Just So Stories

Twelve stories that explain, with mock seriousness, how things came to be as they are: how the whale got his narrow throat, how the camel got his hump from the Djinn in charge of All Deserts for saying nothing but humph, how the leopard got his spots, how the elephant's child got his trunk from the crocodile on the banks of the great grey-green Limpopo River, how the first letter was written and the alphabet made, and the cat who walked by himself. Each is told to a child, O Best Beloved, in rhythmic, playful sentences made for reading aloud.

Kipling first told the stories to his own daughter and published them in 1902 with his own drawings. Reynard T. Fox reads them in about three and a half hours, with a little help from his father.