain. She`ll be pleased of me because I can draw. Now, in case you forget, I`ve drawn the spear that Daddy wants outside our Cave. It`s inside really, but you show the picture to my Mummy and she`ll give it you. I`ve made her holding up her hands, because I know she`ll be so pleased to see you. Isn`t it a beautiful picture? And do you quite understand, or shall I `splain again?`
The Stranger-man (and he was a Tewara) looked at the picture and nodded very hard. He said to himself,` If I do not fetch this great Chief`s tribe to help him, he will be slain by his enemies who are coming up on all sides with spears. Now I see why the great Chief pretended not to notice me! He feared that his enemies were hiding in the bushes and would see him. Therefore he turned to me his back, and let the wise and wonderful child draw the terrible picture showing me his difficulties. I will away and get help for him from his tribe.` He did not even ask Taffy the road, but raced off into the bushes like the wind, with the birch-bark in his hand, and Taffy sat down most pleased.
Now this is the picture that Taffy had drawn for him!
`What have you been doing, Taffy?` said Tegumai. He had mended his spear and was carefully waving it to and fro.
`It`s a little berangement of my own, Daddy dear,` said Taffy. `If you won`t ask me questions, you`ll know all about it in a little time, and you`ll be surprised. You don`t know how surprised you`ll be, Daddy! Promise you`ll be surprised.`
`Very well,` said Tegumai, and went on fishing.
The Stranger-mandid you know he was a Tewara?hurried away with the picture and ran for some miles, till quite by accident he found Teshumai Tewindrow at the door of her Cave, talking to some other Neolithic ladies who had come in to a Primitive lunch. Taffy was very like Teshumai, especially about the upper part of the face and the eyes, so the Stranger-manalways a pure Tewarasmiled politely and handed Teshumai the birch-bark. He had run hard, so that he panted, and his legs were scratched with brambles, but he still tried to be polite.
As soon as Teshumai saw the picture she screamed like anything and flew at the Stranger-man. The other Neolithic ladies at on…

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how the alphabet was made https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-alphabet-was-made/ https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-alphabet-was-made/#respond Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:38:00 +0000 https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-alphabet-was-made/ THE week after Taffimai Metallumai (we will still call her Taffy, Best Beloved) made that little mistake about her Daddy`s spear and the Stranger-man and the picture-letter and all, she went carp-fishing again with her Daddy. Her Mummy wanted her to stay at home and help hang up hides to dry on the big drying-poles outside their Neolithic Cave, but Taffy slipped away down to her Daddy quite early, and they fished. Presently she began to giggle, and her Daddy said, `Don`t be silly, child.`
`But wasn`t it inciting!` said Taffy. `Don`t you remember how the Head Chief puffed out his

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THE week after Taffimai Metallumai (we will still call her Taffy, Best Beloved) made that little mistake about her Daddy`s spear and the Stranger-man and the picture-letter and all, she went carp-fishing again with her Daddy. Her Mummy wanted her to stay at home and help hang up hides to dry on the big drying-poles outside their Neolithic Cave, but Taffy slipped away down to her Daddy quite early, and they fished. Presently she began to giggle, and her Daddy said, `Don`t be silly, child.`
`But wasn`t it inciting!` said Taffy. `Don`t you remember how the Head Chief puffed out his cheeks, and how funny the nice Stranger-man looked with the mud in his hair?`
`Well do I,` said Tegumai. `I had to pay two deerskinssoft ones with fringesto the Stranger-man for the things we did to him.`
`We didn`t do anything,` said Taffy. `It was Mummy and the other Neolithic ladiesand the mud.`
`We won`t talk about that,` said her Daddy, `Let`s have lunch.`
Taffy took a marrow-bone and sat mousy-quiet for ten whole minutes, while her Daddy scratched on pieces of birch-bark with a shark`s tooth. Then she said, `Daddy, I`ve thinked of a secret surprise. You make a noiseany sort of noise.`
`Ah!` said Tegumai. `Will that do to begin with?`
`Yes,` said Taffy. `You look just like a carp-fish with its mouth open. Say it again, please.`
`Ah! ah! ah!` said her Daddy. `Don`t be rude, my daughter.`
`I`m not meaning rude, really and truly,` said Taffy. `It`s part of my secret-surprise-think. Do say ah, Daddy, and keep your mouth open at the end, and lend me that tooth. I`m going to draw a carp-fish`s mouth wide-open.`
`What for?` said her Daddy.
`Don`t you see?` said Taffy, scratching away on the bark. `That will be our little secret s`prise. When I draw a carp-fish with his mouth open in the smoke at the back of our Caveif Mummy doesn`t mindit will remind you of that ah-noise. Then we can play that it was me jumped out of the dark and s`prised you with that noisesame as I did in the beaver-swamp last winter.`
`Really?` said her Daddy, in the voice that grown-ups use when they are truly attending. `Go on, Taffy.`
`Oh bother!` she said. `I can`t draw all of a carp-fish, but I can draw something that means a carp-fish`s mouth. Don`t you know how they stand on their heads rooting in the mud? Well, here`s a pretence carp-fish (we can play that the rest of him is drawn). Here`s just his mouth, and that means ah.` And she drew this. (1.)
`That`s not bad,` said Tegumai, and scratched on his own piece of bark for himself; but you`ve forgotten the feeler that hangs across his mouth.`
`But I can`t draw, Daddy.`
`You needn`t draw anything of him except just the opening of his mouth and the feeler across. Then we`ll know he`s a carp-fish, `cause the perches and trouts haven`t got feelers. Look here, Taffy.` And he drew this. (2.)
`Now I`ll copy it.` said Taffy. `Will you understand this when you see it?`
`Perfectly,` said her Daddy.
And she drew this. (3.) `And I`ll be quite as s`prised when I see it anywhere, as if you had jumped out from behind a tree and said `”Ah!”`
`Now, make another noise,` said Taffy, very proud.
`Yah!` said her Daddy, very loud.
`H`m,` said Taffy. `That`s a mixy noise. The end part is ah-carp-fish-mouth; but what can we do about the front part? Yer- yer-yer and ah! Ya!`
`It`s very like the carp-fish-mouth noise. Let`s draw another bit of the carp-fish and join `em,` said her Daddy. He was quite incited too.
`No. If they`re joined, I`ll forget. Draw it separate. Draw his tail. If he`s standing on his head the tail will come first. `Sides, I think I can draw tails easiest,` said Taffy.
`A good notion,` said Tegumai. “Here`s a carp-fish tail for the yer-noise.` And he drew this. (4.)
`I`ll try now,` said Taffy. “Member I can`t draw like you, Daddy. Will it do if I just draw the split part of the tail, and the sticky-down line for where it joins?` And she drew this. (5.)
Her Daddy nodded, and his eyes were shiny bright with `citement.
`That`s beautiful,` she said. `Now make another noise, Daddy.`
`Oh!` said her Daddy, very loud.
`That`s quite easy,` said Taffy. `You make your mouth all around like an egg or a stone. So an egg or a stone will do for that.`
`You can`t always find eggs or stones. We`ll have to scratch a round something like one.` And he drew this. (6.)
`My gracious!` said Taffy, `what a lot of noise-pictures we`ve made,carp-mouth, carp-tail, and egg! Now, make another noise, Daddy.`
`Ssh!` said her Daddy, and frowned to himself, but Taffy was too incited to notice.
`That`s quite easy,` she said, scratching on the bark.
`Eh, what?` said her Daddy. `I meant I was thinking, and didn`t want to be disturbed.`
`It`s a noise just the same. It`s the noise a snake makes, Daddy, when it is thinking and doesn`t want to be disturbed. Let`s make the ssh-noise a snake. Will this do?` And she drew this. (7.)
`There,` she said. `That`s another s`prise-secret. When you draw a hissy-snake by the door of your little back-cave where you mend the spears, I`ll know you`re thinking hard; and I`ll come in most mousy-quiet. And if you draw it on a tree by the river when you are fishing, I`ll know you want me to walk most most mousy-quiet, so as not to shake the banks.`
`Perfectly true,` said Tegumai. And there`s more in this game than you think. Taffy, dear, I`ve a notion that your Daddy`s daughter has hit upon the finest thing that there ever was since the Tribe of Tegumai took to using shark`s teeth instead of flints for their spear-heads. I believe we`ve found out the big secret of the world.`
`Why?` said Taffy, and her eyes shone too with incitement.
`I`ll show,` said her Daddy. `What`s water in the Tegumai language?`
`Ya, of course, and it means river toolike Wagai-yathe Wagai river.`
`What is bad water that gives you fever if you drink itblack waterswamp-water?`
`Yo, of course.`
`Now look,` said her Daddy. `S`pose you saw this scratched by the side of a pool in the beaver-swamp?` And he drew this. (8.)
`Carp-tail and round egg. Two noises mixed! Yo, bad water,` said Taffy. “Course I wouldn`t drink that water because I`d know you said it was bad.`
`But I needn`t be near the water at all. I might be miles away, hunting, and still`
`And still it would be just the same as if you stood there and said, “G`way, Taffy, or you`ll get fever.” All that in a carp-fish-tail and a round egg! O Daddy, we must tell Mummy, quick!` and Taffy danced all round him.
`Not yet,` said Tegumai; `not till we`ve gone a little further. Let`s see. Yo is bad water, but So is food cooked on the fire, isn`t it?` And he drew this. (9.)
`Yes. Snake and egg,` said Taffy `So that means dinner`s ready. If you saw that scratched on a tree you`d know it was time to come to the Cave. So`d I.`
`My Winkie!` said Tegumai. `That`s true too. But wait a minute. I see a difficulty. SO means “come and have dinner,” but sho means the drying-poles where we hang our hides.`
`Horrid old drying-poles!` said Taffy. `I hate helping to hang heavy, hot, hairy hides on them. If you drew the snake and egg, and I thought it meant dinner, and I came in from the wood and found that it meant I was to help Mummy hang the two hides on the drying-poles, what would I do?`
`You`d be cross. So`d Mummy. We must make a new picture for sho. We must draw a spotty snake that hisses sh-sh, and we`ll play that the plain snake only hisses ssss.`
`I couldn`t be sure how to put in the spots,` said Taffy. `And p`raps if you were in a hurry you might leave them out, and I`d think it was so when it was sho, and then Mummy would catch me just the same. No! I think we`d better draw a picture of the horrid high drying-poles their very selves, and make quite sure. I`ll put them in just after the hissy-snake. Look!` And she drew this. (10.)
`P`raps that`s safest. It`s very like our drying-poles, anyhow,` said her Daddy, laughing. `Now I`ll make a new noise with a snake and drying-pole sound in it. I`ll say shi. That`s Tegumai for spear, Taffy.` And he laughed.
`Don`t make fun of me,` said Taffy, as she thought of her picture-letter and the mud in the Stranger-man`s hair. `You draw it, Daddy.`
`We won`t have beavers or hills this time, eh?` said her Daddy, `I`ll just draw a straight line for my spear.` And he drew this. (11.)
`Even Mummy couldn`t mistake that for me being killed.`
`Please don`t, Daddy. It makes me uncomfy. Do some more noises. We`re getting on beautifully.`
`Er-hm!` said Tegumai, looking up. `We`ll say shu. That means sky.`
Taffy drew the snake and the drying-pole. Then she stopped. `We must make a new picture for that end sound, mustn`t we?`
`Shu-shu-u-u-u!` said her Daddy. `Why, it`s just like the round-egg-sound made thin.`
`Then s`pose we draw a thin round egg, and pretend it`s a frog that hasn`t eaten anything for years.`
`N-no,` said her Daddy. `If we drew that in a hurry we might mistake it for the round egg itself. Shu-shu-shu! `I tell you what we`ll do. We`ll open a little hole at the end of the round egg to show how the O-noise runs out all thin, ooo-oo-oo. Like this.` And he drew this. (12.)
`Oh, that`s lovely! Much better than a thin frog. Go on,` said Taffy, using her shark`s tooth. Her Daddy went on drawing, and his hand shook with incitement. He went on till he had drawn this. (13.)
`Don`t look up, Taffy,` he said. `Try if you can make out what that means in the Tegumai language. If you can, we`ve found the Secret.`
`Snakepolebrokeneggcarptail and carp-mouth,` said Taffy. `Shu-ya. Sky-water (rain).` Just then a drop fell on her hand, for the day had clouded over. `Why, Daddy, it`s raining. Was that what you meant to tell me?`
`Of course,` said her Daddy. `And I told it you without saying a word, didn`t I?`
`Well, I think I would have known it in a minute, but that raindrop made me quite sure. I`ll always remember now. Shu-ya means rain, or “it is going to rain.” Why, Daddy!` She got up and danced round him. `S`pose you went out before I was awake, and drawed shu-ya in the smoke on the wall, …

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how the leopard got his spots https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-leopard-got-his-spots/ https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-leopard-got-his-spots/#respond Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:38:00 +0000 https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-leopard-got-his-spots/ IN the days when everybody started fair, Best Beloved, the Leopard lived in a place called the High Veldt. `Member it wasn`t the Low Veldt, or the Bush Veldt, or the Sour Veldt, but the `sclusively bare, hot, shiny High Veldt, where there was sand and sandy-coloured rock and `sclusively tufts of sandy- yellowish grass. The Giraffe and the Zebra and the Eland and the Koodoo and the Hartebeest lived there; and they were `sclusively sandy-yellow-brownish all over; but the Leopard, he was the `sclusivest sandiest-yellowish-brownest of them alla greyish-yellowish catty-shaped kind of beast, and he matched the `sclusively yellowish-greyish-brownish

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IN the days when everybody started fair, Best Beloved, the Leopard lived in a place called the High Veldt. `Member it wasn`t the Low Veldt, or the Bush Veldt, or the Sour Veldt, but the `sclusively bare, hot, shiny High Veldt, where there was sand and sandy-coloured rock and `sclusively tufts of sandy- yellowish grass. The Giraffe and the Zebra and the Eland and the Koodoo and the Hartebeest lived there; and they were `sclusively sandy-yellow-brownish all over; but the Leopard, he was the `sclusivest sandiest-yellowish-brownest of them alla greyish-yellowish catty-shaped kind of beast, and he matched the `sclusively yellowish-greyish-brownish colour of the High Veldt to one hair. This was very bad for the Giraffe and the Zebra and the rest of them; for he would lie down by a `sclusively yellowish-greyish-brownish stone or clump of grass, and when the Giraffe or the Zebra or the Eland or the Koodoo or the Bush-Buck or the Bonte-Buck came by he would surprise them out of their jumpsome lives. He would indeed! And, also, there was an Ethiopian with bows and arrows (a `sclusively greyish-brownish-yellowish man he was then), who lived on the High Veldt with the Leopard; and the two used to hunt togetherthe Ethiopian with his bows and arrows, and the Leopard `sclusively with his teeth and clawstill the Giraffe and the Eland and the Koodoo and the Quagga and all the rest of them didn`t know which way to jump, Best Beloved. They didn`t indeed!
After a long timethings lived for ever so long in those daysthey learned to avoid anything that looked like a Leopard or an Ethiopian; and bit by bitthe Giraffe began it, because his legs were the longestthey went away from the High Veldt. They scuttled for days and days and days till they came to a great forest, `sclusively full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows, and there they hid: and after another long time, what with standing half in the shade and half out of it, and what with the slippery-slidy shadows of the trees falling on them, the Giraffe grew blotchy, and the Zebra grew stripy, and the Eland and the Koodoo grew darker, with little wavy grey lines on their backs like bark on a tree trunk; and so, though you could hear them and smell them, you could very seldom see them, and then only when you knew precisely where to look. They had a beautiful time in the `sclusively speckly-spickly shadows of the forest, while the Leopard and the Ethiopian ran about over the `sclusively greyish-yellowish-reddish High Veldt outside, wondering where all their breakfasts and their dinners and their teas had gone. At last they were so hungry that they ate rats and beetles and rock-rabbits, the Leopard and the Ethiopian, and then they had the Big Tummy-ache, both together; and then they met Baviaanthe dog-headed, barking Baboon, who is Quite the Wisest Animal in All South Africa.
Said Leopard to Baviaan (and it was a very hot day), `Where has all the game gone?`
And Baviaan winked. He knew.
Said the Ethiopian to Baviaan, `Can you tell me the present habitat of the aboriginal Fauna?` (That meant just the same thing, but the Ethiopian always used long words. He was a grown-up.)
And Baviaan winked. He knew.
Then said Baviaan, `The game has gone into other spots; and my advice to you, Leopard, is to go into other spots as soon as you can.`
And the Ethiopian said, `That is all very fine, but I wish to know whither the aboriginal Fauna has migrated.`
Then said Baviaan, `The aboriginal Fauna has joined the aboriginal Flora because it was high time for a change; and my advice to you, Ethiopian, is to change as soon as you can.`
That puzzled the Leopard and the Ethiopian, but they set off to look for the aboriginal Flora, and presently, after ever so many days, they saw a great, high, tall forest full of tree trunks all `sclusively speckled and sprottled and spottled, dotted and splashed and slashed and hatched and cross-hatched with shadows. (Say that quickly aloud, and you will see how very shadowy the forest must have been.)
`What is this,` said the Leopard, `that is so `sclusively dark, and yet so full of little pieces of light?`
`I don`t know, said the Ethiopian, `but it ought to be the aboriginal Flora. I can smell Giraffe, and I can hear Giraffe, but I can`t see Giraffe.`
`That`s curious,` said the Leopard. `I suppose it is because we have just come in out of the sunshine. I can smell Zebra, and I can hear Zebra, but I can`t see Zebra.`
`Wait a bit, said the Ethiopian. `It`s a long time since we`ve hunted `em. Perhaps we`ve forgotten what they were like.`
`Fiddle!` said the Leopard. `I remember them perfectly on the High Veldt, especially their marrow-bones. Giraffe is about seventeen feet high, of a `sclusively fulvous golden-yellow from head to heel; and Zebra is about four and a half feet high, of a `sclusively grey-fawn colour from head to heel.`
`Umm, said the Ethiopian, looking into the speckly-spickly shadows of the aboriginal Flora-forest. `Then they ought to show up in this dark place like ripe bananas in a smokehouse.`
But they didn`t. The Leopard and the Ethiopian hunted all day; and though they could smell them and hear them, they never saw one of them.
`For goodness` sake,` said the Leopard at tea-time, `let us wait till it gets dark. This daylight hunting is a perfect scandal.`
So they waited till dark, and then the Leopard heard something breathing sniffily in the starlight that fell all stripy through the branches, and he jumped at the noise, and it smelt like Zebra, and it felt like Zebra, and when he knocked it down it kicked like Zebra, but he couldn`t see it. So he said, `Be quiet, O you person without any form. I am going to sit on your head till morning, because there is something about you that I don`t understand.`
Presently he heard a grunt and a crash and a scramble, and the Ethiopian called out, `I`ve caught a thing that I can`t see. It smells like Giraffe, and it kicks like Giraffe, but it hasn`t any form.`
`Don`t you trust it,` said the Leopard. `Sit on its head till the morningsame as me. They haven`t any formany of `em.`
So they sat down on them hard till bright morning-time, and then Leopard said, `What have you at your end of the table, Brother?`
The Ethiopian scratched his head and said, `It ought to be `sclusively a rich fulvous orange-tawny from head to heel, and it ought to be Giraffe; but it is covered all over with chestnut blotches. What have you at your end of the table, Brother?`
And the Leopard scratched his head and said, `It ought to be `sclusively a delicate greyish-fawn, and it ought to be Zebra; but it is covered all over with black and purple stripes. What in the world have you been doing to yourself, Zebra? Don`t you know that if you were on the High Veldt I could see you ten miles off? You haven`t any form.`
`Yes,` said the Zebra, `but this isn`t the High Veldt. Can`t you see?`
`I can now,` said the Leopard. `But I couldn`t all yesterday. How is it done?`
`Let us up,` said the Zebra, `and we will show you.
They let the Zebra and the Giraffe get up; and Zebra moved away to some little thorn-bushes where the sunlight fell all stripy, and Giraffe moved off to some tallish trees where the shadows fell all blotchy.
`Now watch,` said the Zebra and the Giraffe. `This is the way it`s done. Onetwothree! And where`s your breakfast?`
Leopard stared, and Ethiopian stared, but all they could see were stripy shadows and blotched shadows in the forest, but never a sign of Zebra and Giraffe. They had just walked off and hidden themselves in the shadowy forest.
`Hi! Hi!` said the Ethiopian. `That`s a trick worth learning. Take a lesson by it, Leopard. You show up in this dark place like a bar of soap in a coal-scuttle.`
`Ho! Ho!` said the Leopard. `Would it surprise you very much to know that you show up in this dark place like a mustard-plaster on a sack of coals?`
`Well, calling names won`t catch dinner, said the Ethiopian. `The long and the little of it is that we don`t match our backgrounds. I`m going to take Baviaan`s advice. He told me I ought to change; and as I`ve nothing to change except my skin I`m going to change that.`
`What to?` said the Leopard, tremendously excited.
`To a nice working blackish-brownish colour, with a little purple in it, and touches of slaty-blue. It will be the very thing for hiding in hollows and behind trees.`
So he changed his skin then and there, and the Leopard was more excited than ever; he had never seen a man change his skin before.
`But what about me?` he said, when the Ethiopian had worked his last little finger into his fine new black skin.
`You take Baviaan`s advice too. He told you to go into spots.`
`So I did,` said the Leopard. I went into other spots as fast as I could. I went into this spot with you, and a lot of good it has done me.`
`Oh,` said the Ethiopian, `Baviaan didn`t mean spots in South Africa. He meant spots on your skin.`
`What`s the use of that?` said the Leopard.
`Think of Giraffe,` said the Ethiopian. `Or if you prefer stripes, think of Zebra. They find their spots and stripes give them per-fect satisfaction.`
`Umm,` said the Leopard. `I wouldn`t look like Zebranot for ever so.`
`Well, make up your mind,` said the Ethiopian, `because I`d hate to go hunting without you, but I must if you insist on looking like a sun-flower against a tarred fence.`
`I`ll take spots, then,` said the Leopard; `but don`t make `em too vulgar-big. I wouldn`t look like Giraffenot for ever so.`
`I`ll make `em with the tips of my fingers,` said the Ethiopian. `There`s plenty of black left on my skin still. Stand over!`
Then the Ethiopian put his five fingers close together (there was plenty of black left on his new skin still) and pressed them all over the Leopard, and wherever the five fingers touched they left five little black marks, all close together. You can see them on any Leopard`s skin you like, Best Beloved. Sometimes the fingers slipped and the marks got a little blurred; but if yo…

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how the rhinoceros got his skin https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-rhinoceros-got-his-skin/ https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-rhinoceros-got-his-skin/#respond Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:38:00 +0000 https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/how-the-rhinoceros-got-his-skin/ ONCE upon a time, on an uninhabited island on the shores of the Red Sea, there lived a Parsee from whose hat the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour. And the Parsee lived by the Red Sea with nothing but his hat and his knife and a cooking-stove of the kind that you must particularly never touch. And one day he took flour and water and currants and plums and sugar and things, and made himself one cake which was two feet across and three feet thick. It was indeed a Superior Comestible (that`s magic), and he

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ONCE upon a time, on an uninhabited island on the shores of the Red Sea, there lived a Parsee from whose hat the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour. And the Parsee lived by the Red Sea with nothing but his hat and his knife and a cooking-stove of the kind that you must particularly never touch. And one day he took flour and water and currants and plums and sugar and things, and made himself one cake which was two feet across and three feet thick. It was indeed a Superior Comestible (that`s magic), and he put it on stove because he was allowed to cook on the stove, and he baked it and he baked it till it was all done brown and smelt most sentimental. But just as he was going to eat it there came down to the beach from the Altogether Uninhabited Interior one Rhinoceros with a horn on his nose, two piggy eyes, and few manners. In those days the Rhinoceros`s skin fitted him quite tight. There were no wrinkles in it anywhere. He looked exactly like a Noah`s Ark Rhinoceros, but of course much bigger. All the same, he had no manners then, and he has no manners now, and he never will have any manners. He said, `How!` and the Parsee left that cake and climbed to the top of a palm tree with nothing on but his hat, from which the rays of the sun were always reflected in more-than-oriental splendour. And the Rhinoceros upset the oil-stove with his nose, and the cake rolled on the sand, and he spiked that cake on the horn of his nose, and he ate it, and he went away, waving his tail, to the desolate and Exclusively Uninhabited Interior which abuts on the islands of Mazanderan, Socotra, and Promontories of the Larger Equinox. Then the Parsee came down from his palm-tree and put the stove on its legs and recited the following Sloka, which, as you have not heard, I will now proceed to relate:
Them that takes cakes
Which the Parsee-man bakes
Makes dreadful mistakes.
And there was a great deal more in that than you would think.
Because, five weeks later, there was a heat wave in the Red Sea, and everybody took off all the clothes they had. The Parsee took off his hat; but the Rhinoceros took off his skin and carried it over his shoulder as he came down to the beach to bathe. In those days it buttoned underneath with three buttons and looked like a waterproof. He said nothing whatever about the Parsee`s cake, because he had eaten it all; and he never had any manners, then, since, or henceforward. He waddled straight into the water and blew bubbles through his nose, leaving his skin on the beach.
Presently the Parsee came by and found the skin, and he smiled one smile that ran all round his face two times. Then he danced three times round the skin and rubbed his hands. Then he went to his camp and filled his hat with cake-crumbs, for the Parsee never ate anything but cake, and never swept out his camp. He took that skin, and he shook that skin, and he scrubbed that skin, and he rubbed that skin just as full of old, dry, stale, tickly cake-crumbs and some burned currants as ever it could possibly hold. Then he climbed to the top of his palm-tree and waited for the Rhinoceros to come out of the water and put it on.
And the Rhinoceros did. He buttoned it up with the three buttons, and it tickled like cake crumbs in bed. Then he wanted to scratch, but that made it worse; and then he lay down on the sands and rolled and rolled and rolled, and every time he rolled the cake crumbs tickled him worse and worse and worse. Then he ran to the palm-tree and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed himself against it. He rubbed so much and so hard that he rubbed his skin into a great fold over his shoulders, and another fold underneath, where the buttons used to be (but he rubbed the buttons off), and he rubbed some more folds over his legs. And it spoiled his temper, but it didn`t make the least difference to the cake-crumbs. They were inside his skin and they tickled. So he went home, very angry indeed and horribly scratchy; and from that day to this every rhinoceros has great folds in his skin and a very bad temper, all on account of the cake-crumbs inside.
But the Parsee came down from his palm-tree, wearing his hat, from which the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour, packed up his cooking-stove, and went away in the direction of Orotavo, Amygdala, the Upland Meadows of Anantarivo, and the Marshes of Sonaput.

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rikki-tikki-tavi https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/rikki-tikki-tavi/ https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/rikki-tikki-tavi/#respond Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:38:00 +0000 https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/rikki-tikki-tavi/ This is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through the bath-rooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the Tailorbird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the musk-rat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice, but Rikki-tikki did the real fighting.
He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink. He could scratch himself anywhere he pleased

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This is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through the bath-rooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the Tailorbird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the musk-rat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice, but Rikki-tikki did the real fighting.
He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink. He could scratch himself anywhere he pleased with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use. He could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottle brush, and his war cry as he scuttled through the long grass was: “Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!”
One day, a high summer flood washed him out of the burrow where he lived with his father and mother, and carried him, kicking and clucking, down a roadside ditch. He found a little wisp of grass floating there, and clung to it till he lost his senses. When he revived, he was lying in the hot sun on the middle of a garden path, very draggled indeed, and a small boy was saying, “Here`s a dead mongoose. Let`s have a funeral.”
“No,” said his mother, “let`s take him in and dry him. Perhaps he isn`t really dead.”
They took him into the house, and a big man picked him up between his finger and thumb and said he was not dead but half choked. So they wrapped him in cotton wool, and warmed him over a little fire, and he opened his eyes and sneezed.
“Now,” said the big man (he was an Englishman who had just moved into the bungalow), “don`t frighten him, and we`ll see what he`ll do.”
It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is “Run and find out,” and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose. He looked at the cotton wool, decided that it was not good to eat, ran all round the table, sat up and put his fur in order, scratched himself, and jumped on the small boy`s shoulder.
“Don`t be frightened, Teddy,” said his father. “That`s his way of making friends.”
“Ouch! He`s tickling under my chin,” said Teddy.
Rikki-tikki looked down between the boy`s collar and neck, snuffed at his ear, and climbed down to the floor, where he sat rubbing his nose.
“Good gracious,” said Teddy`s mother, “and that`s a wild creature! I suppose he`s so tame because we`ve been kind to him.”
“All mongooses are like that,” said her husband. “If Teddy doesn`t pick him up by the tail, or try to put him in a cage, he`ll run in and out of the house all day long. Let`s give him something to eat.”
They gave him a little piece of raw meat. Rikki-tikki liked it immensely, and when it was finished he went out into the veranda and sat in the sunshine and fluffed up his fur to make it dry to the roots. Then he felt better.
“There are more things to find out about in this house,” he said to himself, “than all my family could find out in all their lives. I shall certainly stay and find out.”
He spent all that day roaming over the house. He nearly drowned himself in the bath-tubs, put his nose into the ink on a writing table, and burned it on the end of the big man`s cigar, for he climbed up in the big man`s lap to see how writing was done. At nightfall he ran into Teddy`s nursery to watch how kerosene lamps were lighted, and when Teddy went to bed Rikki-tikki climbed up too. But he was a restless companion, because he had to get up and attend to every noise all through the night, and find out what made it. Teddy`s mother and father came in, the last thing, to look at their boy, and Rikki-tikki was awake on the pillow. “I don`t like that,” said Teddy`s mother. “He may bite the child.” “He`ll do no such thing,” said the father. “Teddy`s safer with that little beast than if he had a bloodhound to watch him. If a snake came into the nursery now-“
But Teddy`s mother wouldn`t think of anything so awful.
Early in the morning Rikki-tikki came to early breakfast in the veranda riding on Teddy`s shoulder, and they gave him banana and some boiled egg. He sat on all their laps one after the other, because every well-brought-up mongoose always hopes to be a house mongoose some day and have rooms to run about in; and Rikki-tikki`s mother (she used to live in the general`s house at Segowlee) had carefully told Rikki what to do if ever he came across white men.
Then Rikki-tikki went out into the garden to see what was to be seen. It was a large garden, only half cultivated, with bushes, as big as summer-houses, of Marshal Niel roses, lime and orange trees, clumps of bamboos, and thickets of high grass. Rikki-tikki licked his lips. “This is a splendid hunting-ground,” he said, and his tail grew bottle-brushy at the thought of it, and he scuttled up and down the garden, snuffing here and there till he heard very sorrowful voices in a thorn-bush.
It was Darzee, the Tailor-bird, and his wife. They had made a beautiful nest by pulling two big leaves together and stitching them up the edges with fibers, and had filled the hollow with cotton and downy fluff. The nest swayed to and fro, as they sat on the rim and cried.
“What is the matter?” asked Rikki-tikki.
“We are very miserable,” said Darzee. “One of our babies fell out of the nest yesterday and Nag ate him.”
“H`m!” said Rikki-tikki, “that is very sad-but I am a stranger here. Who is Nag?”
Darzee and his wife only cowered down in the nest without answering, for from the thick grass at the foot of the bush there came a low hiss-a horrid cold sound that made Rikki-tikki jump back two clear feet. Then inch by inch out of the grass rose up the head and spread hood of Nag, the big black cobra, and he was five feet long from tongue to tail. When he had lifted one-third of himself clear of the ground, he stayed balancing to and fro exactly as a dandelion tuft balances in the wind, and he looked at Rikki-tikki with the wicked snake`s eyes that never change their expression, whatever the snake may be thinking of.
“Who is Nag?” said he. “I am Nag. The great God Brahm put his mark upon all our people, when the first cobra spread his hood to keep the sun off Brahm as he slept. Look, and be afraid!”
He spread out his hood more than ever, and Rikki-tikki saw the spectacle-mark on the back of it that looks exactly like the eye part of a hook-and-eye fastening. He was afraid for the minute, but it is impossible for a mongoose to stay frightened for any length of time, and though Rikki-tikki had never met a live cobra before, his mother had fed him on dead ones, and he knew that all a grown mongoose`s business in life was to fight and eat snakes. Nag knew that too and, at the bottom of his cold heart, he was afraid.
“Well,” said Rikki-tikki, and his tail began to fluff up again, “marks or no marks, do you think it is right for you to eat fledglings out of a nest?”
Nag was thinking to himself, and watching the least little movement in the grass behind Rikki-tikki. He knew that mongooses in the garden meant death sooner or later for him and his family, but he wanted to get Rikki-tikki off his guard. So he dropped his head a little, and put it on one side.
“Let us talk,” he said. “You eat eggs. Why should not I eat birds?”
“Behind you! Look behind you!” sang Darzee.
Rikki-tikki knew better than to waste time in staring. He jumped up in the air as high as he could go, and just under him whizzed by the head of Nagaina, Nag`s wicked wife. She had crept up behind him as he was talking, to make an end of him. He heard her savage hiss as the stroke missed. He came down almost across her back, and if he had been an old mongoose he would have known that then was the time to break her back with one bite; but he was afraid of the terrible lashing return stroke of the cobra. He bit, indeed, but did not bite long enough, and he jumped clear of the whisking tail, leaving Nagaina torn and angry.
“Wicked, wicked Darzee!” said Nag, lashing up as high as he could reach toward the nest in the thorn-bush. But Darzee had built it out of reach of snakes, and it only swayed to and fro.
Rikki-tikki felt his eyes growing red and hot (when a mongoose`s eyes grow red, he is angry), and he sat back on his tail and hind legs like a little kangaroo, and looked all round him, and chattered with rage. But Nag and Nagaina had disappeared into the grass. When a snake misses its stroke, it never says anything or gives any sign of what it means to do next. Rikki-tikki did not care to follow them, for he did not feel sure that he could manage two snakes at once. So he trotted off to the gravel path near the house, and sat down to think. It was a serious matter for him.
If you read the old books of natural history, you will find they say that when the mongoose fights the snake and happens to get bitten, he runs off and eats some herb that cures him. That is not true. The victory is only a matter of quickness of eye and quickness of foot-snake`s blow against mongoose`s jump-and as no eye can follow the motion of a snake`s head when it strikes, this makes things much more wonderful than any magic herb. Rikki-tikki knew he was a young mongoose, and it made him all the more pleased to think that he had managed to escape a blow from behind. It gave him confidence in himself, and when Teddy came running down the path, Rikki-tikki was ready to be petted.
But just as Teddy was stooping, something wriggled a little in the dust, and a tiny voice said: “Be careful. I am Death!” It was Karait, the dusty brown snakeling that lies for choice on the dusty earth; and his bite is as dangerous as the cobra`s. But he is so small that nobody thinks of him, and so he does the more harm to people.
Rikki-tikki`s eyes grew red again, and he danced up to Karait with the peculiar rocking, swaying motion that he had inherited from his family. It looks very funny, but it is so perfectly balanced a gait that you can fly …

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mowgli`s brothers https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/mowglis-brothers/ https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/mowglis-brothers/#respond Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:38:00 +0000 https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/mowglis-brothers/ It was seven o`clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day`s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived. "Augrh!" said Father Wolf. "It is time to hunt again." He was going to spring down hill when a little shadow with a bushy tail crossed the

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It was seven o`clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day`s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived. “Augrh!” said Father Wolf. “It is time to hunt again.” He was going to spring down hill when a little shadow with a bushy tail crossed the threshold and whined: “Good luck go with you, O Chief of the Wolves. And good luck and strong white teeth go with noble children that they may never forget the hungry in this world.”
It was the jackal-Tabaqui, the Dish-licker-and the wolves of India despise Tabaqui because he runs about making mischief, and telling tales, and eating rags and pieces of leather from the village rubbish-heaps. But they are afraid of him too, because Tabaqui, more than anyone else in the jungle, is apt to go mad, and then he forgets that he was ever afraid of anyone, and runs through the forest biting everything in his way. Even the tiger runs and hides when little Tabaqui goes mad, for madness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature. We call it hydrophobia, but they call it dewanee-the madness-and run.
“Enter, then, and look,” said Father Wolf stiffly, “but there is no food here.”
“For a wolf, no,” said Tabaqui, “but for so mean a person as myself a dry bone is a good feast. Who are we, the Gidur-log [the jackal people], to pick and choose?” He scuttled to the back of the cave, where he found the bone of a buck with some meat on it, and sat cracking the end merrily.
“All thanks for this good meal,” he said, licking his lips. “How beautiful are the noble children! How large are their eyes! And so young too! Indeed, indeed, I might have remembered that the children of kings are men from the beginning.”
Now, Tabaqui knew as well as anyone else that there is nothing so unlucky as to compliment children to their faces. It pleased him to see Mother and Father Wolf look uncomfortable.
Tabaqui sat still, rejoicing in the mischief that he had made, and then he said spitefully:
“Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting grounds. He will hunt among these hills for the next moon, so he has told me.”
Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Waingunga River, twenty miles away.
“He has no right!” Father Wolf began angrily-“By the Law of the Jungle he has no right to change his quarters without due warning. He will frighten every head of game within ten miles, and I-I have to kill for two, these days.”
“His mother did not call him Lungri [the Lame One] for nothing,” said Mother Wolf quietly. “He has been lame in one foot from his birth. That is why he has only killed cattle. Now the villagers of the Waingunga are angry with him, and he has come here to make our villagers angry. They will scour the jungle for him when he is far away, and we and our children must run when the grass is set alight. Indeed, we are very grateful to Shere Khan!”
“Shall I tell him of your gratitude?” said Tabaqui.
“Out!” snapped Father Wolf. “Out and hunt with thy master. Thou hast done harm enough for one night.”
“I go,” said Tabaqui quietly. “Ye can hear Shere Khan below in the thickets. I might have saved myself the message.”
Father Wolf listened, and below in the valley that ran down to a little river he heard the dry, angry, snarly, singsong whine of a tiger who has caught nothing and does not care if all the jungle knows it.
“The fool!” said Father Wolf. “To begin a night`s work with that noise! Does he think that our buck are like his fat Waingunga bullocks?”
“H`sh. It is neither bullock nor buck he hunts to-night,” said Mother Wolf. “It is Man.”
The whine had changed to a sort of humming purr that seemed to come from every quarter of the compass. It was the noise that bewilders woodcutters and gypsies sleeping in the open, and makes them run sometimes into the very mouth of the tiger.
“Man!” said Father Wolf, showing all his white teeth. “Faugh! Are there not enough beetles and frogs in the tanks that he must eat Man, and on our ground too!”
The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting grounds of his pack or tribe. The real reason for this is that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in the jungle suffers. The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenseless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him. They say too-and it is true-that man-eaters become mangy, and lose their teeth.
The purr grew louder, and ended in the full-throated “Aaarh!” of the tiger`s charge.
Then there was a howl-an untigerish howl-from Shere Khan. “He has missed,” said Mother Wolf. “What is it?”
Father Wolf ran out a few paces and heard Shere Khan muttering and mumbling savagely as he tumbled about in the scrub.
“The fool has had no more sense than to jump at a woodcutter`s campfire, and has burned his feet,” said Father Wolf with a grunt. “Tabaqui is with him.”
“Something is coming uphill,” said Mother Wolf, twitching one ear. “Get ready.”
The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf dropped with his haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then, if you had been watching, you would have seen the most wonderful thing in the world-the wolf checked in mid-spring. He made his bound before he saw what it was he was jumping at, and then he tried to stop himself. The result was that he shot up straight into the air for four or five feet, landing almost where he left ground.
“Man!” he snapped. “A man`s cub. Look!”
Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood a naked brown baby who could just walk-as soft and as dimpled a little atom as ever came to a wolf`s cave at night. He looked up into Father Wolf`s face, and laughed.
“Is that a man`s cub?” said Mother Wolf. “I have never seen one. Bring it here.”
A Wolf accustomed to moving his own cubs can, if necessary, mouth an egg without breaking it, and though Father Wolf`s jaws closed right on the child`s back not a tooth even scratched the skin as he laid it down among the cubs.
“How little! How naked, and-how bold!” said Mother Wolf softly. The baby was pushing his way between the cubs to get close to the warm hide. “Ahai! He is taking his meal with the others. And so this is a man`s cub. Now, was there ever a wolf that could boast of a man`s cub among her children?”
“I have heard now and again of such a thing, but never in our Pack or in my time,” said Father Wolf. “He is altogether without hair, and I could kill him with a touch of my foot. But see, he looks up and is not afraid.”
The moonlight was blocked out of the mouth of the cave, for Shere Khan`s great square head and shoulders were thrust into the entrance. Tabaqui, behind him, was squeaking: “My lord, my lord, it went in here!”
“Shere Khan does us great honor,” said Father Wolf, but his eyes were very angry. “What does Shere Khan need?”
“My quarry. A man`s cub went this way,” said Shere Khan. “Its parents have run off. Give it to me.”
Shere Khan had jumped at a woodcutter`s campfire, as Father Wolf had said, and was furious from the pain of his burned feet. But Father Wolf knew that the mouth of the cave was too narrow for a tiger to come in by. Even where he was, Shere Khan`s shoulders and forepaws were cramped for want of room, as a man`s would be if he tried to fight in a barrel.
“The Wolves are a free people,” said Father Wolf. “They take orders from the Head of the Pack, and not from any striped cattle-killer. The man`s cub is ours-to kill if we choose.”
“Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dog`s den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak!”
The tiger`s roar filled the cave with thunder. Mother Wolf shook herself clear of the cubs and sprang forward, her eyes, like two green moons in the darkness, facing the blazing eyes of Shere Khan.
“And it is I, Raksha [The Demon], who answers. The man`s cub is mine, Lungri-mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs-frog-eater-fish-killer-he shall hunt thee! Now get hence, or by the Sambhur that I killed (I eat no starved cattle), back thou goest to thy mother, burned beast of the jungle, lamer than ever thou camest into the world! Go!”
Father Wolf looked on amazed. He had almost forgotten the days when he won Mother Wolf in fair fight from five other wolves, when she ran in the Pack and was not called The Demon for compliment`s sake. Shere Khan might have faced Father Wolf, but he could not stand up against Mother Wolf, for he knew that where he was she had all the advantage of the ground, and would fight to the death. So he backed out of the cave mouth growling, and when he was clear he shouted:
“Each dog barks in his own yard! We will see what the Pack will say to this fostering of man-cubs. The cub is mine, and to my teeth he will come in the end, O bush-tailed thieves!”
Mother Wolf threw herself down panting among the cubs, and Father Wolf said to her gravely:
“Shere Khan speaks this much truth. The cub must be shown to the Pack. Wilt thou still keep him, Mother?”
“Keep him!” she gasped. “He came naked, by night, alone and very hungry; yet he was not afraid! Look, he has pushed one of my babes to one side already. And that lame butcher would have killed him and would have run off to the Waingunga while the villagers here hunted through all our lairs in revenge! Keep him? Assuredly I will …

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kaa`s hunting https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/kaas-hunting/ https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/kaas-hunting/#respond Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:38:00 +0000 https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/kaas-hunting/ All that is told here happened some time before Mowgli was turned out of the Seeonee Wolf Pack, or revenged himself on Shere Khan the tiger. It was in the days when Baloo was teaching him the Law of the Jungle. The big, serious, old brown bear was delighted to have so quick a pupil, for the young wolves will only learn as much of the Law of the Jungle as applies to their own pack and tribe, and run away as soon as they can repeat the Hunting Verse-"Feet that make no noise; eyes that can see in the

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All that is told here happened some time before Mowgli was turned out of the Seeonee Wolf Pack, or revenged himself on Shere Khan the tiger. It was in the days when Baloo was teaching him the Law of the Jungle. The big, serious, old brown bear was delighted to have so quick a pupil, for the young wolves will only learn as much of the Law of the Jungle as applies to their own pack and tribe, and run away as soon as they can repeat the Hunting Verse-“Feet that make no noise; eyes that can see in the dark; ears that can hear the winds in their lairs, and sharp white teeth, all these things are the marks of our brothers except Tabaqui the Jackal and the Hyaena whom we hate.” But Mowgli, as a man-cub, had to learn a great deal more than this. Sometimes Bagheera the Black Panther would come lounging through the jungle to see how his pet was getting on, and would purr with his head against a tree while Mowgli recited the day`s lesson to Baloo. The boy could climb almost as well as he could swim, and swim almost as well as he could run. So Baloo, the Teacher of the Law, taught him the Wood and Water Laws: how to tell a rotten branch from a sound one; how to speak politely to the wild bees when he came upon a hive of them fifty feet above ground; what to say to Mang the Bat when he disturbed him in the branches at midday; and how to warn the water-snakes in the pools before he splashed down among them. None of the Jungle People like being disturbed, and all are very ready to fly at an intruder. Then, too, Mowgli was taught the Strangers` Hunting Call, which must be repeated aloud till it is answered, whenever one of the Jungle-People hunts outside his own grounds. It means, translated, “Give me leave to hunt here because I am hungry.” And the answer is, “Hunt then for food, but not for pleasure.”
All this will show you how much Mowgli had to learn by heart, and he grew very tired of saying the same thing over a hundred times. But, as Baloo said to Bagheera, one day when Mowgli had been cuffed and run off in a temper, “A man`s cub is a man`s cub, and he must learn all the Law of the Jungle.”
“But think how small he is,” said the Black Panther, who would have spoiled Mowgli if he had had his own way. “How can his little head carry all thy long talk?”
“Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed? No. That is why I teach him these things, and that is why I hit him, very softly, when he forgets.”
“Softly! What dost thou know of softness, old Iron-feet?” Bagheera grunted. “His face is all bruised today by thy-softness. Ugh.”
“Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who love him than that he should come to harm through ignorance,” Baloo answered very earnestly. “I am now teaching him the Master Words of the Jungle that shall protect him with the birds and the Snake People, and all that hunt on four feet, except his own pack. He can now claim protection, if he will only remember the words, from all in the jungle. Is not that worth a little beating?”
“Well, look to it then that thou dost not kill the man-cub. He is no tree trunk to sharpen thy blunt claws upon. But what are those Master Words? I am more likely to give help than to ask it”-Bagheera stretched out one paw and admired the steel-blue, ripping-chisel talons at the end of it-“still I should like to know.”
“I will call Mowgli and he shall say them-if he will. Come, Little Brother!”
“My head is ringing like a bee tree,” said a sullen little voice over their heads, and Mowgli slid down a tree trunk very angry and indignant, adding as he reached the ground: “I come for Bagheera and not for thee, fat old Baloo!”
“That is all one to me,” said Baloo, though he was hurt and grieved. “Tell Bagheera, then, the Master Words of the Jungle that I have taught thee this day.”
“Master Words for which people?” said Mowgli, delighted to show off. “The jungle has many tongues. I know them all.”
“A little thou knowest, but not much. See, O Bagheera, they never thank their teacher. Not one small wolfling has ever come back to thank old Baloo for his teachings. Say the word for the Hunting-People, then-great scholar.”
“We be of one blood, ye and I,” said Mowgli, giving the words the Bear accent which all the Hunting People use.
“Good. Now for the birds.”
Mowgli repeated, with the Kite`s whistle at the end of the sentence.
“Now for the Snake-People,” said Bagheera.
The answer was a perfectly indescribable hiss, and Mowgli kicked up his feet behind, clapped his hands together to applaud himself, and jumped on to Bagheera`s back, where he sat sideways, drumming with his heels on the glossy skin and making the worst faces he could think of at Baloo.
“There-there! That was worth a little bruise,” said the brown bear tenderly. “Some day thou wilt remember me.” Then he turned aside to tell Bagheera how he had begged the Master Words from Hathi the Wild Elephant, who knows all about these things, and how Hathi had taken Mowgli down to a pool to get the Snake Word from a water-snake, because Baloo could not pronounce it, and how Mowgli was now reasonably safe against all accidents in the jungle, because neither snake, bird, nor beast would hurt him.
“No one then is to be feared,” Baloo wound up, patting his big furry stomach with pride.
“Except his own tribe,” said Bagheera, under his breath; and then aloud to Mowgli, “Have a care for my ribs, Little Brother! What is all this dancing up and down?”
Mowgli had been trying to make himself heard by pulling at Bagheera`s shoulder fur and kicking hard. When the two listened to him he was shouting at the top of his voice, “And so I shall have a tribe of my own, and lead them through the branches all day long.”
“What is this new folly, little dreamer of dreams?” said Bagheera.
“Yes, and throw branches and dirt at old Baloo,” Mowgli went on. “They have promised me this. Ah!”
“Whoof!” Baloo`s big paw scooped Mowgli off Bagheera`s back, and as the boy lay between the big fore-paws he could see the Bear was angry.
“Mowgli,” said Baloo, “thou hast been talking with the Bandar-log-the Monkey People.”
Mowgli looked at Bagheera to see if the Panther was angry too, and Bagheera`s eyes were as hard as jade stones.
“Thou hast been with the Monkey People-the gray apes-the people without a law-the eaters of everything. That is great shame.”
“When Baloo hurt my head,” said Mowgli (he was still on his back), “I went away, and the gray apes came down from the trees and had pity on me. No one else cared.” He snuffled a little.
“The pity of the Monkey People!” Baloo snorted. “The stillness of the mountain stream! The cool of the summer sun! And then, man-cub?”
“And then, and then, they gave me nuts and pleasant things to eat, and they-they carried me in their arms up to the top of the trees and said I was their blood brother except that I had no tail, and should be their leader some day.”
“They have no leader,” said Bagheera. “They lie. They have always lied.”
“They were very kind and bade me come again. Why have I never been taken among the Monkey People? They stand on their feet as I do. They do not hit me with their hard paws. They play all day. Let me get up! Bad Baloo, let me up! I will play with them again.”
“Listen, man-cub,” said the Bear, and his voice rumbled like thunder on a hot night. “I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of the jungle-except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. We of the jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys drink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt; we do not die where they die. Hast thou ever heard me speak of the Bandar-log till today?”
“No,” said Mowgli in a whisper, for the forest was very still now Baloo had finished.
“The Jungle-People put them out of their mouths and out of their minds. They are very many, evil, dirty, shameless, and they desire, if they have any fixed desire, to be noticed by the Jungle People. But we do not notice them even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads.”
He had hardly spoken when a shower of nuts and twigs spattered down through the branches; and they could hear coughings and howlings and angry jumpings high up in the air among the thin branches.
“The Monkey-People are forbidden,” said Baloo, “forbidden to the Jungle-People. Remember.”
“Forbidden,” said Bagheera, “but I still think Baloo should have warned thee against them.”
“I-I? How was I to guess he would play with such dirt. The Monkey People! Faugh!”
A fresh shower came down on their heads and the two trotted away, taking Mowgli with them. What Baloo had said about the monkeys was perfectly true. They belonged to the tree-tops, and as beasts very seldom look up, there was no occasion for the monkeys and the Jungle-People to cross each other`s path. But whenever they found a sick wolf, or a wounded tiger, or bear, the monkeys would torment him, and would throw sticks and nuts at any beast for fun and in the hope of being noticed. Then they would howl and shriek senseless songs, and invite the Jungle-People to climb up their trees and fight them, or would start furious battles over nothing among themselves, and leave the dead monkeys where the Jungle-People could see them. They were always just going to have a leader, and laws and customs of their own, but they never did, because their memories would not hold over from day to day, and so they compromised things by making up a saying, “What the Bandar-log think now the jungle will think later,” and that comforted th…

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tiger, tiger https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/tiger-tiger/ https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/tiger-tiger/#respond Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:38:00 +0000 https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/tiger-tiger/ Now we must go back to the first tale. When Mowgli left the wolf`s cave after the fight with the Pack at the Council Rock, he went down to the plowed lands where the villagers lived, but he would not stop there because it was too near to the jungle, and he knew that he had made at least one bad enemy at the Council. So he hurried on, keeping to the rough road that ran down the valley, and followed it at a steady jog-trot for nearly twenty miles, till he came to a country that he did not

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Now we must go back to the first tale. When Mowgli left the wolf`s cave after the fight with the Pack at the Council Rock, he went down to the plowed lands where the villagers lived, but he would not stop there because it was too near to the jungle, and he knew that he had made at least one bad enemy at the Council. So he hurried on, keeping to the rough road that ran down the valley, and followed it at a steady jog-trot for nearly twenty miles, till he came to a country that he did not know. The valley opened out into a great plain dotted over with rocks and cut up by ravines. At one end stood a little village, and at the other the thick jungle came down in a sweep to the grazing-grounds, and stopped there as though it had been cut off with a hoe. All over the plain, cattle and buffaloes were grazing, and when the little boys in charge of the herds saw Mowgli they shouted and ran away, and the yellow pariah dogs that hang about every Indian village barked. Mowgli walked on, for he was feeling hungry, and when he came to the village gate he saw the big thorn-bush that was drawn up before the gate at twilight, pushed to one side.
“Umph!” he said, for he had come across more than one such barricade in his night rambles after things to eat. “So men are afraid of the People of the Jungle here also.” He sat down by the gate, and when a man came out he stood up, opened his mouth, and pointed down it to show that he wanted food. The man stared, and ran back up the one street of the village shouting for the priest, who was a big, fat man dressed in white, with a red and yellow mark on his forehead. The priest came to the gate, and with him at least a hundred people, who stared and talked and shouted and pointed at Mowgli.
“They have no manners, these Men Folk,” said Mowgli to himself. “Only the gray ape would behave as they do.” So he threw back his long hair and frowned at the crowd.
“What is there to be afraid of?” said the priest. “Look at the marks on his arms and legs. They are the bites of wolves. He is but a wolf-child run away from the jungle.”
Of course, in playing together, the cubs had often nipped Mowgli harder than they intended, and there were white scars all over his arms and legs. But he would have been the last person in the world to call these bites, for he knew what real biting meant.
“Arre! Arre!” said two or three women together. “To be bitten by wolves, poor child! He is a handsome boy. He has eyes like red fire. By my honor, Messua, he is not unlike thy boy that was taken by the tiger.”
“Let me look,” said a woman with heavy copper rings on her wrists and ankles, and she peered at Mowgli under the palm of her hand. “Indeed he is not. He is thinner, but he has the very look of my boy.”
The priest was a clever man, and he knew that Messua was wife to the richest villager in the place. So he looked up at the sky for a minute and said solemnly: “What the jungle has taken the jungle has restored. Take the boy into thy house, my sister, and forget not to honor the priest who sees so far into the lives of men.”
“By the Bull that bought me,” said Mowgli to himself, “but all this talking is like another looking-over by the Pack! Well, if I am a man, a man I must become.”
The crowd parted as the woman beckoned Mowgli to her hut, where there was a red lacquered bedstead, a great earthen grain chest with funny raised patterns on it, half a dozen copper cooking pots, an image of a Hindu god in a little alcove, and on the wall a real looking glass, such as they sell at the country fairs.
She gave him a long drink of milk and some bread, and then she laid her hand on his head and looked into his eyes; for she thought perhaps that he might be her real son come back from the jungle where the tiger had taken him. So she said, “Nathoo, O Nathoo!” Mowgli did not show that he knew the name. “Dost thou not remember the day when I gave thee thy new shoes?” She touched his foot, and it was almost as hard as horn. “No,” she said sorrowfully, “those feet have never worn shoes, but thou art very like my Nathoo, and thou shalt be my son.”
Mowgli was uneasy, because he had never been under a roof before. But as he looked at the thatch, he saw that he could tear it out any time if he wanted to get away, and that the window had no fastenings. “What is the good of a man,” he said to himself at last, “if he does not understand man`s talk? Now I am as silly and dumb as a man would be with us in the jungle. I must speak their talk.”
It was not for fun that he had learned while he was with the wolves to imitate the challenge of bucks in the jungle and the grunt of the little wild pig. So, as soon as Messua pronounced a word Mowgli would imitate it almost perfectly, and before dark he had learned the names of many things in the hut.
There was a difficulty at bedtime, because Mowgli would not sleep under anything that looked so like a panther trap as that hut, and when they shut the door he went through the window. “Give him his will,” said Messua`s husband. “Remember he can never till now have slept on a bed. If he is indeed sent in the place of our son he will not run away.”
So Mowgli stretched himself in some long, clean grass at the edge of the field, but before he had closed his eyes a soft gray nose poked him under the chin.
“Phew!” said Gray Brother (he was the eldest of Mother Wolf`s cubs). “This is a poor reward for following thee twenty miles. Thou smellest of wood smoke and cattle-altogether like a man already. Wake, Little Brother; I bring news.”
“Are all well in the jungle?” said Mowgli, hugging him.
“All except the wolves that were burned with the Red Flower. Now, listen. Shere Khan has gone away to hunt far off till his coat grows again, for he is badly singed. When he returns he swears that he will lay thy bones in the Waingunga.”
“There are two words to that. I also have made a little promise. But news is always good. I am tired to-night,-very tired with new things, Gray Brother,-but bring me the news always.”
“Thou wilt not forget that thou art a wolf? Men will not make thee forget?” said Gray Brother anxiously.
“Never. I will always remember that I love thee and all in our cave. But also I will always remember that I have been cast out of the Pack.”
“And that thou mayest be cast out of another pack. Men are only men, Little Brother, and their talk is like the talk of frogs in a pond. When I come down here again, I will wait for thee in the bamboos at the edge of the grazing-ground.”
For three months after that night Mowgli hardly ever left the village gate, he was so busy learning the ways and customs of men. First he had to wear a cloth round him, which annoyed him horribly; and then he had to learn about money, which he did not in the least understand, and about plowing, of which he did not see the use. Then the little children in the village made him very angry. Luckily, the Law of the Jungle had taught him to keep his temper, for in the jungle life and food depend on keeping your temper; but when they made fun of him because he would not play games or fly kites, or because he mispronounced some word, only the knowledge that it was unsportsmanlike to kill little naked cubs kept him from picking them up and breaking them in two.
He did not know his own strength in the least. In the jungle he knew he was weak compared with the beasts, but in the village people said that he was as strong as a bull.
And Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the difference that caste makes between man and man. When the potter`s donkey slipped in the clay pit, Mowgli hauled it out by the tail, and helped to stack the pots for their journey to the market at Khanhiwara. That was very shocking, too, for the potter is a low-caste man, and his donkey is worse. When the priest scolded him, Mowgli threatened to put him on the donkey too, and the priest told Messua`s husband that Mowgli had better be set to work as soon as possible; and the village head-man told Mowgli that he would have to go out with the buffaloes next day, and herd them while they grazed. No one was more pleased than Mowgli; and that night, because he had been appointed a servant of the village, as it were, he went off to a circle that met every evening on a masonry platform under a great fig-tree. It was the village club, and the head-man and the watchman and the barber, who knew all the gossip of the village, and old Buldeo, the village hunter, who had a Tower musket, met and smoked. The monkeys sat and talked in the upper branches, and there was a hole under the platform where a cobra lived, and he had his little platter of milk every night because he was sacred; and the old men sat around the tree and talked, and pulled at the big huqas (the water-pipes) till far into the night. They told wonderful tales of gods and men and ghosts; and Buldeo told even more wonderful ones of the ways of beasts in the jungle, till the eyes of the children sitting outside the circle bulged out of their heads. Most of the tales were about animals, for the jungle was always at their door. The deer and the wild pig grubbed up their crops, and now and again the tiger carried off a man at twilight, within sight of the village gates.
Mowgli, who naturally knew something about what they were talking of, had to cover his face not to show that he was laughing, while Buldeo, the Tower musket across his knees, climbed on from one wonderful story to another, and Mowgli`s shoulders shook.
Buldeo was explaining how the tiger that had carried away Messua`s son was a ghost-tiger, and his body was inhabited by the ghost of a wicked, old money-lender, who had died some years ago. “And I know that this is true,” he said, “because Purun Dass always limped from the blow that he got in a riot when his account books were burned, and the tiger that I speak of he limps, too, for the tracks of his pads are unequal.”
“True, true, that must be the truth,” said the gray-beards, nodding tog…

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the beginning of the armadillos https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/the-beginning-of-the-armadillos/ https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/the-beginning-of-the-armadillos/#respond Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:38:00 +0000 https://kidsfairytale.club/en/rudyard-kipling/the-beginning-of-the-armadillos/ This, O Best Beloved, is another story of the High and Far-Off Times. In the very middle of those times was a Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog, and he lived on the banks of the turbid Amazon, eating shelly snails and things. And he had a friend, a Slow-Solid Tortoise, who lived on the banks of the turbid Amazon, eating green lettuces and things. And so that was all right, Best Beloved. Do you see?
But also, and at the same time, in those High and Far-Off Times, there was a Painted Jaguar, and he lived on the banks of the turbid Amazon too;

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This, O Best Beloved, is another story of the High and Far-Off Times. In the very middle of those times was a Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog, and he lived on the banks of the turbid Amazon, eating shelly snails and things. And he had a friend, a Slow-Solid Tortoise, who lived on the banks of the turbid Amazon, eating green lettuces and things. And so that was all right, Best Beloved. Do you see?
But also, and at the same time, in those High and Far-Off Times, there was a Painted Jaguar, and he lived on the banks of the turbid Amazon too; and he ate everything that he could catch. When he could not catch deer or monkeys he would eat frogs and beetles; and when he could not catch frogs and beetles he went to his Mother Jaguar, and she told him how to eat hedgehogs and tortoises.
She said to him ever so many times, graciously waving her tail, `My son, when you find a Hedgehog you must drop him into the water and then he will uncoil, and when you catch a Tortoise you must scoop him out of his shell with your paw.` And so that was all right, Best Beloved.
One beautiful night on the banks of the turbid Amazon, Painted Jaguar found Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog and Slow-Solid Tortoise sitting under the trunk of a fallen tree. They could not run away, and so Stickly-Prickly curled himself up into a ball, because he was a Hedgehog, and Slow-Solid Tortoise drew in his head and feet into his shell as far as they would go, because he was a Tortoise; and so that was all right, Best Beloved. Do you see?
`Now attend to me,` said Painted Jaguar, `because this is very important. My mother said that when I meet a Hedgehog I am to drop him into the water and then he will uncoil, and when I meet a Tortoise I am to scoop him out of his shell with my paw. Now which of you is Hedgehog and which is Tortoise? because, to save my spots, I can`t tell.`
`Are you sure of what your Mummy told you?` said Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog. `Are you quite sure? Perhaps she said that when you uncoil a Tortoise you must shell him out the water with a scoop, and when you paw a Hedgehog you must drop him on the shell.`
`Are you sure of what your Mummy told you?` said Slow-and-Solid Tortoise. `Are you quite sure? Perhaps she said that when you water a Hedgehog you must drop him into your paw, and when you meet a Tortoise you must shell him till he uncoils.`
`I don`t think it was at all like that,` said Painted Jaguar, but he felt a little puzzled; `but, please, say it again more distinctly.`
`When you scoop water with your paw you uncoil it with a Hedgehog,` said Stickly-Prickly. `Remember that, because it`s important.`
`But,` said the Tortoise, `when you paw your meat you drop it into a Tortoise with a scoop. Why can`t you understand?`
`You are making my spots ache,` said Painted Jaguar; `and besides, I didn`t want your advice at all. I only wanted to know which of you is Hedgehog and which is Tortoise.`
`I shan`t tell you,` said Stickly-Prickly. `but you can scoop me out of my shell if you like.`
`Aha!` said Painted Jaguar. `Now I know you`re Tortoise. You thought I wouldn`t! Now I will.` Painted Jaguar darted out his paddy-paw just as Stickly-Prickly curled himself up, and of course Jaguar`s paddy-paw was just filled with prickles. Worse than that, he knocked Stickly-Prickly away and away into the woods and the bushes, where it was too dark to find him. Then he put his paddy-paw into his mouth, and of course the prickles hurt him worse than ever. As soon as he could speak he said, `Now I know he isn`t Tortoise at all. But`and then he scratched his head with his un-prickly paw`how do I know that this other is Tortoise?`
`But I am Tortoise,` said Slow-and-Solid. Your mother was quite right. She said that you were to scoop me out of my shell with your paw. Begin.`
`You didn`t say she said that a minute ago,` said Painted Jaguar, sucking the prickles out of his paddy-paw. `You said she said something quite different.`
`Well, suppose you say that I said that she said something quite different, I don`t see that it makes any difference; because if she said what you said I said she said, it`s just the same as if I said what she said she said. On the other hand, if you think she said that you were to uncoil me with a scoop, instead of pawing me into drops with a shell, I can`t help that, can I?`
`But you said you wanted to be scooped out of your shell with my paw,` said Painted Jaguar.
`If you`ll think again you`ll find that I didn`t say anything of the kind. I said that your mother said that you were to scoop me out of my shell,` said Slow-and-Solid.
`What will happen if I do?` said the Jaguar most sniffily and most cautious.
`I don`t know, because I`ve never been scooped out of my shell before; but I tell you truly, if you want to see me swim away you`ve only got to drop me into the water.`
`I don`t believe it,` said Painted Jaguar. `You`ve mixed up all the things my mother told me to do with the things that you asked me whether I was sure that she didn`t say, till I don`t know whether I`m on my head or my painted tail; and now you come and tell me something I can understand, and it makes me more mixy than before. My mother told me that I was to drop one of you two into the water, and as you seem so anxious to be dropped I think you don`t want to be dropped. So jump into the turbid Amazon and be quick about it.`
`I warn you that your Mummy won`t be pleased. Don`t tell her I didn`t tell you,` said Slow-Solid.
`If you say another word about what my mother said` the Jaguar answered, but he had not finished the sentence before Slow-and-Solid quietly dived into the turbid Amazon, swam under water for a long way, and came out on the bank where Stickly-Prickly was waiting for him.
`That was a very narrow escape,` said Stickly-Prickly. `I don`t rib Painted Jaguar. What did you tell him that you were?`
`I told him truthfully that I was a truthful Tortoise, but he wouldn`t believe it, and he made me jump into the river to see if I was, and I was, and he is surprised. Now he`s gone to tell his Mummy. Listen to him!`
They could hear Painted Jaguar roaring up and down among the trees and the bushes by the side of the turbid Amazon, till his Mummy came.
`Son, son!` said his mother ever so many times, graciously waving her tail, `what have you been doing that you shouldn`t have done?`
`I tried to scoop something that said it wanted to be scooped out of its shell with my paw, and my paw is full of per-ickles,` said Painted Jaguar.
`Son, son!` said his mother ever so many times, graciously waving her tail, `by the prickles in your paddy-paw I see that that must have been a Hedgehog. You should have dropped him into the water.`
`I did that to the other thing; and he said he was a Tortoise, and I didn`t believe him, and it was quite true, and he has dived under the turbid Amazon, and he won`t come up again, and I haven`t anything at all to eat, and I think we had better find lodgings somewhere else. They are too clever on the turbid Amazon for poor me!`
`Son, son!` said his mother ever so many times, graciously waving her tail, `now attend to me and remember what I say. A Hedgehog curls himself up into a ball and his prickles stick out every which way at once. By this you may know the Hedgehog.`
`I don`t like this old lady one little bit,` said Stickly-Prickly, under the shadow of a large leaf. `I wonder what else she knows?`
`A Tortoise can`t curl himself up,` Mother Jaguar went on, ever so many times, graciously waving her tail. `He only draws his head and legs into his shell. By this you may know the tortoise.`
`I don`t like this old lady at allat all,` said Slow-and-Solid Tortoise. `Even Painted Jaguar can`t forget those directions. It`s a great pity that you can`t swim, Stickly-Prickly.`
`Don`t talk to me,` said Stickly-Prickly. `Just think how much better it would be if you could curl up. This is a mess! Listen to Painted Jaguar.`
Painted Jaguar was sitting on the banks of the turbid Amazon sucking prickles out of his Paws and saying to himself
`Can`t curl, but can swim
Slow-Solid, that`s him!
Curls up, but can`t swim
Stickly-Prickly, that`s him!`
`He`ll never forget that this month of Sundays,` said Stickly-Prickly. `Hold up my chin, Slow-and-Solid. I`m going to try to learn to swim. It may be useful.`
`Excellent!` said Slow-and-Solid; and he held up Stickly-Prickly`s chin, while Stickly-Prickly kicked in the waters of the turbid Amazon.
`You`ll make a fine swimmer yet,` said Slow-and-Solid. `Now, if you can unlace my back-plates a little, I`ll see what I can do towards curling up. It may be useful.`
Stickly-Prickly helped to unlace Tortoise`s back-plates, so that by twisting and straining Slow-and-Solid actually managed to curl up a tiddy wee bit.
`Excellent!` said Stickly-Prickly; `but I shouldn`t do any more just now. It`s making you black in the face. Kindly lead me into the water once again and I`ll practice that side-stroke which you say is so easy.` And so Stickly-Prickly practiced, and Slow-Solid swam alongside.
`Excellent!` said Slow-and-Solid. `A little more practice will make you a regular whale. Now, if I may trouble you to unlace my back and front plates two holes more, I`ll try that fascinating bend that you say is so easy. Won`t Painted Jaguar be surprised!`
`Excellent!` said Stickly-Prickly, all wet from the turbid Amazon. `I declare, I shouldn`t know you from one of my own family. Two holes, I think, you said? A little more expression, please, and don`t grunt quite so much, or Painted Jaguar may hear us. When you`ve finished, I want to try that long dive which you say is so easy. Won`t Painted Jaguar be surprised!`
And so Stickly-Prickly dived, and Slow-and-Solid dived alongside.
`Excellent!` said Slow-and-Solid. `A little more attention to holding your breath and you will be able to keep house at the bottom of the turbid Amazon. Now I`ll try that exercise of putting my hind legs round my ears which you say is so peculiarly comfortable. Won`t Painted Jaguar be surp…

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