Rudyard Kipling

Who is the happy man? He that sees in his own house at home, little children crowned with dust, leaping and falling and crying. —Munichandra, translated by Professor Peterson. The polo-ball was an old one, scarred, chipped, and dinted. It stood on the mantelpiece among the pipe-stems which Imam Din, khitmatgar, was …

How did the camel get his hump? Why won't cats do as they are told? Who invented reading and writing? How did an inquisitive little elephant change the lives of elephants everywhere? Kipling's imagined answers to such questions draw on the beast fables he heard as a child in India, as well as on folk games with …