Just So Stories

First published in 1902, this collection of origin tales explains how animals and people acquired their present shapes and habits. A whale swallows a shipwrecked mariner and is fitted with a grate; a camel receives a hump for refusing work; a rhinoceros is punished with folded skin; a leopard is painted with spots. An elephant's child stretches his nose on the banks of the Limpopo. Other pieces invent the first letter and the alphabet, follow a cat that walks by himself among the cave people, and recount a crab that plays with the sea. The stories are framed as bedtime explanations, with refrains, invented names, and a mock-solemn voice that treats each change as a bargain or a punishment.

Bound in yellow-brown cloth with a design in dark brown and gold based on one of Kipling's illustrations. Pale yellow endleaves. Brown slipcase.