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Just So Stories

by Rudyard Kipling

How the whale got its throat, one of Kipling’s tales for children.

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Original language: EnglishLevel: Beginner3,443 characters · ≈ 5 minSource: Project Gutenberg

Opening lines

IN the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel. All the fishes he could find in all the sea he ate with his mouth--so! Till at last there was only one small fish left in all the sea, and he was a small ‘Stute Fish, and he swam a little behind the Whale’s right ear, so as to be out of harm’s way. Then the Whale stood up on his tail and said, ‘I’m hungry.’ And the small ‘Stute Fish said in a small ‘stute voice, ‘Noble and generous Cetacean, have you ever tasted…

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About the book

Just So Stories is a 1902 collection of origin stories by the British author Rudyard Kipling, considered a classic of children's literature. The stories explain how animals acquired their distinctive features, such as how the leopard got his spots. Kipling first told the opening chapters as bedtime stories to his daughter Josephine, and illustrated the book himself.

About the author

Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English journalist, novelist, poet and short-story writer, born in British India, which inspired much of his work. His representative works include the Jungle Book duology, Kim, the Just So Stories and the poem "If—", and in 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming its first English-language recipient and, at 41, its youngest to date.

Summary prepared with AI from Wikipedia: Just So Stories (CC BY-SA)

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Word glosses and sentence translations are generated in context by AI models (DeepSeek and Zhipu GLM), and every word is checked to have a gloss. AI can make mistakes; you can report problems from the book page.

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